From Indigenous Peoples in Brazil
The printable version is no longer supported and may have rendering errors. Please update your browser bookmarks and please use the default browser print function instead.
News
The other Brazil
20/11/2008
Fonte: The Economist
The other Brazil
The Amazon's indigenous people
Nov 20th 2008 | NOVO PARAÍSO, AMAZONAS
From The Economist print edition
The mixed blessings of the simple life led by indigenous people deep in the forest
POLITICIANS all over the world are accustomed to cutting ribbons on new buildings. In the Alto Solimões region of the Brazilian Amazon, they are sometimes expected to wield bigger shears. An extension to Novo Paraíso's schoolhouse is being built and Yudo, recently elected to the post of vereador, a kind of town councillor, strides into the forest with a chainsaw to get more timber for the beams. The tree falls exactly where he wants it to, but on the way down it rips a branch from the overhanging canopy. It falls, slicing through the top of Yudo's ear. An inch to the right and it would have cracked open his skull like a nut.
The timing of his misfortune could not be better. For the past ten days, Novo Paraíso, which has a population of about 50 souls, has had a hospital as good as almost any to be found in Brazil (albeit a temporary one), courtesy of a Brazilian charity called Expedicionários da Saúde. It comprises three air-conditioned sterile tents for surgery, a pharmacy, a post-operative ward and a team of experienced anaesthetists, surgeons, nurses and technicians, all of whose services are free. Novo Paraíso sits in an area of the forest that, after a long fight, was reserved for the Ticuna people. Most of the Ticuna live in Brazil, but there are some in Colombia and Peru too. One patient has apparently travelled for eight days from Peru to get an operation.
Such reservations are a recent bright spot in a torrid history of contact between indigenous Brazil and its more recent arrivals. The Ticuna discovered white men several hundred years ago, but they have kept their language-bafflingly dissimilar to their neighbours' tongues-intact. Indeed, only a handful of villagers speak any Portuguese, Brazil's national language. All school classes are in Ticuna. A Ticuna girl's first menstruation is still celebrated with a rite involving all her hair being plucked out, along with a lot of feasting.
To the south-west lies an area thought to have the Amazon's highest concentration of tribes who have never had contact with the outside world. In May a passing plane photographed men with spears, bows and arrows poised to let fly if the intruders came within range. Brazil's government has sensibly decided to stop trying to bring order and progress to such "uncontacted" Indians and now leaves them alone (though it recently announced the introduction of a plane with heat sensors that can detect warm bodies, to keep track of their whereabouts). Policy is not so enlightened everywhere. In neighbouring Paraguay, members of uncontacted tribes are still being driven out of the forest.
The results of the reservation policy in the Alto Solimões area are impressive. Over the past ten years, the population has increased from 27,000 to around 40,000, according to FUNASA, the federal agency responsible for providing health care. This has another benefit. "Keeping people here healthy helps to keep the trees standing," says Ricardo Affonso Ferreira, an adventurer and orthopaedic surgeon who set up Expedicionários da Saúde: "They are better at preserving the forest than we are."
Judged by the statistics on sanitation, education and poverty, life should be pretty grim in the Alto Solimões region. In the municipality of São Paulo de Olivença, where Novo Paraíso lies, nine out of ten homes lack running water. The median number of people living in each hut is seven. Each head of household spends an average of only two years in school. Yet life is not as bad as it may sound.
The village's economy runs on barter, though most households seem self-sufficient. Men go out fishing in the Solimões river, a tributary of the Amazon, in canoes with diamond-shaped paddles or small outboard engines. Women gather beans and other crops planted along the banks, leach the cyanide compounds out of manioc, a root that grows well in the poor soil, and then roast it to make a crunchy flour eaten throughout Brazil. Chickens scratch around under huts that sit on stilts to guard against flooding when the river bursts its banks. Many families receive the bolsa familia, a benefit paid on the condition that their children get vaccinated and sent to school.
As well as providing food, communication and the occasional excitement when a Colombian gunboat looking for drug smugglers sails by, the river affords the best way to cool off in the heat-so long as thoughts of little organisms that swim up the urethra can be set aside. In the evening, village children play volleyball or football along the bank. Many of them are approaching the age where they must decide whether to swap this life for something else in one of the riverbank towns. Their trendy hair and clothes suggest they will.
If this all sounds a little too prelapsarian, it is perhaps because Novo Paraíso is so small. On the other side of the river, in Vendaval, a settlement of around 1,500, there have been cases of suicide. On one recent Saturday night a drunken knife fight left one man dead and another with his face and neck badly scored.
For now, though, Novo Paraíso has more immediate worries. Among the patients arriving on the river bank to have their cataracts removed and their hernias fixed at the new hospital is a pregnant woman who is bleeding alarmingly. She is brought into one of the tents for an emergency caesarean section. The baby is swaddled and placed in a plastic container emptied of medical equipment, before the pair are sent off in a fast boat to the nearest incubator, four hours upstream.
The Economist, 20/11/2008.
http://www.economist.com/node/12641796?story_id=12641796
The Amazon's indigenous people
Nov 20th 2008 | NOVO PARAÍSO, AMAZONAS
From The Economist print edition
The mixed blessings of the simple life led by indigenous people deep in the forest
POLITICIANS all over the world are accustomed to cutting ribbons on new buildings. In the Alto Solimões region of the Brazilian Amazon, they are sometimes expected to wield bigger shears. An extension to Novo Paraíso's schoolhouse is being built and Yudo, recently elected to the post of vereador, a kind of town councillor, strides into the forest with a chainsaw to get more timber for the beams. The tree falls exactly where he wants it to, but on the way down it rips a branch from the overhanging canopy. It falls, slicing through the top of Yudo's ear. An inch to the right and it would have cracked open his skull like a nut.
The timing of his misfortune could not be better. For the past ten days, Novo Paraíso, which has a population of about 50 souls, has had a hospital as good as almost any to be found in Brazil (albeit a temporary one), courtesy of a Brazilian charity called Expedicionários da Saúde. It comprises three air-conditioned sterile tents for surgery, a pharmacy, a post-operative ward and a team of experienced anaesthetists, surgeons, nurses and technicians, all of whose services are free. Novo Paraíso sits in an area of the forest that, after a long fight, was reserved for the Ticuna people. Most of the Ticuna live in Brazil, but there are some in Colombia and Peru too. One patient has apparently travelled for eight days from Peru to get an operation.
Such reservations are a recent bright spot in a torrid history of contact between indigenous Brazil and its more recent arrivals. The Ticuna discovered white men several hundred years ago, but they have kept their language-bafflingly dissimilar to their neighbours' tongues-intact. Indeed, only a handful of villagers speak any Portuguese, Brazil's national language. All school classes are in Ticuna. A Ticuna girl's first menstruation is still celebrated with a rite involving all her hair being plucked out, along with a lot of feasting.
To the south-west lies an area thought to have the Amazon's highest concentration of tribes who have never had contact with the outside world. In May a passing plane photographed men with spears, bows and arrows poised to let fly if the intruders came within range. Brazil's government has sensibly decided to stop trying to bring order and progress to such "uncontacted" Indians and now leaves them alone (though it recently announced the introduction of a plane with heat sensors that can detect warm bodies, to keep track of their whereabouts). Policy is not so enlightened everywhere. In neighbouring Paraguay, members of uncontacted tribes are still being driven out of the forest.
The results of the reservation policy in the Alto Solimões area are impressive. Over the past ten years, the population has increased from 27,000 to around 40,000, according to FUNASA, the federal agency responsible for providing health care. This has another benefit. "Keeping people here healthy helps to keep the trees standing," says Ricardo Affonso Ferreira, an adventurer and orthopaedic surgeon who set up Expedicionários da Saúde: "They are better at preserving the forest than we are."
Judged by the statistics on sanitation, education and poverty, life should be pretty grim in the Alto Solimões region. In the municipality of São Paulo de Olivença, where Novo Paraíso lies, nine out of ten homes lack running water. The median number of people living in each hut is seven. Each head of household spends an average of only two years in school. Yet life is not as bad as it may sound.
The village's economy runs on barter, though most households seem self-sufficient. Men go out fishing in the Solimões river, a tributary of the Amazon, in canoes with diamond-shaped paddles or small outboard engines. Women gather beans and other crops planted along the banks, leach the cyanide compounds out of manioc, a root that grows well in the poor soil, and then roast it to make a crunchy flour eaten throughout Brazil. Chickens scratch around under huts that sit on stilts to guard against flooding when the river bursts its banks. Many families receive the bolsa familia, a benefit paid on the condition that their children get vaccinated and sent to school.
As well as providing food, communication and the occasional excitement when a Colombian gunboat looking for drug smugglers sails by, the river affords the best way to cool off in the heat-so long as thoughts of little organisms that swim up the urethra can be set aside. In the evening, village children play volleyball or football along the bank. Many of them are approaching the age where they must decide whether to swap this life for something else in one of the riverbank towns. Their trendy hair and clothes suggest they will.
If this all sounds a little too prelapsarian, it is perhaps because Novo Paraíso is so small. On the other side of the river, in Vendaval, a settlement of around 1,500, there have been cases of suicide. On one recent Saturday night a drunken knife fight left one man dead and another with his face and neck badly scored.
For now, though, Novo Paraíso has more immediate worries. Among the patients arriving on the river bank to have their cataracts removed and their hernias fixed at the new hospital is a pregnant woman who is bleeding alarmingly. She is brought into one of the tents for an emergency caesarean section. The baby is swaddled and placed in a plastic container emptied of medical equipment, before the pair are sent off in a fast boat to the nearest incubator, four hours upstream.
The Economist, 20/11/2008.
http://www.economist.com/node/12641796?story_id=12641796
The news items published by the Indigenous Peoples in Brazil site are researched daily from a variety of media outlets and transcribed as presented by their original source. ISA is not responsible for the opinios expressed or errors contained in these texts. Please report any errors in the news items directly to the source