The moonless night was so dark I could hardly make out the outlines of our guides as we approached the village. Cooking fires from inside of thatched huts sent figures dancing on the walls. As we walked toward the center of the village, the children called out to each other announcing that the warazu, or outsiders, had arrived. Boys and girls surrounded us forming circles corresponding to their ages. In play resembling ceremony, small hands clasped and the children sang while stomping the ground. A older child initiated the song, was followed immediately by all with everyone ending at the same time. The children’s songs rose from the village and drifted up toward the crowded canopy of stars. A small hand reached for mine and laced our fingers into a tight grip. Other children hung onto me, showing unabashed affection and a fascination with my hairy legs. My heart melted as their voices, vulnerable yet enduring, bathed us with their gift. These are the songs the Xavante have sung for centuries and continue to teach to their children.
Brazil is a huge country, about the size of the United States of America. It is home to the world’s largest rainforest, oldest river and largest wetlands with time-rich biological diversity that serves as an earth sanctuary. Brazil’s tropical Savannah , or cerrado, supports an incredible diversity of life covering about a quarter of the landmass of the country. The cerrado is home to over 420 species of trees, 10,000 species of plants and 800 species of birds. There can be as many as 150 plant species in a single acre of cerrado compared to a dozen species found in the same area of forest in the Pacific Northwest. The cerrado is both one the most productive and most threatened of the planet’s ecosystems, with only 3% under any kind of legal protection. It is estimated that 50% of Brazil’s cerrado has been completely converted to other uses and another 40% is degraded but recoverable. The effects of such massive devastation have global implications since tropical Savannah plays an important role in carbon sequestration countering the effects of global warming. Soil nutrient depletion and restricted water infiltration associated with human activities in the region continue with dramatic consequences.
The diversity of Brazil’s plant and animal life is matched by a vibrant array of cultures, indigenous, colonial and mixed, that inhabit a country that spans a continent. The indigenous peoples of the country, representing a treasure of language, story, ritual and knowledge, are as threatened as the land. The Xavante Indians of the Mato Grosso plateau of central Brazil live in a fraction of their traditional lands in a mosaic of ecosystems including dense gallery forests covering the banks of wild rivers, impassible jungle, palm forests, grasslands, parklands, and wetlands. Jaguar and puma roam the savannah searching for an abundance of prey. Flocks of parrots screech across the sky and settle in communal nests in the Mango trees. Anteaters stalk termite mounds that serve as islands of refuge in the rainy season. For millennia, the Xavante have lived a semi-nomadic life in a remote part of the country where their strong cultural heritage, connection with the ancestors and hunting and gathering practices have enabled them to maintain their traditional way of life.
I had the privilege of visiting the Xavante and experiencing their extradordinary world. Two years ago, Amalia Souza, a Brazilian cultural activist approached The Cultural Conservancy and the Institute for Deep Ecology (IDE) with the idea of organizing a cultural exchange with the Xavante. Amalia was collaborating with the Institute for the Development of Indigenous Traditions (IDETI), a non-governmental organization concerned with the protection of indigenous culture and traditional arts. IDETI works with the Xavante Indians of central Brazil whose lands have been under attack from an encroaching agricultural frontier, deforestation and the proposal for an industrial waterway, or Hidrovía, that would destroy their river systems and way of life. The Cultural Conservancy is a fifteen-year-old non-profit organization that assists indigenous peoples in the protection and revitalization of traditional story, song, language and lands. The Institute for Deep Ecology is an educational organization that promotes a sacred relationship with all life and a biocentric view of the Earth that the Xavante found to be akin to their own. The Xavante were reaching out to the international community by inviting a delegation of activists to visit their land for a cultural exchange. I was joined by Aryeh Shell from IDE and Art and Revolution and Levana Saxon from the Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Youth Alliance (INIYA) on a delegation to meet with the Xavante. We were met in Brazil by Amalia, Jurandir Siridiwé Xavante and Angela Pappiani from IDETI who were our translators, companions and guides.
The Xavante reservation is in the remote far west part of the country and we traveled over fifteen hundred miles by airplane, truck and bus to get there. For hundreds of miles, we saw the land beaten and subdued for as far as the eye could see. We had studied about the continued colonization of the country by multi-national corporations, but we were not prepared for the sight of an endless landscape clear-cut and leveled for large-scale export-oriented agropastoral enterprises. So much of central Brazil has been reduced to withering stalks in a silent landscape of ashes.
Brazil is the world’s second largest beef producer with a national herd of about 170 million cows in over two million ranches occupying nearly 60% of the country’s interior. The effect of cattle production on the landscape varies according to density, but much of the cerrado has been severely affected by decades of over-grazing. Large scale ranching causes compaction of the soil, decimation of native species, the introduction of noxious weeds, and disruption of hydrologic systems. Often, cattle pasture is alternated with agriculture on the same tired land.
Brazil is the second largest producer of soybean close behind the US and gaining. Soybean is an inappropriate crop for the soils of the cerrado and leads to erosion and degradation of the nutrient base. Giant soybean companies, owned and operated by American-based multi-national corporations such as Monsanto, Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, have created a dramatic shift in land use resulting in an alarming increase in the use of herbicides and pesticides, the dehydration of surface water, depletion of the aquifers, and a loss of local employment and even greater concentration of land ownership in a country that has the world’s greatest discrepancy between the rich and the poor. Global industrial agribusiness, as practiced today in Brazil and other developing countries, renders the land progressively impoverished with each crop. Large businesses and land owners, in collusion with government officials, lease the land for pennies on the acre and then move onto other terrain when the yields diminish leaving huge tracts of denuded and depleted soil.
Modern technological society is threatening the Xavante’s way of life with the dangers of environmental degradation and cultural extinction. The Xavante and eleven other tribes including the Karajá, Krikati, Bororo, Tapirapé, Apinayé, Avá-Canoeiro, Javaé, Xerente, Guarani, M’byá, and Karajá do Norte are facing the construction of a series of dams on their life-sustaining rivers and an industrial waterway that would dynamite, channelize and dredge 1,200 miles from the mouth of the Amazon River through the Araguaia/Tocantins river basin, one of the world’s most important reserves of biological and cultural diversity. Plans are to penetrate deep into the cerrado with an armada of barges to extract timber, iron ore and gold and plant hundreds of thousands of acres of soybean and other crops for export. Alterations of the river systems proposed for 87 different sites would have disastrous effects on the ecosystem causing the collapse of river banks, siltation, erosion and flooding. The project has been criticized as both economically and environmentally unsustainable and threatens the extinction of the Pink Dolphin, Spotted Jaguar, Giant River Otter and other endangered species. In addition, there are proposals for a series of stepladder dams on the Rio das Mortes that would decimate the fisheries upon which the Xavante depend.
The Initial Environmental Impact Assessment for the Hidrovía was disqualified due to its poor technical quality and was roundly criticized for its mischaracterization of the testimony of anthropologists and biologists, resulting in charges of fraud. The Brazilian Transport Ministry’s refusal to conduct meaningful and accessible public hearings lead to a court order suspending the licensing process. The current danger is in the construction of smaller projects that accumulate into a transport system capable of large-scale resource extraction. Funding for the project has been proposed by multi-national banking institutions such as the Inter-American Development Bank.
After days and nights of travel, we rendezvoused with our guides at the last bus terminal on the road into the high plateau of the wild west frontier of central Brazil. We piled into the back of a pick-up truck for the last leg of our journey, a four hour roller coaster ride to the reserve. Jurandir pointed out the expanse of the large private and corporate land holdings. As we passed a huge factory warehouse owned by Cargill, we explained that the multi-national soybean farming, processing and transportation conglomerate is working in over 60 countries with the same destructive results. With assistance from Catherine Powell of the Data Center, we provided the Xavante with detailed information about the corporations behind the Hidrovía project including a litany of criminal activities that have resulted in multi-million dollar fines and incarceration, convictions and investigations into bribery, influence-pedaling, price-fixing, environmental destruction, and mistreatment of employees. These large agribusiness companies engage in industrial farming practices that lead to diminishing returns resulting in what has been termed as “suicide economics.” And while multi-national corporations lay waste to the interior of Brazil, the roadways are lined with the shanty towns of landless peasants denied the right to work and live on the land.
Jurandir pointed to the edge of the tilled horizon where we saw the beginning of the Xavante Reservation, a great verdant landscape covering the land. He smiled widely and announced proudly, “We have arrived in Xavante land!” We turned off the main road and drove toward the Rio das Mortes Indian reservation. The sight of intact cerrado from where the land meets the sky was a revitalizing balm. We passed through old growth jungle, palm forest and natural grasslands. We sped through a dense bamboo jungle and campo limpo, or sweeping parklands with fire-red termite mounds and statuesque trees. Suddenly the truck skid to a halt, the driver jumped out and grabbed his rifle and ran into the forest. He yelled back to Jurandir as he sprinted through the thicket of trees. “Tapir,” said Jurandir, “He saw a mating pair in the forest and he’s after the male.” After a few moments, we heard a shot and then another and then the distinctive Xavante cry. “He got it,” Jurandir announced as he hopped out of the truck and we followed. After weaving our way through the thicket we found the hunter panting and standing proudly over his prey, a bullet shot cleanly through its chest. This was seen as a good sign of our arrival.
The Xavante call themselves the A’uwe Uptabi, or True People. The Xavante once defended a vast territory between the Araguaia and Tocantins rivers but were forced by Brazilian expansionism to settle on a reservation near the Rio Das Mortes, or River of Death, named after a bloody battle between the tribe and encroaching settlers. The Xavante have a well-earned reputation for ferocity as they have defended their land against Indians and non-Indians alike with the vigor and skill of a warrior society. Beginning in the mid-1930s, the Brazilian government under the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas, began the infamous “March to the West” that sought to exercise dominion over indigenous groups and their territories. The search for gold and cattle pasture led to violent conflicts and slaving expeditions deep into the sertão, or interior. In addition to efforts to confiscate their land, the indigenous peoples of Brazil have had to battle attempts by Christian missionaries at cultural and religious assimilation. For decades, the Xavante living in the sparsely populated western frontier defended their lands with sheer force. Attempts at “pacification” included the military incursions, the invasion of homesteaders, , state-sponsored development projects, and efforts to co-opt Xavante leaders with consumer goods. The current reservation was established in 1979.
Through the years, the Xavante have survived as a distinct people despite concerted efforts at assimilation and confiscation of their lands. They have maintained a tenacious hold on their culture through a rigorous traditional cultural education that follows a prescribed 16 year course of study and practice. Xavante children are initiated into age-based kinship societies where they are taught by their elders. Their traditional knowledge provides them with the skills and insights of a people who depend directly on the natural world for survival. At the same time, the Xavante have become directly engaged in the legal and political machinations of the Brazilian government in order to protect their interests. Xavante leaders have walked the halls of power in the capital city of Brasilia wearing soccer shorts and tennis shoes, body paint and headdresses and carrying briefcases of legal documents . Working with organizations such as the IDETI and the Instituto Socioambiental, they have taken their activism to the courts and federal legislature to protect their rights and reclaim their reservation lands.
The 800,000 acre Rio das Mortes Reservation is home to 12,000 Xavante living in ten villages on six reserves. Three of these villages, Etenhiritipa, Areões and Wederã, have been designated by the Xavante to be traditional in architecture, social structure, cultural education, ceremony and daily practices. When we arrived in Etenhiritipa we were greeted by their spiritual leader Sereburã, their cacique or chief Tsuptó, the vice-chief and tribal translator Paulo and the council of elders. Amalia and Angela were mobbed by the children and greeted by old friends. Some of the smaller children, unaccustomed to warazu, took one look at me, burst into tears and ran away. Jurandir introduced us to the council and we took turns speaking about our work and good will toward the Xavante. All of our communications were translated from English to Portuguese to Xavante and back again. The elders rose to speak one by one and addressed us using a performance style that mixes speech with cadence and breath. They welcomed us with grace, thanked us for traveling the long distance to visit them and spoke eloquently and forcefully about the threats to their land and culture. The cacique talked about historical problems with miners, ranchers and poachers and explained that they are now confronting the greatest threat to their future. Under the shelter of palm fronds, the circle of elders explained how the proposed Hidrovía would destroy their way of life.
“We were told that the government was planning to build dams on our rivers, cut down our trees and steal minerals from the soil. What will happen to us? Are we to die with the fish, disappear with the animals and fall with the trees?” proclaimed an elder, his hands rising into fists. “Even when the white man thinks that our traditions are gone, they are very wrong about this. Even if it seems like we are holding on by a thread, we will keep our culture alive.”
In the middle of the village a lone tractor sat near side a line of outboard motors and aluminum river boats. We were told that they had been confiscated from a group of fazendieros (ranchers) who were caught poaching timber and game on the reservation. Dressed in war paint, the Xavante had ambushed the poachers, tied them up and took the equipment. When federal authorities came to the village to retrieve the tractor and the boats, the Xavante explained their side of the story and informed the police that they would keep the equipment while their lawyers pursued the case in the courts.
Xavante villages are arranged in a crescent of large shelters made of tree trunks, bamboo and palm leaves. As many as three generations live in a single dwelling. The community draws its water from wells located in the center of the village. Women and children are seen filling their string of gourds with water and working gardens plots which provide manioc, rice, beans and cassava . Groups of daughters, sisters, mothers and grandmothers roast the manioc in large iron skillets in the shade of mango trees. A diet of cultivated foods and native fruits and nuts are augmented with a variety of fish, Tapir, Peccary, Deer, Turtle, Capybara and Anteater. I was impressed by the lack of material goods – no manufactured furniture, no refrigerators, no TVs, no toys except those fashioned by the children. The Xavante make their own clothes on pedal-powered sewing machines and carry their supplies and harvest in woven baskets. The entire village of 500 people shared two pick-up trucks.
The Xavante are native hunters and you can witness their exquisite skill in their keen physical prowess, sheer stamina and profound knowledge of the natural world. The Xavante must hunt their traditional game in order to dream for it is through dreaming that they maintain contact with their ancestors. The dream world is an essential dimension in Xavante life. When Xavante elders dream about council with the ancestors, they share the dream with the village and for weeks the tribe prepares for a reenactment of the dream with tribal members assuming the role of immortals. These ceremonies help to insure spiritual and cultural continuity and an alignment of the present and the past.
Hunting, fishing and land management are an essential part of the traditional ways. Once nomadic, the Xavante now pursue a diminishing stock of native animals on smaller ranges. Hunting practices have changed dramatically with scarcer game, rifles and truck transport. The introduction of more and more processed food into their diets has interfered with the Xavante’s ability to maintain a connection with the dream world. A group of the elders are working with Brazilian ecologist Vanderlei de Castro and Paulo Bezerra, founders of the Pró-Fauna project, who are assisting the Xavante in the husbandry and restoration of game stocks and the revitalization of their traditional methods of hunting on reservation lands.
The day we spent on the Rio das Mortes on a Xavante hunting and fishing excursion was an exhausting and humbling adventure. We accompanied a group of hunters who trekked for long hours along the banks of the river through a dense jungle of roots and vines we navigated with the help of singing machetes. Equipped with only line, hooks and sinkers, the skilled fishermen cast out into the jade-colored river and pulled in one fish after another. River Dolphin broke the surface of the water and Spotted River Turtle basked on the sand bars. When they had caught all their baskets could hold, we returned to our meeting place for a feast of Piranha and other creatures from the day’s harvest.
Jurandir Xavante walks in two very different worlds. As president of IDETI, he works in Sao Paulo, the largest city in Brazil, where he lives with his wife, a Japanese Bhuto theater director, and their son. He returns to Etenhiritipa for a few months each year to take part in ceremonies, visit his parents and work with the tribe on the protection of their traditional arts and reservation lands. When I asked him how it felt to have his feet in such separate realities, he told me simply that learning the ways of the warazu was his task since he was a young boy. Realizing that they would have to come to grips with an encroaching colonial frontier, twenty years ago the Xavante elders decided to prepare eight young boys to leave the reservation to learn Portuguese and report back to their people about Brazilian culture and politics. Jurandir remembers when, at the age of eleven, he walked for two days to a landing strip at a ranch near the edge of the reservation and flew to the big city. “I could not believe my eyes,” he said. “I had never been away from the village, I had never even been in a truck. It was like traveling to another planet.” His only previous experience with the outsiders was in a violent conflict with armed invaders. As planned, a Brazilian family took him in and he attended school. “I could not speak a word of Portuguese, I couldn’t communicate with anyone. After a while I learned the language and studied in school and every year I returned home to tell my people about the warazu and what we needed to do to protect ourselves.”
The Xavante are a unique and abiding people. Against all odds, they are standing their ground, waging warfare when forced to protect their lands while they ply the political waters of national and international politics with an impressive display of savvy and sophistication. Faced with a tidal wave of cultural, economic and political assimilation, they are determined to maintain a traditional lifestyle that is psychologically, socially and practically challenging. For the most part, the traditional villages exist outside of the cash economy, a major vehicle for assimilation. By continuing their relationship with their ancestors, they are supported in their efforts to keep and hold the traditional ways. Performed in still unbroken circles, the communal songs and dances are central to the cohesion and reification of Xavante culture. The Xavante possess a sophisticated oral performance style that they practice daily in a variety of rituals. A rich library of oral performance continues to relate their stories, create traditional and contemporary art, maintain social structure and unity, and practice the ceremonies that animate Xavante life.
The Xavante are reaching out to indigenous rights and environmental activists to face the myriad of threats to their land and culture. They recognize that global problems require cross-cultural solutions. Still, as they seek help, they want to control the influences on their traditional way of life. They have decided that one way of achieving solidarity is in the form of a cultural exchange so that they might express their essence through their land and culture, and to learn the ways in which other peoples have held onto that which enables them to be “True People” -- with history and continuity, spirit and community. They are planning cultural exchanges in the future in order to forge international alliances.
The night before our departure from the village, the council of elders gathered us in their evening circle and sang to us. Sereburã’s deep voice, mature and confident, lead elaborate chants that had the force of the wind. The songs were woven with harmonizing choruses and were punctuated with exuberant calls sounding like the wild cries of creatures traversing life forms and lifetimes. Xavante songs, taught to each emerging generation, continue to reach through time to stand with them in the moment.
Their voices still echo within me.
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