How are you? Kendjam looks timeless, but it was established only in , when Chief Pukatire and his followers split off from the village of Pukanu, farther up the Iriri River, after a dispute about logging. A few families have TVs in their thatch houses and enjoy watching videos of their own ceremonies, along with Brazilian soap operas.
Pukatire showed us to a two-room schoolhouse built a few years ago by the Brazilian government—a pistachio-colored concrete structure with a tile roof and shutters and the luxe marvel of a flush toilet fed by well water.
We pitched our tents on the veranda. Some headed out to the charred earth of their swidden gardens to tend crops of manioc, bananas, and sweet potatoes. A tortoise hunter returned from the forest, loudly singing in the Kayapo custom to announce his successful quest for the land turtles that are a vital part of the village diet. Toward evening the heat ebbed. A group of young warriors skirmished over a soccer ball.
Boys with slingshots fired rocks at lapwings and swallows; one stunned a white-throated kingbird and clutched it in his hand—the yellow-breasted bird glaring defiantly like the peasant unafraid of the firing squad in the famous Goya painting. Families filtered down to the Iriri for their regular evening baths, but there were caimans in the river, and they did not linger as darkness fell.
Eight degrees south of the Equator, the blood orange sun sank quickly. Howler monkeys roared over the dial-tone drone of the cicadas, and earthy odors eddied onto the night air. At first glance, Kendjam seems a kind of Eden. And perhaps it is. In , 11 years after the founding of the Brazilian Republic, the Kayapo population was about 4, Contact often had the unintended effect of introducing measles and other diseases to people who had no natural immunity.
By the late s, following the construction of the Trans-Amazon Highway, the population had dwindled to about 1, But if they were battered, they were never broken. Leaders like Ropni and Mekaron-Ti organized protests with military precision, began to apply pressure, and, as I learned from Zimmerman, who has been working with the Kayapo for more than 20 years, would even kill people caught trespassing on their land.
Kayapo war parties evicted illegal ranchers and gold miners, sometimes offering them the choice of leaving Indian land in two hours or being killed on the spot. Warriors took control of strategic river crossings and patrolled borders; they seized hostages; they sent captured trespassers back to town without their clothes.
In their struggle for autonomy and control over their land, the chiefs of that era learned Portuguese and were able to enlist the help of conservation organizations and celebrities such as the rock star Sting, who traveled with Chief Ropni also known as Raoni.
In the Kayapo helped get indigenous rights written into the new Brazilian Constitution, and eventually they secured legal recognition of their territory. The original plan calling for six dams in the basin was dropped after large demonstrations in which conservation groups joined the Kayapo for what is known today as the Altamira Gathering.
The Kayapo population is now rapidly growing. From shotguns and motorized aluminum boats to Facebook pages, they have shown a canny ability to adopt technologies and practices of the cash-based society at their borders without compromising the essence of their culture. With the help of noted anthropologist and Kayapo expert Terence Turner of Cornell University, they have embraced video cameras to record their ceremonies and dances and to log interactions with government officials.
One small example of their ability to incorporate elements of the outside world into their culture is a pattern now fashionable with Kayapo bead workers: It is based on the logo of the Bank of Brazil. Much to the dismay of some conservationists, several village chiefs formed partnerships with gold mining companies in the s and in the s sold mahogany logging concessions—alliances they came to regret and now have largely ended. Mostly the Kayapo learned to organize and to put aside their sometimes fractious relations to cultivate unity of purpose among themselves.
As a result, they are perhaps the richest and most powerful of around indigenous tribes remaining in Brazil. What may be the most crucial of all, they have their land. At least for the moment. Last June in the village of Kokraimoro, Kayapo chiefs avowed their opposition to a raft of decrees, ordinances, and proposed laws and constitutional amendments that would gut their ability to control their land and prevent them, and any other indigenous group, from adding to their territory.
The measures, which echo the dismal history of betrayal and dispossession in North America, are widely seen as part of a campaign to enable mining, logging, and agricultural interests to circumvent indigenous rights, now inconveniently guaranteed by the Brazilian Constitution.
Among the many facets of this political struggle, perhaps the most wrenching at the moment is the effort to stop a project the Kayapo thought they had scotched more than two decades ago.
In Kayapo villages the division of labor falls along traditional lines. The men hunt and fish; the women cook, garden, and gather fruits and nuts. We pulled away on two aluminum skiffs powered by Rabeta motors that enable shallow-water travel during the dry season.
In places the river was black and still as a midnight mirror; in others it looked like tea flowing over the brown Brazilian shield rock, purling through gentle rapids or weaving among gardens of granitic Precambrian boulders. We clambered ashore. After five minutes of ducking and twisting and wriggling past a riot of thorny ferns and fallen limbs, stopping constantly to unhook myself from vines and to disabuse my adrenal glands of the conviction that venomous pit vipers lurked under every pile of leaves, I had no idea which way was east or west, no sense of where the river was, no hope of getting back to the boat on my own.
We picked up a faint game trail. In-depth knowledge of the latter is extremely important during discourses and decision making. In fact, argumentation in discourses often rests upon comparisons with events or situations similar to those lived through by ancestors. Mythology assumes an important role, since myths invariably evoke moral values that can be used in an argument. As chiefs have no coercive means of imposing their decisions on their followers, their discourses comprise, as far as they go, the only available means of persuasion.
It is through discourse, in which the moral values and interests of an association are placed in the forefront, that the chiefs exercise their influence and their prestige in order to put forward their ideas and make them acceptable. However, a chief never takes a decision in the full sense of the word, he has no power.
Nobody pays attention to a chief who imposes his own will and in the event that he wishes to do so, he may even be banned. A chief should be attentive to the ideas circulating within his group of followers and whenever a consensus emerges he should formulate it rapidly, so that other men align themselves unanimously with the idea or action, apparently his own proposal.
In fact, it is at this stage that the discourses become decisive: they often give the wrong impression that the chief is proposing something. He just skilfully formulates an idea for which a consensus was about to be reached. In the case of a dispute, the chief generally consults the oldest members of the association.
Eloquence is therefore crucial for the leaders. But if a chief lacks extreme eloquence, this may sometimes be compensated by other exceptional qualities.
The first quality combativeness is associated with the male virtues of physical force, indifference to pain, the capacity to be a good warrior and defend the interests of the association and community against threats. The second quality eloquence is indispensable for maintaining and promoting unity. This latter quality is also linked to the generosity chiefs must demonstrate in all circumstances: everyone expects them to redistribute immediately everything they obtain in the past, war prizes; today, the presents given by visitors.
The chiefs must put the interests of the group before their own individual interests: generosity is a manifest proof of this feeling of solidarity. Moreover, chiefs must take care that individual disputes do not generate into quarrels between factions, which would put at risk the unity of the society as a whole. Nonetheless, chiefs from different associations must avoid such involvements wherever possible and seek mutual understanding. The final process of designating a new chief comprises precisely such a promotion of consensus.
After initiation, some youths start to act as leaders of their peers. Others end up deciding that the function of chief does not interest them: they do not develop any political ambition and interrupt their training. The facts and acts of those who possess such an ambition are exposed — and sometimes questioned — during the following years by existing chiefs and by elders in general. It is during this phase, then, that the aspirants may demonstrate their qualities. As a result, during this stage, judgement is essentially based on exemplary conduct.
After some years, the veteran chief is so old that it becomes difficult for him to take part in public activities. It is at this moment that a successor is designated. The choice is not made through elections. The judgement of the members of the association to which the candidate belongs is an important factor: they indicate their preference.
Nevertheless, the veteran chief has the final word, especially if two or more youths are revealed as serious candidates. To avoid subsequent quarrels between the different candidates, he must consult the chiefs of other associations, in order for them to propose the name of the candidate who enjoys the best reputation or who has shown the most suitable conduct.
It is the chiefs of other associations who finally decide and officially proclaim their choice publicly in the village. In other words, it is necessary to be aggressive towards strangers and a peacemaker within the community.
Moreover, few chiefs effectively respond to the commended ideal: some are very aggressive, others too pacific or insufficiently generous. Only strong chiefs succeed in attaining an equilibrium between the two roles. In fact, whites generally use them to transmit messages and especially to obtain something from the community.
These recent developments have inglreasingly led the communities to attribute greater decision-making powers to their chiefs, but only where negotiations with whites are concerned. Within the community, the traditional rules remain valid. The surrounding forest is considered an anti-social space, where men can transform into animals or spirits, sicken without reason or even kill their relatives. Beings who are half-animal, half-people dwell there. The further from the village, the more anti-social the forest becomes and its associated dangers increase.
The section of forest in which the village population hunts, fishes and cultivates land is first socialized by the attribution of place names. Thereafter, human modifcations of the nature world are accompanied by rituals. For example, the opening of new swiddens is preceded by a dance presenting many structural similarities to the war ritual.
Opening up new swiddens is indeed a symbolic war against a natural rather than human enemy. Returning from the hunt, men must sing to the spirits of the game they themselves have killed in order for the spirits to remain in the forest. Each animal species designates a song that always begins with the cry of the dead animal. Each rite translates a part of this cosmological vision and establishes a link between man and nature, in which above all the human-animal relationship is reinforced.
They divide into three main categories: the large ceremonies for confirming personal names; certain agricultural, hunting, fishing and occasional rites — for example, those performed during solar or lunar eclipses — and, finally, rites of passage.
The latter are frequently solemn affairs, though short and only rarely accompanied by dances or songs: they are organized so as to announce publicly the passage of some people from one age set to another.
Shamans enter into contact with the natural spirits and learn new songs and names from them. The sources inspiring common names are multiple, potentially referring to an element of the environment, a part of the body, a personal experience and so on. The beautiful names have two parts: a ceremonial prefix and a simple suffix. There are eight untranslatable ceremonial suffixes, each corresponding to a ceremonial category.
Some days after birth, the child receives a certain number of common and beautiful names. Both can be used, but it is more elegant for the latter to be confirmed at a later time during a ceremony.
This confirmation occurs after the child has developed elementary motor and linguistic abilities, and, especially in the case of boys, before being formally integrated into one of the associations linked to the centre of the village. In other words, the confirmation of names attributed to birth takes place between the age of two and eight years, during a naming ritual. Ideally, each child should be honoured more than once. As the ceremony may last months, enormous quantities of foods have to be assembled and prepared.
The father and mother obviously turn to their more distant relatives to request help, but not everyone wants to — or can — contribute towards such a heavy economic sum. Each of these possesses a particular name and consists of a long series of specific dances, songs and ritual practices.
The honoured children are assisted by two or more ritual friends, non-related people of both sexes who will thereafter have the task of assisting the child during all the difficult phases of his or her future life. The attribution of a name is one of the most crucial occasions when the help of a ritual friend is required. In fact, the ceremonial confirmation of names is considered to be a dangerous undertaking.
This is partially explained by the origin of the names which, as we recall, derive from natural — and therefore frightening — elements. But there is also a second threat: during performance of the rites, the spirits of the dead relatives attempt to take away the spirit of the decorated children. The essential difference resides in the fact that the spirits live by night and fear the light of day. Women smoke almost the whole time they stay in the swiddens since the spirits fear the smoke.
Without this precaution, many spirits would lurk near them as they went to collect potatoes and manioc and then follow them as far as the village. To confuse the plane of the spirits, the women spit in all directions before leaving the swiddens and surround themselves with a cloud of smoke. Spitting and blowing smoke are acts endowed with the same efficacy as the male songs after a successful hunting trip: both have the aim of driving away spirits.
The grave comprises a circular well in which the body is placed in a seated position, the face always pointed to the east. The hole is covered after various personal objects of the deceased are placed below, such as gourds, weapons and some ornaments.
The spirit will take these objects to its new dwelling place. In the first weeks following the death, relatives leave a small amount of food and drink everyday by the side of the grave, since the spirit does not always immediately find the path leading to the village of the dead.
As a result, relatives of someone who has recently died are extremely prudent: in order to scare away the spirits, they illuminate the house with large fires that produce a lot of smoke.
The simple fact of looking at a spirit is mortal and the latter typically awaits for an opportune moment to capture the soul of a sick person or a weak relative.
During the naming ritual, the honoured children are placed in a situation of extreme weakness: at the start of this rite, they are so to speak unfinished beings, submitted to an intense process of socialization by means of body painting, the wearing of very fine ornaments, ritual dances by male or female groups and, finally, by the ritual confirmation of their names.
At the end of this process, the honoured children become whole human beings again. For these reasons, the honouring of very young children is avoided during such ceremonies, since this would place them in danger, even when accompanied by adult ritual friends. Blood is a dangerous substance of which the body must retain a precise quantity — its lack induces weakness and sickness, while its excess leads to.
When the village elders think that the youths have become too soft or slow and attribute this attitude to the excessive accumulation of blood in their bodies, a specialist must scarify the thighs of the boys until they bleed.
This is done with the help of a triangular piece of gourd edged with extremely sharp fish teeth. Feared above all is contact with. Depending on the intensity of the contact, a series of prohibitions must be observed. As warriors are increasingly rare, only the oldest people bear these tattoos.
The culminating point appears to have been the celebrated pan-indigenous assembly in Altamira in February , which had a pronounced impact in the press. The impression remains that many sources of international help were only interested in the Indians in so far as they acted as defenders of nature. The Altamira gathering brought the Kayapo, as well as other Brazilian Indians and their supporters into a forum where discussion could be had about how to protect the environment and the native peoples.
The Kayapo demanded information that was being withheld by the government relating to the negative consequences for their people who would be directly affected by the construction of the dam, as well as rural Brazilians in the Xingu River area, who they felt were not receiving adequate and fair information.
The Kayapo continued to fight adversity and retaliated using traditional war oratory and dances. The Kayapo attended the meeting to protest the hydroelectric dam development while wearing traditional costume and wielding machetes. An important media element of the presentations was the appearance of the rock star Sting during the demonstration. Sting would continue to support the Kayapo in their efforts to protect their land, and in he would found the Rainforest Foundation Fund.
Three years later, the first privately funded separation of the Brazilian indigenous reserve was made possible. In , they were again threatened by secretive government plans to build a series of hydroelectric dams on their land. The Construction plans continue to be fought by the Kayapo people. Government corruption continues to weaken the resistance efforts of the indigenous and opposition forces within the government. Kayapo leaders protesting the creation of the dam are constantly threatened, and some have been killed by developers and land prospectors.
Because of the nature of the circumstances, these crimes are rarely punished. The forest is the home of the Kayapo and they rely on its bounty for their food and medicinal needs. Rivers are essential to their way of life and gold mining in Brazil is polluting the rivers, while the proposed Belo Monte Dam project would use up vast amounts of resources essential to the survival and livelihood of the Kayapo and would severely impact fishing conditions.
Between 18,, indirectly associated jobs will be created by the construction of the dam. These numbers will have a vast and far reaching implication on population growth in the area which has the very real potential to put even more pressure on the fragile forest infrastructure and ever decreasing natural resource base, escalating concerns of flooding and deforestation in particular. Kayapo people facts for kids Kids Encyclopedia Facts. All content from Kiddle encyclopedia articles including the article images and facts can be freely used under Attribution-ShareAlike license, unless stated otherwise.
Cite this article:. Thank you! Published by Martin Waters Modified over 6 years ago. The Kayapo people are an indigenous tribe that live in the Amazon Rainforest. There are approximately 9, people left that belong to the Kayapo tribe. They are known as fierce warriors as they fight off enemy tribes and fight among themselves.
They also eat fruits, Brazilian nuts and the harvest vegetables. The Kayapo people are very skilled hunters. They use blowguns and darts that are covered in a poison that paralyses. They hunt monkeys and turtles. Due to there their contact with the outside world they can also purchase products such as rice, beans, milk and sugar from near by villages. Homes and recourses resources will be destroyed.
People of the Amazon Rainforests in Brazil.
0コメント