#AWA PEOPLE FULL#

We don’t want their money and their motorcycles. The Ka’apor and Guajajara”-neighboring tribes the Awá have testy relationships with-“are selling their wood to the whites.

We have much courage, but we need you close to us. “We don’t succeed in living with chickens and cows.

#AWA PEOPLE FULL#

Piraí starts to speak in Portuguese, his voice full of gravitas and emotion. All these communications and interactions are going on that our contingent from the modern world is dead to. Our gathering, on one of the last islands of intact rain forest in the eastern Amazon, is taking place in the context of an entire eco-system. A rooster is prancing on the path for the benefit of a dozen hens and lesser males. Emaciated dogs, little brown bags of bones, are snoozing and rolling in the dust. He is listening to a bird in the nearby forest that is singing in triplets. Pirahá has a big smile, which I recognize is the smirk of someone with a sense of the absurd, who appreciates the delicious ironies, the constant outrageous surprises of existence, as people tend to do at the end of their lives. Their son Iuwí is to his right, and in the background is his father, Pirahá, who is also married to Iuwí’s sister, so Pirahá is both Iuwí’s grandfather and his brother-in-law. He sits on one of the benches behind the Brazilian National Indian Foundation’s post of Juriti, where I am staying, and his wife, Pakoyaí, in a skirt of finely woven tucum palm, sits next to him. They are carrying beautifully made longbows and arrows that come to their shoulders. Three of the men have yellow crowns of toucan feathers, red toucan-feather bracelets on their upper arms, and red toucan down dabbed on the tip of their foreskins, which are tied up with string. The welcoming committee comes down from the village.