A few dozen kilometers away in Jaquiri, where a small group of Cambebas live, the mood is far less jubilant. We only encounter women and children. The men have gone to Tefé for a ten-day health education course provided by people from the project. Maria das Graças, a somewhat sullen, toothless woman, positions herself as the spokeswoman for the women. Visitors usually have to speak to Raimundo Cruz first, she says. He is the leader, tuxaua, of the community. Maria: “We often find it very difficult to contact the project coordinators to get information. And because we want to preserve our culture, we can’t just let anyone come ashore.”
After saying this, she welcomes us on behalf of Raimundo Cruz. I understand the women’s reluctance. The people here are among the last of the Cambeba people – the tribe only has just under a hundred members – and often a resolute exclusion of everything outside their own culture is seen as the only way to survive. The women’s fear is mainly due to the fact that gangs from the surrounding areas sometimes raid when the men of the community are away. This previously happened upstream at the Tikuna. Loggers who were forced to leave the legally demarcated habitat of the Tikuna people came armed to Boca do Capacete, near Benjamin Constant, on March 28, 1988, and attacked the defenseless indigenous population. Four people were killed, nineteen were injured, and ten went missing in the Solimões River. The massacre, known as the Massacre do Capacete, was initially treated as a murder case, but in 1994, Brazilian courts ruled that it was a case of genocide.
Despite the fact that they invited us into their village, the women remain suspicious. They barely respond when I ask questions about the role the community plays in the Mamirauá project and vice versa. All Maria wants to say is that life here is much poorer than where we just came from. The part of the area where Joaquim lives is more interesting to the project as a research area – it has more and better fish. In this case, more interesting also means more important. The women say that if they need something from the project leaders, they have to go to them, to Tefé. The Mamirauá people always visit Joaquim directly.
“Life here is hard,” says Ines. “Last year the water rose so high that we lost all our vegetables and had to buy our flour elsewhere. And we didn’t have the money for it. When the men are away, everything falls on us.” And the people from the project, don’t they help when there are problems? Maria: “We had a health, hygiene, and maternity care course, and sometimes people from the project come to give us a medical check-up. If we refuse to cooperate with them, we will lose this too.” And that can be disastrous in a country where healthcare is not a given and diseases like malaria, dysentery, and yellow fever often take on epidemic proportions.
Then it turns out not all the men are gone. His name is Olavo, and he asks if I will accompany him to his home. There I meet his father. Aloiso is ninety years old and “one hundred percent indigenous.” Olavo shows a brochure with “a complete Portuguese – Omágua word list.” He sighs: “Sadly, it was never published.” Omágua is a severely endangered language and is only spoken by a few elderly people. One of them is Aloiso. He and Olavo don’t call themselves Cambebas but Omáguas, which is essentially the same. I’ve found myself in the middle of a neighborhood feud. Olavo feels oppressed by the community. He says they treat him as an outcast. I had noticed that he is the only one in the village with a fence around his hut. He and his father were living here before the rest arrived and started living as a tribe, about twelve years ago, when the Mamirauá project began. “They came here and asked my father for permission to fish. They said they’d stay ten days, but they never left.” A lot has changed for them since. They wanted to change his way of life, says Olavo. He feels hurt that the community isolates itself and doesn’t want to accept him. The strangest part of all this: Olavo’s fiercest opponent is Maria das Graças, the same Maria who is also the grandmother of Christine, Olavo’s newborn granddaughter who is placed in my arms, and whose parents are Maria’s son and Olavo’s daughter. Christine looks at me, first surprised, then curious, but when I talk to her and make faces, she starts to laugh. Even Maria, who has joined us in the house of her ‘enemy’, seems to thaw. Aloiso, who has said little all this time, sings a few phrases in one of the old languages and everyone listens silently. Everything will be alright here.
“We believe in God, but our life depends on the river,” says Maria as we say goodbye. When I wish her wisdom for the future, she replies: “Wisdom? I can’t even read my own name.” “That’s the least of your worries,” I reply. She laughs and says I think like an indigenous person.
To be continued…
