The Wayfinders (9 page)

In 1743 the French explorer and geographer
Charles Marie de la Condamine led the first scientific expedition to travel
the length of the river. His ethnobotanical discoveries were extraordinary.
He was the first to identify quinine as a treatment for malaria, to describe
rubber, to examine the botanical sources of curare, and to report the
existence of barbasco, the fish poisons that would yield the biodegradable
insecticide rotenone. He learned about all these remarkable plants from the
Indians, and yet his disdain for the peoples of the forest could not have
been greater. “Before making them Christians,” he wrote, “they must first be
made human.” He saw Indians as children, frozen in their development,
trapped within a forest that he revered but of which he ultimately knew
nothing.

By the time anthropologists entered the Amazon in
numbers in the 1950s, the surviving indigenous cultures were for the most
part living in the remote headwaters at the periphery of the basin. The main
trunk of the river and the lower reaches of its principal tributaries had
been settled by Europeans for more than 400 years. Indeed, a unique world
had emerged, a riverine peasantry of
caboclos
, men and women of
mixed heritage whose entire subsistence base was derived from indigenous
antecedents and adaptations. But of the original inhabitants of the main
floodplain of the Amazon, there existed only shadows in the sands, whispered
messages in the forest.

Anthropologists, ethnographers in particular,
naturally were drawn to the extant peoples, the “real” Indians, if you will.
Many of these societies lived along the eastern flank of the Andes, in a
wide arc that reached along the margin of the Amazon basin from Bolivia in
the south to Colombia in the north, and then across southern Venezuela, the
headwaters of the Orinoco and the southern side of the Guiana Shield. The
Andes, a formidable barrier, were not traversed from the west by roads until
after the Second World War. Many cultures I came to know, the Chimane and
Mosetene in Bolivia, the Machiguenga and Campa in the
montaña
of Peru, the Cofán, Siona–Secoya and Atshuar in
lowland Ecuador, the Yanomami in Venezuela, did not experience sustained
contact until the 1960s. The Waorani, with whom I lived in 1981, were not
peacefully contacted until 1958, though their homeland is scarcely 150
kilometres from Quito, the national capital of Ecuador and a city settled
for well over 400 years. In 1957, five missionaries attempted to contact the
Waorani and made a critical mistake. They dropped from the air eight-by-ten
glossy black-and-white photographs of themselves in what we would describe
as friendly gestures, forgetting that the people of the forest had never
seen anything two-dimensional in their lives. The Waorani picked up the
prints from the forest floor and looked behind the faces to try to find the
figure. Seeing nothing, they concluded that these were calling cards from
the devil, and when the missionaries arrived they promptly speared them to
death. The Waorani, incidentally, did not spear only outsiders, all of whom
they considered to be
cowade
, or cannibals. They speared one
another. Fully 54 percent of their mortality over eight generations resulted
from intratribal spearing raids.

The Waorani were and are an exceptional people,
and their history is in many ways unique. But at the same time they fit a
basic pattern shared by many of the marginal societies — marginal only in
the sense that they lived literally at the margins of the basin. These
cultures were for the most part small in numbers, without hierarchy or
intense specialization. They tended to be acephalous, lacking overt
political leaders, and perhaps most characteristically, they were
endogamous. They married amongst themselves, living in isolation and often
in open conflict with their neighbours. They had, of course, extraordinary
gifts. Waorani hunters could smell animal urine at forty paces in the forest
and identify the species. Through generations of empirical observation and
experimentation, they had learned to manipulate plants with considerable
skill. Poisons from plants enabled them to fish and hunt. Hallucinogenic
preparations such as ayahuasca revealed levels of alchemical genius beyond
the reach or understanding of science. And in making a living in the forest,
they had found a way through slash-and-burn agriculture to grow food despite
the nutrient-poor soils. Small plots cut from the forest were fired and
burned, planted and harvested with ever-diminishing returns for perhaps
three years, and then abandoned to be reclaimed by the forest. All of this
activity was critically dependent on population density. Too many people
would result in too many fields with no time for the vegetation to
regenerate, the exhaustion of the land, and the saturation of the carrying
capacity of the environment.

To a remarkable extent, this cultural scenario
became the filter through which anthropologists understood indigenous life
in the Amazon. Societies, it was implied, clung precariously to a perilous
existence, constrained always by the environment and its limitations. In
1971, Betty Meggers, a highly regarded archaeologist at the Smithsonian
Institution, published
Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit
Paradise
, a book that became required reading in virtually every
introductory anthropology course on South America. Meggers depicted a world
of small hunting and gathering societies, virtually unchanged in centuries,
none of which could possibly have supported more than a thousand people, a
figure she determined arbitrarily. Higher populations, she suggested, might
have occurred on the floodplain of the lower river, as indeed Gaspar de
Carvajal had reported, but evidence was vague and imprecise, and all along
the main trunk of the river “the aboriginal cultural pattern had been
completely destroyed within 150 years of its discovery.”

But had it? Preservation of archaeological
remains had been as much of a problem in the Amazon as it was in Polynesia.
But beginning in the 1980s new techniques unveiled unexpected worlds.
Working on the island of Marajó in the delta, archaeologists, Anna Roosevelt
in particular, found evidence of a complex culture, perhaps as many as a
hundred thousand people spread over thousands of square kilometres that had
persisted for at least a thousand years. Near the city of Manaus at the
confluence of the Rio Negro and the Amazon, massive earthen burial mounds,
dating to ad 1000, provided evidence that whoever had occupied the land had
exploited some 138 domesticated plants, most of which were fruit trees and
palms. Botanists and ecologists, meanwhile, were discovering throughout the
Amazon curious anomalies, large but isolated expanses of
terra
preta
, black soil, clearly of human origins, showing that people
had in fact stayed put, and actively worked to enhance the agricultural
potential of the land, with charcoal for nutrient retention, organic waste
as compost. William Balée, an ethnobotanist from Tulane University,
suggested that as much as a tenth of the upland forests of the Amazon, an
area the size of France, may have been nurtured in this manner by the
original inhabitants.

These observations led other scholars to question
traditional assumptions about the origins and impacts of slash-and-burn
agriculture. When I lived among the Waorani, a people who still had stone
tools at the time of contact, I often wondered how such an implement could
possibly fell tropical hardwoods that I, as a botanist and one-time logger,
could barely cut with a modern axe. Anthropologist Robert Carneiro pondered
the same question and decided to experiment. To cut down a 1-metre tree with
a stone axe took 115 hours, three weeks of eight-hour days. To clear a
half-hectare plot took the equivalent of 153 eight-hour days. According to
Betty Meggers and other authorities, such a field could only be worked
intensively for three years before being abandoned. Given other demands on
an individual’s time — hunting, fishing, ritual obligations — it would have
been totally impractical and utterly maladaptive to devote so much effort
for so little return. Rather than slash, burn, plant, harvest, and move on,
people would have had every incentive to stay put. Indeed, as geographer
William Denevan has written, “the picture of swidden, or slash and burn, as
an ancient practice by which Indians kept themselves in timeless balance
with Nature is a total myth.” Slash-and-burn agriculture in the Amazon may
be a comparatively recent development, made possible by the post-contact
introduction of steel tools. It has become over time the agricultural
technology of the peripheral peoples of the basin, whose numbers are low,
and whose lands have been large enough to absorb its almost grotesque
inefficiencies. But clearly this was not the foundation of life among the
densely populated cultures we now know to have existed along the main
reaches of the Amazon.

Anthropologists today recognize that our
understanding of these ancient worlds has been for too long filtered through
our experience with the marginal societies that survived what was in fact a
holocaust. To understand the prehistory of the basin through this lens is
rather like attempting to reconstruct the history of the British Empire from
the perspective of the Hebrides after London had been wiped out by a nuclear
bomb. Within a century of contact, disease and slavery had swept away
millions of indigenous lives. And yet, incredibly, there is one place in the
Amazon where the rhythm of these great civilizations may still be felt and
heard, the homeland of an extraordinary complex of cultures known
collectively as the Peoples of the Anaconda.

IN 1975 WHEN I
first travelled to the Northwest Amazon of
Colombia I stopped en route at Villavicencio, a small city nestled into the
eastern foothills of the Andes, to visit a legendary naturalist, Federico
Medem, a Latvian count who had fled the Russian Revolution and found a new
life in the forests of the tropical lowlands. He was an old friend of my
professor at university, Richard Evans Schultes, the botanical explorer who
had sparked the psychedelic movement with his discovery of the magic
mushrooms in Mexico in 1938, and later spent twelve uninterrupted years in
the most remote reaches of the Amazon. I found Dr. Medem in the evening at
his home, a rambling compound that resembled the quarters of an old rubber
trader. The house had wooden floors and a tin roof, an open veranda hung
with hammocks, and walls decorated with jaguar and bushmaster skins.
Overhead in his office a ceiling fan cast faint shadows across the desk as
he caressed an artifact or ran his fingers over a fading map drawn by hand a
century before. His most prized possession was a shaman’s necklace, a single
strand of palm fibre threaded through a 6-inch crystal of quartz. He
described it as both the penis and crystallized semen of Father Sun,
explaining that within were thirty colours, all distinct energies that had
to be balanced in sacred ritual. The necklace was also the shaman’s house,
the place to which he went when he took yagé, the hallucinogenic potion also
known as ayahuasca. Once inside, the shaman looks out at the world, over the
territory of his people and the sacred sites — the forests, waterfalls,
mountainous escarpments, and black water rivers — watching and watching the
ways of the animals.

Long after Medem retired for the night, I
remained in his office reading a book that he had recommended,
Amazonian
Cosmos
, written by his good friend Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff,
Colombia’s foremost anthropologist, who was also a close colleague of
Schultes. It was from Reichel that I first learned of the importance of
rivers. For the Indians of the Vaupés, rivers are not just routes of
communication, they are the veins of the earth, the link between the living
and the dead, the paths along which the ancestors travelled at the beginning
of time. The Indians’ origin myths vary but always speak of a great journey
from the east, of sacred canoes brought up the Milk River from the east by
enormous anacondas. Within the canoes were the first people, together with
the three most important plants — coca, manioc and yagé, gifts of Father
Sun. On the heads of the anaconda were blinding lights, and in the canoes
sat mythical heroes in hierarchical order: chiefs; wisdom-keepers who were
the dancers and chanters; warriors; shaman; and finally, in the tail,
servants. All were brothers, children of the sun. When the serpents reached
the centre of the world, they lay over the land, outstretched as rivers,
their powerful heads forming river mouths, their tails winding away to
remote headwaters, the ripples in their skin giving rise to rapids and
waterfalls.

Each river welcomed a different canoe, and in
each drainage the five archetypal heroes disembarked and settled, with the
lowly servants heading upstream and the chiefs occupying the mouth. Thus the
rivers of the Vaupés were created and populated, with the Desana people
coming into being on the Río Papuri, the Barasana and Tatuyos on the upper
Piraparaná, the Tucano on the Vaupés, the Makuna on the Popeyacá and lower
Piraparaná, the Tanimukas and Letuama on the Miriti and Apaporis. In time,
the hierarchy described in the myths broke down, and on each of the rivers
the descendants of those who had journeyed in the same sacred canoe came to
live together. They recognized each other as family, speakers of the same
language, and to ensure that no brother married a sister, they invented
strict rules. To avoid incest, a man had to choose a bride who spoke a
different language.

Today, when a young woman marries, she moves to
the longhouse of her husband. Their children will be raised in the language
of the father but naturally will learn their mother’s tongue. The mother,
meanwhile, will be working with the children’s aunts, the wives of their
father’s brothers. But each of these women may come from a different
linguistic group. In a single settlement, therefore, as many as a dozen
languages may be spoken, and it is quite common for an individual to be
fluent in as many as five. Yet curiously, through time, there has been no
corrosion of the integrity of each language. Words are never interspersed or
pidginized. Nor is a language violated by those attempting to pick it up. To
learn, one listens without speaking until the language is mastered.