A Dangerous Relationship
The Indigenous peoples of the Amazon wage an unrelenting battle against the animal, plant, and spiritual inhabitants of the forest—beings that both sustain human existence and threaten it. Although they are regarded as “guardians of the forest” and assumed to live “in harmony with nature,” the reality of everyday Amazonian life tells a dramatically different story.
The “Lord of the Animals” allows humans to “harvest his fruits” in the jungle as long as it is to feed the family.
Text and photos by Carlos Suárez Álvarez
Originally published in issue 182 of Cáñamo magazine, February 2013.
A harmless and endearing sloth slowly drags itself down the middle of the only street in the Shipibo village of Vencedor, in the Peruvian Amazon. It has entered the human space from the surrounding forest; a lively group of children and teenagers gathers around the animal. “Pretty fur,” smiles Osvaldo, the only adult in the group, who uses a stick to try to lift the sloth’s head to see its face. The young spectators laugh and push each other toward the disoriented animal, as if it posed a threat.
The animal lies belly-down, curled up, its head against the ground; when Osvaldo flicks it a few centimeters into the air with his stick, its long black claws come away with a handful of dirt it had clung to. Everyone laughs. Now on its hind legs, the animal tries in vain to appear threatening, raising one hand and letting out a faint hiss. “Does it bite?” I ask, curious about the caution. Osvaldo shakes his head while raising the stick to deliver a hard blow to the sloth’s side. The children cheer with somersaults. Riding the village’s only bicycle, Omar, 14 years old, circles the group until he decides to run over the animal’s legs. The ruckus intensifies when he rolls over its back. Osvaldo keeps pushing the sloth, sending it flying through the air toward the port. A column of children follows, celebrating each flight of the animal.
At the riverbank, several children throw hard mud balls at it and rejoice when they hit it squarely. Omar pushes the animal into the water, where it tries to swim upstream; Omar approaches the shore and pushes it under with a stick. Bubbles rise to the surface. Laughter. After failing to drown it, Omar strikes a heavy blow to its back. The animal, now two meters from the shore, is carried downstream by the current; it briefly disappears among some canoes but reappears still alive. Omar delivers two brutal blows to its head, and the body goes limp, the head submerged, at the mercy of the current. The children follow it a few meters downstream until they are sure it is dead.
In the mornings, it is common to see Shipibo women using machetes to eliminate any attempt by the vegetation to grow back. Venomous snakes can hide beneath the grass.
against nature
The idea that Indigenous people of the Amazon live in blissful harmony with nature, as if in an Edenic garden, is an unfounded cliché. There is an essential incompatibility between Amazonian humans and their forest neighbors. In the Shipibo language (spoken by the children who killed the sloth), the word for village does not refer to a gathering of people (as in Spanish), nor to something communal (community is a legal term imposed by the states); jéma literally means "cleared space," that is, a place taken from the jungle through the elimination of all plant life. A Shipibo village is an island of humanity in an ocean of threatening life. From this human-transformed space, any unsupervised living form is systematically excluded: the permitted species (fruit trees in backyards, chickens, and other domestic animals) obey the will of the human.
In the central street of Vencedor, some thirty meters wide and over two hundred meters long, there is only one tree, and every morning, women strive to pull out (squatting, with a machete) every last blade of grass from the ground surrounding their homes. I understood their powerful reasons days before the school year began: the men of the village were weeding in front of the school, which had been overrun by half-meter-high grass during the vacation period; the chief, while swinging the machete at ground level, slashed open the belly of a meter-and-a-half-long boa. The boa is not venomous, but it could have been the feared jergón or the tiny viper, and it might not have been a machete that found it, but a child’s foot. I also understood, after a harmless accident, that the inevitable fate of large trees is always to fall, either from age or from occasional windstorms; this is why they cannot stand near houses and must be felled. But a materialist explanation is insufficient to fully understand the motivations behind a behavior that transcends the logic of the five senses: Indigenous tradition conceives of a dual reality, and what happens in the spiritual sphere affects the material one.
In his ethnography People of the Center of the World, Colombian anthropologist Juan Álvaro Echeverri describes how the Ocaina healer Kinerai established his own maloca (the great Indigenous ritual house) in a forested area along the Igaraparaná River in the Colombian Amazon. “The elders used to say: ‘Clean where your children are going to sleep,’” Kinerai told Echeverri. “The filth is out there, in the forest; out there there is fire [rage], fatigue, disease.” And Kinerai cleaned both materially and spiritually: during the day, he set traps in the forest, and at night, he sat to meditate, armed with coca and tobacco, calming his heart to identify bad feelings. Inspired by the plants, he dreamed: on the first night, his father visited him angry because the trap had blocked his path, but the father was an impostor, and when Kinerai checked the trap the next day, he found a jaguar, which he had to kill—a metaphor for the difficult father-son relationship he needed to resolve. On successive nights, he was visited by a sad old woman (who introduced herself as the owner of the place), a seductive woman, a supposed friend... Spiritual personifications of various traumas that appeared at dawn in the trap in the form of animals.
In order to independently settle in his own maloca, he had to kill four jaguars (one for each post of the maloca), an armadillo, an anteater, and an etcetera of beings that symbolized each of the materials used in the construction and spiritually corresponded to unresolved issues. “He had to hunt the animals that were the owners of the place because otherwise they would bring problems and diseases to his family,” Echeverri explains. Based on this and other observations, the Colombian anthropologist concludes that the Indigenous person lives “against nature.”
Despite the dangers involved in venturing into the forest, humans must do so daily to obtain food, medicine, and construction materials.
FOREST BEINGS
Humans cannot remain indefinitely in their domestic anti-oasis; the forest provides food, medicine, and building materials—it is necessary to venture into it every day. Shipibo ayahuasquero Roger López, 44, experienced the spiritual dangers of the jungle during his adolescence. At thirteen, he enjoyed gliding through creeks and lagoons with his cousins. On one occasion, he ventured into Cocha Suavi, home of the great black lizard and the boa, a place off-limits to youthful wanderers according to the elders. “What a blast!” he shouted loudly, carefree—until he felt a fiery burning in his side. That afternoon, back home, he tossed and turned with fever. “What happened?” asked his grandfather. “I've been bewitched...” “Aha! Where did you go?” Roger told him the truth; his grandfather was furious. “You don’t understand because you haven’t taken ayahuasca! You don’t know!” His grandfather grabbed his tobacco pipe and Florida water. He sang an icaro, a ritual melody, to the pipe, smoked the tobacco, blew the smoke, sucked on the painful area, and spat. The pain subsided as Roger listened to the scolding. “That’s witchcraft sent by the gods of the anaconda, because they were at peace and you disturbed them. If you were sleeping and someone came and shouted, ‘Ahh! Damn it!’ what would you do? You’d whip them or send your dog after them. Just the same, they were calm and we bothered them.” As he gave advice, the grandfather kept sucking. Soon, Roger felt better. “Never go to a place like that,” the grandfather continued, now calmer. “There are people there, humans like us, and you’re bothering their chickens.”
The grandfather, José López, was a respected ayahuasquero from the Lower Ucayali, a wise man from another time who also knew how to act as the present required; although he recommended his grandson respect the beings of nature, he was paradoxically capable of doing the opposite. Near the same Cocha Suavi where Roger had been bewitched, the grandfather would settle with the family every summer to search for and fell cedar and mahogany trees. Roger would climb into the canoe after breakfast and look for trees close to the waterways so that, with the rise of the winter waters, they could be easily transported to the lagoon, where they formed large rafts for the city boss.
These memories of Roger’s participation in the logging industry didn’t surprise me because years earlier, I had accompanied him to the port of Manantay, on the outskirts of the city of Pucallpa. The heat, the dust of the road, the large trailers carrying massive logs we passed, fleeting glimpses of sawmills on either side, all prepared me for the shock when the mototaxi dropped us at an open area sloping down to the riverbank, teeming with people, food stalls, bustle, midday sun, motorcycles and mototaxis, dust, music blaring, and above all, wood. Wood floating in the river; wood being unloaded by large cranes from barge after barge; wood flowing into an endless line of riverside sawmills; men like ants carrying planks, blocks, and boards; thick logs suspended in the air on their way to some corner of the world. I exclaimed, speechless, and looked at Roger, wide-eyed, seeking complicity. My surprise was even greater when, instead of being outraged, he looked proud: “It’s a very powerful industry, very strong.”
The timber port of Manantay, near the city of Pucallpa, Peru.
contagious virus
Indigenous peoples have participated in extractive processes throughout the Amazon since the white man introduced his global and insatiable commercial system to the region: a highly contagious virus. During the 19th century, they helped decimate manatees and turtles (whose fat was used as fuel for lighting), sarsaparilla, paiche (a fish with prized meat that was sold salted)… From the 20th century onward, with the establishment of roads and improved river communications, rubber—of horrible memory—wood, animal skins, and, in short, any product the globalized system demanded, was systematically extracted by the indigenous population.
The Ocaina hunter Arsecio Pijachi recalls that in his youth, back in the seventies on the Igaraparaná River, he ventured into the forest with his uncle in search of “fine skins” such as those of jaguars, otters, and peccaries, of which they killed several dozen on each expedition; the populations of those species declined to critical levels during that decade. In return, they obtained clothing, tools, motors, and a series of goods that became increasingly indispensable as the market economy took root in this once remote corner of the planet, producing drastic changes in the native’s relationship with the forest.
This dynamic of overexploitation is irreconcilable with the ritual discourses, myths, or children's stories collected by anthropologists in recent decades, which prescribe careful behavior in the use of natural resources. Thomas Griffiths, in an exhaustive study on the economy of the Huitoto on the Caquetá River, Colombia, reproduces a story told by the old wise man José Suárez, in which Father Creator warns the Owner of the Water that humans may fish as long as they ask for permission. “But when one of my sons [a human] is bad, when he does not ask for permission, when he takes your children [those of the Owner of the Water: the fish] without need, then it is up to you to deal with them. In that case, you have the right to defend yourself and reclaim your children.” And old Suárez concludes: “That’s when the Owner of the Water gets angry and there are problems. That’s when our children drown and do not reappear because the Water People have taken them.”
Along the same lines, the Swiss anthropologist Jürg Gasché analyzes the uncertainties of hunting among the Bora of the Ampiyacu River basin in Peru. When the hunter enters the forest, Gasché explains, he is in the territory of the Lord of the Animals, who, all-powerful in his domain, decides the hunter’s fate, success or failure. To ensure a good hunt, on the eve of the expedition, inspired by tobacco and coca, the hunter communicates with the Lord of the Animals to ask permission through a ritual speech from which any reference to violence is excluded: the request is framed in terms of harvesting the fruits cultivated by the Lord of the Animals. The hunter reminds him that just as he allows certain worms to feed on his coca leaves, causing no harm to the plant, so too must the Lord of the Animals allow him to harvest his fruits, which he will use exclusively to feed his family. The hunter is aware that if he exceeds the necessary amount, he must face the consequences. “It is known in the region that several hunters make a living by killing animals for sale,” Gasché writes. “Several of them have fallen ill or the illness has affected a close relative and they were cured by the appropriate treatment after the origin of the illness was diagnosed as stemming from excessive animal slaughter.”
An example of why the Shipibo people only settle after eradicating all the vegetation.
Before the Hungry Monster was established in the Amazon, native societies respected nature because they feared it, not because they loved it; but money made them forget that fear. The stereotype of the ecological indigenous person was forged, according to anthropologist Andreu Viola Recassens, “from the growing environmental awareness of the seventies,” based on “old ethnocentric prejudices,” and has since been embraced by indigenous leaders thanks to what Jürg Gasché, with forty years of experience in the region, considers a process of “submission and alienation” before the urban intellectuals who advise them (and finance them, I would add).
According to Viola, through the alliance between global environmental movements and indigenous people for the protection of tropical forests, the former gained “symbolic capital” and an “aura of legitimacy,” while the latter gained “unprecedented power in their negotiations thanks to the pressure of international public opinion.” Viola illustrates the underlying disconnect between the two by recalling the case of the Kayapó, whose leaders, showing off feathers and face paint, traveled the world accompanied by Sting. What a disappointment for the public and many environmentalists when it became known that the Kayapó had sold timber from their ancestral lands. “It was not the indigenous people who had been deceived, but the false expectations about the real needs and aspirations of the noble savage they themselves had created,” argues Viola. “For the Kayapó, what was truly at stake was the self-determination of their people and the sovereignty of their territory.”
The Polymorphic Devourer slithers through all territories: neither the Kayapó, nor the Ocaina, nor the Bora, nor the Shipibo can resist it. The old stories became old; the indigenous societies of old, simple and autonomous, with material abundance, are now under the powerful spell of the colors of the Screen, very efficient tools, the exotic city, successive steps to nowhere, the frantic pace, electronic music, a thousand dazzling possibilities, a thousand unknown foods, sugar, pornography, well-dressed people in offices, the always more, always more. In short: money (what it buys and what it demands) emits a deafening call that prevents hearing the voices of the ancestors.
