Although it is perhaps the most universal human emotion, grief weighs uniquely upon each of us, and we each must find our own way through the wastelands of loss and bereavement, shadowed by the patterns and compulsions of our distinctive personalities, families and societies. Modern American society seems bent on classifying, five-stepping and pressing on through grief; other societies across the globe give witness to a wide diversity of strategies, from strong repression[1] to cathartic indulgence.[2]
The Kayapó people of Brazil enact the lingering toll of grief through the ritual “welcome of tears,”[3] in which friends or family members who haven’t seen each other for some time cry, wail, embrace and wipe tears away as they remember loved ones they have lost since their last meeting. This custom attracted international attention in 2011, when a photograph of Kayapó chief Raoni in tears was circulated widely with a caption stating (incorrectly) that he was crying over the approval of the Belo Monte dam project. In fact, he was enacting the tearful ritual of greeting with a relative.
 |
| Kayapó chief Raoni greets a relative in the traditional "welcome of tears" |
When a young Kayapó filmmaker called me at 2 AM on the second of January this year to tell me that the chief of Turedjam village, Mro’ô, had died, I thought I must have misunderstood. This just couldn’t be: Mro’ô is younger than I am. I had seen him a little more than a month before, if ever preoccupied with the burdens of leadership on a violent frontier, still alive, healthy and happy, surrounded by his grandchildren at an idyllic small village where one of his daughters had moved.
 |
| Mro'ô Kayapo, 1969-2015 |
When I had last seen him, Mro’ô was proud to learn that yet another of his many ambitious dreams would soon come true: three Kayapó film makers, including one novice cameraman from his own village, had been invited to travel in March of 2015 to represent his people’s concerns and show images from Kayapó culture at an international event on digital media in the United States. I had come to Turedjam in late November of 2014 with anthropologist/journalist Felipe Milanez to convey the good news to the people of Turedjam, and to begin the complex and time-consuming arrangements for obtaining passports and U.S. visas for the Kayapó film makers who would be traveling.
A soft-spoken yet determined leader, Mro’ô had first approached me at the Goeldi Museum in Belem during my first month curating the ethnographic collections there in 2009. He was visiting the museum with French anthropologist Pascale de Robert, and asked me for help to obtain ongoing support for this exchange with the Goeldi Museum. He was especially eager to equip and train a cohort of Kayapó youth to use video cameras and digital editing equipment to record Kayapó culture, both material objects preserved in the Goeldi Museum collections, and the living culture of traditional dances, songs, orations and ceremonies that still take place regularly in modern Kayapó villages : “The old people are all dying,” he had said. “We need to register our culture so that our children and grandchildren will not forget.”
