Coronavirus Brings Back Memories: Indigenous priest reflects on the global pandemic [excerpt]

Justino Sarmento Rezende, a Salesian priest of the Tuyuka indigenous people from the upper Rio Negro in Brazil, reflects on the coronavirus pandemic from the perspective of his people’s history. Excerpted from the interview published by Chacruna.net.

“I was born far from the city, at ‘Jaguar-Creek’.

“Whenever my father heard that a dangerous disease was coming, he took us to an even more isolated place. There, we waited until the latest news finally reached us: ‘the disease has passed’.

Justino Sarmento Rezende.
Photo: Luis Miguel Modino.

“We had no doctors or nurses to take care of us. But we were watched over constantly by our sage grandparents who performed protective ceremonies using white pitch incense to fumigate the environment, the people and their pets.

“Every day the sages smoked their cigars and talked about what they had seen in their dreams, what protective prayers they had composed in their nighttime meditations...

..."They protected our lives within rays of sunlight, within the clouds.

"They protected our lives within rays of sunlight..."
Photo: G.H. Shepard Jr.

“This current time with its current viruses, with their own proper names, it takes me back to the past and reminds me of the wisdom of my grandparents who helped to defend life.

“It reminds me of our defensive technique: fleeing from the enemy, not exposing oneself, retreating to a safe place until the disease passes.”

-----

Interview conducted by Luis Miguel Modino for Instituto Humanitas Unisinos, translated to the English by Glenn H. Shepard Jr. and excerpted for "Notes from the Ethnoground." Read the full interview at Chacruna.net.

The Fish Trap: Winning poem featured by Sapiens.org for World Poetry Day

The fish trap

The fish trap is sun bleached dry half
buried in squeaking white
sand under an equatorial
moon that wants to walk across the black
mirror but instead is twice
swallowed by river and 
clouds

It is both an elegant and obsolete
thing this hybrid carcass of palm
staves lashed with sinewy vines an incongruous
coil of copper wire binding some
ancient fracture burnished
golden by the 
sand

He dismembers it like some beast on a
skewer its ribs and sinews yielding to dark
vegetable hands function
not lost but transformed as he starts
a fire and the flattened
helix glows among the 
ashes

The fish lie on the bank by the haul
net sucking at the futile night
air through pumping gills still
they watch him stunned through
glazing water as red
halos ebb behind open
eyes

And he feeds the last
of the trap to the
flames under a gnarled
pot on the beach flickering between
an empty village and the black
river under the smothered 
moon

---

Poem chosen as a winner in the 2020 anthropological poetry prize by Sapiens.org

Read my introduction to the poem for #WorldPoetryDay

Hear me read "The Fish Trap" on SoundCloud

Thanks to Christine Weeber, Eshe Lewis, Kim Herbst and Daniel Salas for editorial input, graphic design, artwork and web design on behalf of Sapiens.org

See also "Yellow Jessamine," a haiku for a toxic coronavirus Spring

Between the Cross and the Pleiades: Missionaries, museums and a Baniwa shaman's heritage

"Right there in that deep pool," she pointed a weathered brown hand across the sand towards a bend in the river.  "That's where she told him to dump it."  She counted the items out on her fingers, "Virola snuff, a snake's head, a jaguar tooth, an earth-spirit crystal, yopo snuff.  All of his shaman's instruments.  Sophie made him do it."

Baniwa shamans use crystals and other magical materials to enter the spirit world and transform into various beings.

Ana, a septuagenarian Cubeo woman from Colombia now living among the Baniwa people in Brazil, describes how an American Protestant missionary named Sophie Muller convinced her uncle (now long deceased) to throw his shamanistic paraphernalia into the river and convert to Christianity in the 1950s.  Shamans of the northwest Amazon use hallucinogenic snuffs and other psychoactive plants to enter the spirit world, employing various minerals, animal parts and other magical materials during trance to transform into different animals and spirit beings[1].

"And he regretted it, too.  Says he wished he had thrown his instruments in the woods, so he could go back and get them later.  But at the bottom of the river!  He was finished.  He was the last one."

"All of his shaman's instruments. Sophie made him do it...  At the bottom of the river! He was finished."

I met Ana on a recent trip to the Içana and Ayari Rivers, tributaries of the Upper Rio Negro in the northwest Brazilian Amazon.  Concluding a three-year long project of exchange between the Goeldi Museum and several indigenous peoples, I traveled to the Upper Rio Negro carrying digital photographs of ethnographic objects collected in the region over a hundred years ago and deposited in museums in Brazil and Europe by German anthropologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg[2].
  

The Challenge of Life Hill: Magical landmark in the Brazilian Amazon metes out destiny like the Fates

For two hours we watched storm clouds gather as our speedboat cut through coffee-colored waves on the Içana River. We beached at the base of a sandy cliff called Paitsidzapani in the Baniwa language, named for a kind of edible frog. Brazilian Portuguese has no word for such herpetological minutiae, so the Baniwa also call the place Serra do Desafio da Vida, or “Challenge of Life Hill.” Baniwa Indians stop here to partake of its dual enchantments: some stay at the base to gather coal shards endowed with a miraculous capacity to promulgate the eponymous (and by all accounts delectable) frogs. The brave, however, look towards the top, fix their eyes on dry twigs lining the precipice, and climb the steep embankment.

The sandy cliffs of Life Hill reflected in the river

In this landscape of dwarf forests, swamps and sand dunes along the Brazil-Colombia border, the hill metes out destiny like the Fates: those who top out with a steady stride and plant a tree branch along the ledge will be blessed by a long and healthy life; those who break stride and pause to rest are doomed to die young.   

Life Hill is less arbitrary than unbending Atropos, since cardiovascular capacity certainly correlates with longevity. Yet this is no light-hearted athletic feat: Abel, my Baniwa companion, said that his sister collapsed halfway up and was dead within a few years.

As most of our party ascended, I considered from below. Although not foolhardy, I enjoy a reasonable physical challenge. But as an ethnobotanist—half scientist, half mystic—I maintain a cautious respect for taboo and superstition, which have an uncanny penchant for truth. Yet the hill couldn’t have been higher than fifty yards.  It was steep, but I’m in pretty good shape. My only worry was a nagging knee. 

I began at a brisk jog, almost a sprint. I covered the first fifteen yards easily. Abel shouted from the top, “Don’t wear yourself out!” I reverted to a lunging stride, already breathing sharply and regretting the initial exertion as the path got steeper.

The hill, like life, is deceptive. The sand looked soft and inviting, but as I climbed it became deep and white and treacherous as a snowdrift. As the slope increased, the ground seemed to suck energy through the bottom of my feet. There is a mechanical explanation: the yielding sand absorbs impact and impulse, stealing the drive out of each forward lunge. But for the superstitious soul, there is a spiking sense of desperation, “What if I don’t make it?!”

Ancient petroglyphs along the Içana River

Halfway up, and I was in trouble. Fatigue set in just as the slope steepened wickedly. My heart pounded and my lungs ached as urgently as my burning legs. My stride became erratic as I slogged through collapsing powder, pausing longer after each footfall. About three-quarters up, my bad knee panged and I lurched to the left, almost losing my balance in calf deep-sand. I thought it was over. But I righted myself with an outstretched hand and leaned forward as far as I could, agonizing through the final steps. Human will, for all its tenacity, eventually meets the wall of physical limitation:  ten more feet and I would have collapsed. But I had reached the top. 

With a crazed heart slamming in my ears, I bent forward to breathe, but Abel urged, “Don’t stop!  Run and plant your branch!”

It was the hardest part of the trial. With leaden feet, burning thighs, racing heart, and panicky breath, I shambled toward the scrub forest and broke off a sturdy living branch with shriveled, olive-like fruits. I limped back to the cliff and planted my branch alongside a few fresh twigs and many withered ones. I looked out over the spectacular vista that swam and pulsed before my eyes: a tapestry of forest stretching to the horizon, broken only by a band of white sand and the reddish-black ribbon of the river. Tall rain clouds were moving toward us. A ferocious bolt of lightning cracked and its thunder roared over the forest like a breaking tidal wave. 

“Whenever someone climbs, the shamans of the Jaguar Clan throw thunderbolts,” said Abel. “This is where their souls enter the mountain.”

We raced down the hill, falling carefree through the crazed channels we had dredged up, and which the wind and the rain would soon smooth over. To finalize the rite and seal its augury for our party, we all dove, head first and fully clothed, into the icy black pool at the foot of the precipice.

White sand and black water under a cloudy sky

-- This piece was first published by The Common on February 23, 2011

Might at the Museum: Indigenous groups revisit their heritage at the Goeldi Museum

Visitors idling on a hot Saturday afternoon through the shady grounds of the Goeldi Museum’s Zoobotanical Park in downtown Belém, Brazil, gawked and snapped photos of the unanticipated spectacle:  more than thirty Kayapó Indians in full ceremonial regalia had just entered through the front gate. I walked alongside Mro-ô, leader of the Kayapó village of Turedjam in southern Pará state. I had invited Mro-ô and his people to participate in the inauguration of a new exhibit[1] celebrating the Goeldi Museum’s 145 years at the forefront of research into the cultural diversity and human history of the Amazon basin. The exhibit, running from June through September, includes ethnographic artifacts collected among the Kayapó by different researchers from the early 1900s through the present.

A Kayapó family poses in the Goeldi's Zoobotanical Park beside a life-size photograph of a Kayapó who visited the museum in 1903

Ethnographic collections have typically been regarded as “graveyards of objects”[2] belonging to cultures that are already extinct or in a process of extinction. However in recent decades, indigenous peoples of the Amazon have conquered new forms of political engagement and developed unique interfaces with modernity. Such changes demand a new approach to museum science and ethnographic collections. The Goeldi Museum has pioneered a kind of museum science that puts indigenous peoples into dialog with their own cultural heritage, an approach we call “ethnomuseology.” According to Lucia van Velthem, curator of the Goeldi collections for many years, “ethnographic objects possess a relationship of continuity with their cultures of origin.”[3]

Kayapó villagers from Turedjam visit the new exhibit at the Goeldi Museum

The visit of the Kayapó to the museum in late June represents the culmination of an ongoing research project that is built around this philosophy.

Sacred Flutes Redux: Cultural revival among the Baniwa of the Upper Rio Negro

Laureano, dignified with a parrot-feather crown and thick horn-rimmed glasses, paddles from the bow of the canoe while his skinny younger brother Oliver, in sweat pants and a baseball cap, rows aft.  Moacir, Laureano’s son, and I are filming from a second aluminum speed boat.  Funded by the Brazilian Ministry of Culture to document his people’s revitalization of ancient rituals banned by Christian missionaries, Moacir’s professional high-definition video camera is much more impressive and expensive than my own humble palm-corder.  We are paddling up this narrow tributary of the Ayari River, reddish-black but translucent like Coca Cola, to the place where Laureano concealed the sacred flutes nearly three decades ago in the icy depths of the creek.  The spot is marked like buried treasure with cryptic scars on a half-submerged tree trunk that only their maker can decipher.  Moacir, himself over thirty, was the last of his village to be initiated in the grueling ceremony of fasting and ritual privations that culminated in the playing of the flutes.  The same flutes that initiated Moacir also initiated his father, and his father’s father.  Nearly a hundred years old, these flutes lie hidden under three fathoms of cold black water directly below the rickety carcass of Laureano’s canoe.
 

Japurutu, Baniwa instruments not subject

to the restrictions surrounding sacred flutes.

They have come to show me where the flutes are buried, but they will not dive to retrieve them until I have left. Women, children and non-initiates like myself are banned from seeing the flutes, an offense punishable by banishment or even death.  The three of them, all initiated, will return later to recover the flutes, clean, tune and decorate them, and play them tonight for the first time in twenty-five years.