Then Paiakan sat down with Juneia to talk to me about his plans to fight the dams. He asked me for help in raising money to take different tribe members to Altamira and to build the traditional village on the dam site. I had no choice but to promise I'd do the best I could. But if I were to raise funds, I realized a key question was: would he be willing to come to Canada himself? His presence would make all the difference. Si: he would come.
Soon we were on our way out of the village, crossing a sea of green that extended as far as we could see on both sides of the plane. I vowed I would return for a longer stay. After nearly an hour, we began to see thin wisps of smoke, clearings, and huts and eventually landed near Redenção, the nearest settlement, which would have taken thirteen days to reach if we had canoed.
As soon as I could, I phoned Tara. She says I had a catch in my throat as I related the threats to the forest. “You have to do something!” I told her. When she asked what, I told her about the Kaiapo and their charismatic leader, describing Paiakan's plan, his need for funds, and his promise to come to Canada to help raise money and the profile of the issues.
As I continued on my way for the remaining five weeks of the shoot, Tara sprang into action in Canada, organizing events in Toronto and Ottawa. In 1988, the Amazon was a hot topic. The scale of its destruction was on everyone's lips. With luck, Paiakan's visit would fuel public and press interest.
People were quick to lend a hand. In Toronto, Monte Hummel and the World Wildlife Fund offered support for a fund-raising event, and in Ottawa, Elizabeth May, who was now with the Sierra Club and had first rocketed into prominence fighting logging in Cape Breton, promised the same. Soon great plans were afoot.
The Amazon rain forest is immense. Although the ecosystem has been assaulted for decades by gold miners, loggers, peasants, and ranchers, most of it remains intact. As roads increase, however, at some point the integrity of the forest may become so diminished that it will no longer support its biodiversity.
On our shoot, we visited immense coal-mining operations where huge holes appeared in the forest. We visited the Balbina dam, which had flooded eight hundred square miles of forest and driven two tribes close to extinction, drowning untold numbers of animals and plants, yet silted up so rapidly that it was soon abandoned. A road through the forest is the greatest threat because it brings with it a flood of the landless poor, desperate to make a living and willing to destroy the forest to gain it. We interviewed representatives of the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, who justified the need for roads to carry economic development into remote parts of Brazil.
After I left Brazil to return to Canada, our crew remained to interview Chico Mendes, the charismatic rubber tapper who had galvanized his cohorts to fight to protect the forest. Two weeks after we interviewed him, he was murdered. During the 1980s, over a thousand activists, including Mendes, Indians, and many Catholic priests, had been murdered in Brazil with impunity. But the murder of Chico Mendes backfired. In death, Mendes's fame grew: he became a martyr, a worldwide symbol of the consequences of corruption underlying the destruction of the Amazon.
ON OCTOBER 14, 1988, Paiakan and Kube-i were to be tried for their visit to Washington. I flew down to Belém to witness the trial. The courthouse was ringed with young soldiers armed with rifles, pistols, shields, bulletproof vests, and clubs. Buses rolled up and out stepped hundreds of Kaiapo warriors in feathers and paint, carrying sticks, clubs, and bows and arrows. These men lined up in rows six abreast and advanced on the courthouse, beating the sticks rhythmically, marching in unison to their chants and periodic grunts. When they reached the soldiers, they lined up. Each warrior faced a soldier, menacingly staring him in the eye. The soldiers looked straight ahead, but if I had been one of them, I would have wet my pants.
Paiakan and Kube-i then gave speeches outside the courthouse, as the warriors gathered round them and sat down. An old Kaiapo woman began to scream at the warriors. Darrell Posey translated some of what she said: “I call upon you to take up arms, to kill the whites, slaughter them! I'm coming here to speak to you, to call upon you in the name of your mothers and your fathers, all of us older people. I'm calling upon you! I throw my words in your faces. Have I come in vain? You sit here while the whites are crushing us.” The men sat there with their heads bowed. The same woman then turned to the soldiers ringing the courthouse and told them: “I am here to speak my anger at you! I am enraged with you. You sit there drawing maps of our land to steal it. But I tell you, we're going to beat you soundly in defence of our land!” Kaiapo women are truly ferocious.
Paiakan and Kube-i mounted the steps to enter the courthouse but were blocked for being “seminude.” The judge ruled that they must dress to show respect for Brazilian law. When Kubei-i replied that they were dressed in respectful traditional attire, which gave them power, the judge said they must follow Brazilian formalities and should strive to become Brazilians. Darrell Posey muttered to me, “That would be genocide.”
When the court wouldn't budge, Paiakan simply told the warriors they were leaving. He said that if the government wanted to try them, it would have to go to Aucre and get them. The Kaiapo men threw their drumming sticks onto the road, boarded the buses, and left without any interference from the soldiers. I picked up two sticks, which I still have as souvenirs of that encounter.
But no government officials would dare try to fly into the remote village, where they would be completely vulnerable. The case was eventually dropped because of the absurdity of the original charges.
EIGHT
PROTECTING PAIAKAN'S FOREST HOME
IN FEBRUARY 1989, we had arranged for air tickets so that Paiakan could come to North America. After a brief stop in Chicago, where he was a guest of Terry Turner, a physical anthropologist at the University of Chicago, Paiakan flew to Toronto for our concert to raise funds for the protest to be staged at Altamira. Our translator was Barbara Zimmerman, a young Canadian herpetologist who was working in the Amazon.
Tara had an audacious idea — why not invite the major multinational companies that did business in the Amazon to attend a reception before the concert to meet Paiakan in person and, in return, to donate a thousand dollars? We would be asking companies that were destroying the rain forest to give money to someone fighting to protect it. We drew up a list of eighteen companies, from American Express to the Bank of Japan, and I called the Toronto head of each company to extend the invitation.
The Toronto reception was a gala event. The Elmwood Club donated its elegant premises and exquisite Thai food. The CBC filmed the arrival of the hosts — me, Paiakan, the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, and Gordon Lightfoot — and the well-heeled guests. Of the eighteen companies, all but one sent a representative with a check. In one hour, we raised $16,500. That was a lot in the eighties. The only exception was the Bank of Japan. I had called the president, identified myself, and said, “I understand you have interests in Brazil and thought you would like to meet an Indian leader from the Amazon.” After a considerable pause, he replied, “We have interests in Brazil, but we do not have interest in Indians.”