Now, I have a curious trait. When confronted with an emotionally charged situation, I become sleepy. It seems to be some kind of defense mechanism, perhaps a way of avoiding further anxiety. In any case, I felt there wasn't much we could do but wait it out and hope things would be calm by morning. Normally I'm the worrywart, but I climbed into my hammock and went back to sleep. Tara lay there listening to bullets whiz past our thin mud walls. Boy, was she mad at me. But we survived.
Morning came. The girls woke up unaware of what had gone on. We ventured out cautiously, wondering what would happen. Superficially, life seemed to be normal as people went about cooking, fishing, swimming. We couldn't decide whether it was our imagination or whether the people were cooler toward us. Our idyllic stay in Aucre had come to a crashing end. We had planned to stay for a few more days, but some of the joy had gone out of it, displaced by our ignorance and fear.
When Paiakan announced that the plane was coming in to take him and Irekran and their children out of Aucre, we decided to leave too. This had been an experience of a lifetime, a step back thousands of years in time to the way humans have lived for most of our existence. We had reached across that huge chasm in friendship and had been accepted in return, yet the eclipse had brought each side back to the reality of how differently we perceive the world.
We had to lighten our packs for the plane and gave away T-shirts, flashlights, fishing gear, knives, whatever we felt would be useful. A young man who had hung around me on our fishing trips shyly gave me a feather necklace he had made. As we left, I didn't know whether the ritual weeping was just for Paiakan and Irekran or whether the Kaiapo also liked us and were wishing us the best.
Severn and Sarika didn't want to leave. It had been an enchanted experience for them, and they wanted to stay the full shot. But once again we were airborne, leaving Aucre and passing over that immense expanse of green.
After forty minutes, we passed a brilliant slash of red through the forest — it was a placer gold mine, and the destruction of the river was unbelievable. The water looked a foamy cream color. Soon we began to see smoke, at first small wisps here and there and then large plumes that blocked the sun — this part of the forest, home to the Kaiapo, was on fire. Sev, especially, became very agitated to realize her friends' habitat was being destroyed.
We stayed overnight in a motel in Redenção. In Aucre, money meant nothing. There, life depended on the skills and knowledge of the people, and the forest and rivers were abundant and generous. Suddenly we were thrown into a world where money was everything. After the mud hut and the Kaiapo children underfoot and the swimming and fishing, even this small town seemed noisy, polluted, and inhospitable. After a sad farewell to Paiakan and his family — who knew when we would see each other again? — we caught a plane to Cuiaba for a short visit to the Pantanal, a wetland fabled for its birds and crocodiles.
As we flew out of Redenção, Sarika complained that her eye was sore. It was red and bloodshot, and within minutes, a thick, milky mucus began to pour out of it. It was terrifying to watch the speed with which this infection developed. By the time we arrived in São Paulo, en route to Cuiaba, her eyelid was swollen shut. We rushed to a drugstore in the airport, where the pharmacist looked at her. I had expected him to jump back and shout, “Oh, my god!” or something equally dramatic, but he indicated it was a common problem and calmly handed us a tube of medicine. I was dubious, but we squeezed the medication into her eye, and within minutes the swelling began to decrease. In a few hours, her eye was free of infection.
While we were waiting for Sarika's eye to subside, Miles began to mock me about the parasites I had pulled out of my feet. How many had I had? Why had I worn sandals? He heaped scorn on me because I should have taken better care of myself. “Do you mean you didn't get any?” I asked. “You don't have any sore spots?”
“Of course not. . ” he responded, then stopped in midsentence. He plunked himself down on a sofa, tore off his shoe and sock, then saw the volcano between his toes. “Take it out, take it out!” he wailed. I could only laugh at this brave Haida warrior.
PAIAKAN BECAME A GLOBAL hero for his battle to protect his home. He was honored and feted in Europe and the United States. In 1990 he was elected to the United Nations Environment Program's Global 500 list of world environmentalists and, along with former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, received a prize from the Society for a Better World. I flew to New York to celebrate the award with him.
In 1992, an Earth Summit drawing participants from around the world was to be held in Rio de Janeiro in June, and as the date approached, we prepared to return to Brazil. Paiakan's renown had grown, and despite being a thorn in the side of those who would develop the Amazon, he was expected to play a central role at the summit. I heard the Tibetan religious leader the Dalai Lama had asked to share the stage with him.
We arrived in Rio and settled into an apartment on the Condado, just north of Ipanema. The night before the summit, Tara went out for groceries, only to see Paiakan's face on the cover of a national magazine with the words “O Savagem”—“the Savage!”—printed across his image. Paiakan was accused of picking up seventeen-year-old Letiçia Ferreira in a car on the way to a picnic near Redenção and of attacking and raping her with Irekran's assistance and in the presence of their children. The sensational charges, described as “facts” in the most lurid language in the Brazilian news magazine, were announced by the young woman's uncle, the mayor of Redenção, who had campaigned on a virulent anti-Indian platform. Paiakan and his family had retreated to the safety of Aucre.
The whole thing stank to high heaven, but as a tactic to keep Paiakan out of the limelight, it worked brilliantly. At meetings of non-government organizations (NGO) at the Hotel Gloria during the summit, Paul Watson and I shook our heads as one by one the spokespeople for environmental organizations distanced themselves from Paiakan.
In 1994, Paiakan was acquitted in absentia for lack of evidence. But years later, the charges were reinstated. I have pressed Brazilian lawyer Frank Melli, who is a staunch supporter of Paiakan's, to see whether Paiakan can be granted a pardon now that more than thirteen years have passed. He has been silenced far more effectively than if, like Chico Mendes, he had been martyred by assassination. In the meantime, we have set up a trust that will enable Paiakan's children, as is his wish, to go on to university so that they can be educated and work for their people if that is their goal.
When we had visited Paiakan in 1989, he mused that in Canada we pay our scholars and experts to teach at universities and pass on their knowledge to young people. “Our elders are our professors,” he said, and told me he would like to have a Kaiapo university where elders could teach young people how to live in the forest. He wanted to show the forest could be valuable left standing. He wanted, for example, to establish a research station in a pristine area to which scientists would pay to come from the outside world; they would hire Kaiapo cooks and assistants, and they would both teach and learn from the Kaiapo.