![]() ![]() Women encourage their husbands to return with plentiful game meat, and the men oblige. Their existence is one of intimate connection with the forest, which provides food, shelter and spiritual solace.‘If my children are hungry, I just go into the forest and I can find them food,’ says Peccary Awá. And when the moon is full, the men – hair speckled white with king vulture down – in a chant-induced trance – commune with forest spirits, during a sacred ritual lasting till dawn. Awa women even breast-feed capuchin and howler monkeys and have also been known to suckle small pigs.Īt night, the Awa travel with torches made from tree resin, carrying the embers of a fire as they move from one hunting ground to another. They nurture orphaned animals as pets, share their hammocks with raccoon-like coatis and split mangoes with green parakeets. ![]() Vultures, bats and the three-toed sloth are forbidden as prey for eating. They spend their days hunting for game such as peccary, tapir and monkey, with 6ft bows made from the irapa tree and gathering forest produce such as babacu nuts and acai berries. His life since his return has been typical of the 360 members of the Awa tribe. Karapiru has since remarried, has a young daughter and lives in the Awa village of Tiracambu. The meeting was one Karapiru could never have imagined during his 12 years on the run: the young man was his son. The farmer gave him shelter, and alerted the National Indian Foundation (Funai) – the government body responsible for Indian policy – which, in turn, sent a young Awa man called Tiramucum to talk to this "unknown" Indian, whose language no one could understand. More than a decade later, on the outskirts of a town in the neighbouring state of Bahia, Karapiru was seen by a farmer walking through the black ash of a burnt patch of forest, carrying a machete, arrows, and a chunk of smoked wild pig. When the solitude became too much, he would talk quietly to himself, or hum as he walked. At night, when howler monkeys called from the canopy, he slept high in the boughs of vast copaiba trees. He survived by eating honey and small birds such as parakeets, doves and red-bellied thrushes. He walked for nearly 400 miles across the forests and plains of Maranhao, crossing the sand dunes and rivers that flow into the Atlantic Ocean. And into this region of precious bio- and cultural diversity poured an army of ranchers, settlers and loggers, for there was a fortune to be made from the forest.įor 12 years, Karapiru was on the run, fleeing the invaders. At its heart was an open-air iron mine so big it could be seen from space. ![]() It was a mammoth agro-industrial complex, consisting of a dam, tarmac roads, aluminium smelters using timber from the forest, cattle ranches, and a 560-mile long railway that cut through the Awa's territory on its way to the coast. The Greater Carajas Programme was devastating for the environment and its indigenous peoples. Towards the end of the 1960s, geologists discovered that the world's richest reserves of iron ore lay under the soil, and the US, Japan, World Bank and EEC, as it was then, loaned billions of dollars to Brazil to finance the extraction, in return for exports of minerals. One of only two nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes left in Brazil, the Awa have long lived in this area, which lies between the equatorial forests of Amazonia and the drier savannas to the east. On the forested western edge of Maranhao state in north-east Brazil lives the Awa tribe. ![]()
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