Kayapos

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Kayapos

LOCATION: Brazil (Amazon rainforest)
POPULATION: A few thousand
LANGUAGE: Kayapo
RELIGION: Traditional indigenous beliefs

INTRODUCTION

The Kayapos are part of the South American Amerindian peoples who speak languages of the Macro-Ge group. The Ge peoples inhabit the east of Brazil and the north of Paraguay and consist of a wide range of different tribes located in different geographic zones. The Northwestern. Ge tribes include the Timbira, Northern and Southern Kayapo, and Suya. The central Ge peoples divide themselves into Xavante, Xerente, and Akroa, while the Southern Ge, or Kaingang, include the Coroado and others. The Ge community, as whole, probably does not exceed 10,000 human beings.

The Kayapos are one of the main Ge tribes that remain in the Amazon basin in Brazil. There are several theories about the origins of the various South American Indian groups, and it is thought that they may have migrated thousands of years ago from Central Asia, crossing into North America and making their way southwards. There are others who believe that this may be true for some but not all Amerindian groups. The Kayapos resisted assimilation and were known traditionally as fierce warriors, raiding enemy tribes and sometimes fighting among themselves.

Their first steady contact with Europeans did not occur until the 20th century, in the 1950s. Since then, because of contact with squatters, loggers, miners, and eventually Brazilian government officials, the Kayapos evolved some new customs and have had to struggle to maintain their way of life. Logging and mining, particularly for gold, as well as some agricultural activities and cattle-ranching in cleared-out sections of the jungle have posed threats to the Kayapos' traditional way of life. Increasing destruction of the rain forest, as well as river pollution caused by chemicals used in gold-mining activities, threatens the delicate balance between humans, plants, and animals successfully maintained for thousands of years by Amazon Indians, such as the Kayapos.

LOCATION AND HOMELAND

When the Portuguese conquerors first arrived in Brazil, there were about 5 million Amerindians, but today there are only about 200,000, of which a few thousand are Kayapos, living along the Xingu River in the eastern part of the Amazon rain-forest, in several scattered villages. Their lands consist of tropical rain forest and savanna. The Amazon basin, which includes the Amazon River and its tributaries, such as the Xingu, is sometimes referred to as Amazonia and includes parts of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. In Brazil it covers about 7.8 million sq km (3 million sq mi).

LANGUAGE

The language spoken by the Kayapos belongs to the Ge linguistic family and, as a result of diverse splits within Kayapo groups, many dialects have emerged. However, all these particular dialects lead to the recognition of a common root that makes them part of a same culture. The Kayapos, for whom oratory is a highly-valued social practice, define themselves as those who speak well in opposition to all the groups who do not speak their language.

The great diversity of Amerindian languages is also partly due to the lifestyle of peoples sometimes living at considerable distances from each other, in this way developing distinct mythologies, religious customs, and languages. Even quite small groups, such as the Kayapos, are divided into smaller tribes with their own chiefs, although they all speak the Kayapo language. Thanks to some work by anthropologists and travelers (including several visits to the Kayapos by the pop star Sting, who made their struggles known to a wider world), the names of several Kayapo chiefs are known. One of these is Raoni, who left his Amazon homeland for a time and traveled widely with Sting. Another Kayapo who traveled with him was the panther-hunter N'goire. Sting also met a powerful medicine-man called Tacuma.

FOLKLORE

There is an interesting legend among the Kayapos who live along a lagoon. They say that if one rises at dawn and looks across the lagoon, one can see the ghost of a White man on horseback galloping along the shore. The strange thing about the description of this ghostly rider is that he is said to wear a full suit of armor, rather like a European knight, or perhaps a Portuguese conqueror.

The Kayapos believe their ancestors learned how to live communally from social insects, such as bees. This is why mothers and children paint each other's bodies with patterns that look like animal markings, including those of bees.

The flamboyant Kayapo headdress with feathers radiating outward represents the universe. Its shaft is a symbol for the cotton rope by which the first Kayapo, it is said, descended from the sky. Kayapo fields and villages are built in a circle to reflect the Kayapo belief in a round universe.

RELIGION

As opposed to the beliefs that some missionaries have brought to the Amazon, including the idea that after death people either descend into Hell or rise up to Heaven, the Kayapos believe that at death a person goes to the village of the dead, where people sleep during the day and hunt at night. There, old people become younger and children become older. In that village in the afterlife, Kayapos believe they have their own traditional assembly building. Kayapo women, it is thought, are permitted only short visits to deliver food to their male relatives.

The Kayapos share certain general beliefs about the universe and practice similar forms of magic with the Ge peoples. Although there are many specific differences, it is possible to assess that the major deities for these tribes are the sun and the moon. Kayapos, as the rest of the Ge peoples, have shamans to cure sickness.

MAJOR HOLIDAYS

Special days for the Kayapos revolve around the seasons, which in the Amazon are the dry season and the rainy season. Kayapo holidays are also linked to their ceremonies, such as the initiation rites held when a boy reaches puberty or when he receives, as a small boy, his special ancestral name. The important dry-season celebration called Bemp (after a local fish) also includes marriage rites as well as initiation and naming ceremonies. Kayapos do not divide their time into secular and religious occasions: all events are linked in unifying ways, and the religious, natural, social, and festive elements are interconnected.

RITES OF PASSAGE

When children are born, the marriage ties between a husband and wife are formalized. A man may have two or three wives. Young children receive special ancestral names in ceremonies that are regarded as an important means of helping the child develop social ties and his or her identity as a Kayapo. The naming ceremonies are held in each dry or rainy season, along with other rites that include special dances or ceremonies related to the crops the Kayapos grow.

INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS

The Kayapos have a traditionally hospitable way of greeting visitors to their homes. Food will be prepared by the women, and a bed made of bamboo will be laid out for a guest. On occasions body paint will be worn (usually geometric designs in black or red paint), and adornments, such as shell earrings or brightly colored feathers, are worn to decorate the head.

Ceremonial life is very important and continues year-round. Kayapos are often in the midst of a ceremony or making preparations for the next one.

LIVING CONDITIONS

The Kayapos live in thatched-roof huts that have an open plan without room divisions inside. The thatch for the roofs is made of palm leaves. The huts are quite roomy and large enough for an entire family. Instead of using mattresses, the bedding usually consists of hammocks, which are much cooler and more comfortable in a jungle environment.

Health protection in the jungle areas where the Kayapos live is achieved through the use of roots and herbs that have medicinal qualities, some of which have been known to the Kayapos for a long time. The Kayapos also have their medicine-men, whom White people sometimes call witch-doctors.

The Kayapos use canoes to travel long distances in the Amazon. They can also trek for days or weeks at a time. In recent years, road tracks and an airstrip have been built leading out of the Xingu River reservation where they live.

FAMILY LIFE

The Kayapos social organization is unique among South American Amerindians in its complexity. Every village is divided into moieties (dual groupings), clans, and associations according to age, sex, and occupation. These are found in various forms and combinations in different places. Participation between these clans takes place in almost all aspects of life such as games, ceremonies, warfare, settlement patterns, marriage, and handicrafts. What makes so peculiar this organization structure is the fact that every relationship is unique since it is governed by the individual's relationships among clans or tribes.

CLOTHING

Traditionally men cover their lower abdomen with sheaths. The most striking ornamental addition to their attire is a light wooden lip disk that is about 6 cm (2.4 in) in diameter and stretches their lower lip out to produce the Kayapos' extraordinary and very distinctive appearance. A small incision is made and a disk inserted and as time goes on, the disks are replaced with progressively larger ones. The lip plug symbolizes assertiveness among the Kayapos. Another characteristic device used by this tribe is the ear plug, which symbolize receptivity to others. Aggressiveness will be signaled by not wearing large ear plugs, meaning that they do not listen to others. The use of the lip disk is dying out among the younger men, who find it uncomfortable.

Modern, younger men often wear Western-style shorts. This is due to increasing contact with more-Westernized Brazilians who have come to the Amazon to clear the forest in logging activities, farming, and gold-mining.

A Kayapo chief wears many hats, with ceremonial feathers as part of his headdress. A headdress made out of bright golden-yellow feathers can look like the rays of the sun: a brilliant crown circling the head. Particular family links are indicated by the use of matching parrot feathers. The feathers signify initiation into adulthood. Other ornaments include beads, cotton bands, or shells, which women also wear.

Girls and boys wear colored cloth bands of various colors, such as blue, yellow, or orange, which are tied and sometimes knotted below the waist. Sometimes these colored bands of cloth are also worn crisscrossed across the chest. They also wear ornaments such as beaded necklaces made up of many strands, and wristbands, as well as armbands worn high up towards the shoulder. Occasionally, boys also wear knee bands just below the knee. Young Kayapos are usually barefoot, but with greater contact with White settlers some Kayapo chiefs occasionally wear Western-style thonged rubber sandals.

Body paint is an important addition for men and women as well as for children, but it is not a casual form of make-up. The specific markings and occasions for wearing it are linked to particular rituals and activities.

FOOD

Fish is a main source of protein in the Kayapos' diet. Wild fruits and Brazil nuts are eaten. Vegetables are harvested, and animals, such as the coati, the monkey, and the turtle, are hunted. Some of these animals are eaten more often during festivals. Kayapos are skilled hunters who use blowguns and darts dipped in a type of poison called curare, which instantly paralyzes an animal. Because of greater contact with White society, Kayapos are changing their diet and can now purchase rice, beans, cookies, sugar, and milk from village stores that have cropped up in various parts of the Amazon to supply loggers, miners, and farmers. Supplies are usually flown in to frontier towns that are not far from the Xingu Reservation where the Kayapos live.

EDUCATION

Most Kayapos have continued to teach their young people the skills necessary to survive in the jungle environment, especially hunting and fishing, as well as the art of trekking, and the making of canoes and the skill to use them. Growing vegetables, beading, and body paint preparations, as well as cooking, are skills Kayapo girls are expected to know. In some cases missionaries arriving in the Xingu River area have attempted to offer a more Western-style education, including reading and writing, but many Kayapos have been extremely wary of accepting this type of schooling out of fear that their children will be lost to them and will forget traditional skills.

More recently at a meeting post in a protected area of the Xingu Reservation known as Leonardo (named after a famous Brazilian anthropologist, Leonardo Villas-Boas, who together with his brother tried to help many Amazon Indians), a school has been set up to teach children from various tribes. They learn reading, writing, and arithmetic and receive information about the ways of White people.

CULTURAL HERITAGE

Completing a full cycle of festivals is essential to Kayapo culture. Singing, chanting, and dancing are an important part of Kayapo life. The men and women also sing as they go out on a hunt or work the land. They use a type of rattle, or maraca, and sticks to beat rhythms.

WORK

Gold-mining, an activity in which many Kayapos were pressured into taking part when the gold rush began in the Amazon, is hard and often dangerous work. The mercury used in mining pollutes the rivers. The Kayapos are organized into family groups with chiefs who have come together to defend their interests and to find ways of confronting the problems posed not only by mining, but also by the arrival of people who do not appreciate the delicate ecological balance of the Amazon region, which the Kayapos and other tribes have helped maintain during hundreds or perhaps even thousands of years.

The Kayapo chiefs arrive at decisions through a process of consensus and are helping to direct their people in a variety of activities that include harvesting nuts, fruits, and vegetables, as well as the construction of modern housing units for recently arrived settlers. This newer source of work means that the Kayapos no longer restrict themselves to traditional hunting and fishing and, because they now earn some money for their work, they can purchase goods they did not have before.

Some Kayapos have begun to have more contact with White people, but the modern way of life still can seem very bizarre to them. The English pop star Sting, and the French photographer and filmmaker Jean-Pierre Dutilleux, who made so many people aware of threats to the Amazon ecology and the difficulties of the Amerindians in that area, recount in their lively and sympathetic book, Jungle Stories: The Fight for the Amazon, that when Raoni, a Kayapo chief, first left his Amazon homeland to visit a Brazilian city during his long struggles to protect his people's way of life, he was amazed at the level of fear and anxiety in the city. He was also appalled to see people who had no food to eat forcing themselves to ask for money while others simply passed them by and ignored them. He concluded that money is bad and worried about the Kayapos being drawn into a cash economy.

SPORTS

Traditionally, the Kayapos did not develop sporting skills separately from skills that were useful for work. Hunting, fishing, and trekking, for example, have now become sporting activities in White society, but in Kayapo society they are vital to the survival of the people, even though aspects of these activities are also enjoyed in their own right by the Kayapos. Some may obtain great pleasure from teaching the younger members of the tribe the early steps necessary to master these skills, while acquiring prowess in any or all of them is a source of pride.

One activity that Kayapo children enjoy is swimming along the shores of the beautiful and clear waters of the Xingu River, which at least until recently was completely unpolluted from its headwaters right up to the area where it joins the Amazon river. Some villagers who have had more contact with White people have learned to play soccer.

ENTERTAINMENT AND RECREATION

Storytelling is a significant aspect of Kayapo life and a means of transmitting Kayapo legends and history, as well as a way of preserving the identity of a people. It is also a form of entertainment. Mostly, however, it forms part of the rituals that give structure and meaning to the life of the Kayapos, interwoven with dance rituals and ceremonies that follow a definite cycle, linked to nature and to the changing seasons, throughout the year.

FOLK ART, CRAFTS, AND HOBBIES

Kayapos make beautiful beaded necklaces. Some of them are a brilliant blue or yellow. They also make bracelets and earrings using shells or stones, and headdresses made from the brightly colored feathers of various Amazon birds. The Kayapos are skilled in preparing and applying intricate designs as body paint. They weave sturdy and flexible hammocks and make their own canoes, as well as fishing and hunting implements such as spears, clubs, blow guns, arrows, and darts.

SOCIAL PROBLEMS

Many activities in the Amazon threaten a way of life the Kayapos want to preserve. Poverty, together with a population explosion and an unequal system of land ownership in countries such as Brazil, has driven many people into the Amazon region in search of land. People use slash-and-burn agricultural methods that are unsuitable when the population density rises, because the forest cannot recover. Although the Kayapos and other Amerindian peoples of the Amazon have practiced this method of agriculture successfully for thousands of years, their numbers have been sufficiently small to allow them to move on to other areas of the rainforest, allowing regrowth of the forest to occur in the patches of fallow land. Now deforestation of the Amazon is occurring at a rapid rate. Some of this destruction is accelerated by the activities of cattle-ranchers who have also come into the Amazon. Beef is supplied in this way largely to fast-food chains in the United States. Land that is over-grazed by cattle quickly becomes completely barren.

Commercial loggers have also contributed to the destruction of the Amazon rainforest by providing tropical hardwood for construction in Japan, Western Europe, and the United States. It is also used in paper products. But, the level of demand is unsustainable. To keep logging at a level that would not permanently destroy large areas of the rainforest, demand would have to drop sharply and protective regulations would have to be enforced. Recently, efforts have been made to slow some demand and to find alternatives to tropical hardwoods in construction. The destruction of so many trees contributes to carbon dioxide pollution in the atmosphere and, therefore, to global warming.

A third threat to the sustainable way of life of the Kayapos and other tribes of the Amazon is mining. Parts of the Amazon are rich in iron ore and gold. The smelting furnaces need charcoal, and much of it is taken from irreplaceable virgin forest. The gold rush in the Amazon has created many problems for the Kayapos. Frontier mining towns exist close to areas where the Kayapos and other tribes live. Amerindian groups have been affected by diseases to which they had never been exposed before. Mercury, used in extracting gold from the mud of the rivers, is a pollutant, resulting in mercury poisoning that affects Amerindian communities downstream from these mining activities. It is estimated that in 1988, 12% of the mercury released into the atmosphere was due to Amazon gold-mining.

Some Amerindian groups, including the Kayapos, have been attacked and murdered in the search for land. Others have had their land forcibly taken away, and they have had to work for very low wages in miserable conditions in some of the frontier towns. On occasion the Kayapos have attacked those they see as intruders. The delicate balance between plants, animals, and humans has already been severely upset, and the way of life of the Kayapos has been disrupted in areas they used to inhabit. The Kayapos and other Amerindians want to ensure that the Xingu area remains protected, with the support of world opinion and the Brazilian government, and does not become the target of activities that would permanently destroy their beautiful jungle habitat.

One of their most dramatic successes was the Kayapo opposition to the Brazilian government's plan to build a series of hydroelectric dams on the Xingú River with funding from the World Bank. For that occasion around 600 Kayapo Indians in addition to more than 40 other Indigenous nations of Amazonia, gathered along with over 400 representatives of the Brazilian government and world news media and diverse nongovernmental organizations. The government and the World Bank had been reluctant to accept the Kayapo invitation to attend the Altamira's manifestations. When it became clear that hundreds of national and international journalists, filmmakers, and opinion leaders would attend the gathering, Brazilian authorities agreed to send an official representative. One of the famous artists who supported the protest against the construction of the hydroelectric complex was the rock star Sting, who made a brief appearance at the demonstration. As a result of all the international and local pressure, the World Bank denied the request for a loan that was to be used to build the dam.

GENDER ISSUES

Even though every village is autonomous and governed by prominent male secular leaders, auxiliary women's groupings also exist, consisting of wives of associated men's organizations, with the wife of the male chief serving as female chief. The visibility of this role is low and appears more as a conceptual counterpart to men's activity and organization rather than a public leadership role. Nevertheless, without a respected wife who exercises her own influence over female public opinion, a man is considered unqualified to lead.

The Kayapo division of labor splits down a strict gender based function. Men do all the work that does not require attending to children, such as hunting, fishing, farming, and construction. Kayapo women, on the other hand, are solely responsible for raising children. They perform other tasks, such as maintaining gardens or managing domestic animals, but only if that task allows them to attend to the needs of children.

Marriage is monogamous and divorce is common, although lifelong spouses are also common and may become extraordinary close emotionally. Sexually active females traditionally shave the crown of their head. Male assertions of superiority to women, when they occur, refer to socially developed qualities, such as greater propriety and self-restraint, rather than to natural endowments of manhood. As in other Amazonian societies, women do not necessarily acknowledge male superiority, and conflicts between men and women as groups are considered to be normal. Characteristics such as intelligence are appreciated equally in males and females. Both males and females acquire specialized knowledge in the use of medicinal plants and both may become shamans.