SM: Were these 'nomadic' peoples displaced from their home territories because of something going on there or were they . . .

FH: Yes, and they're still scouting around . . I have a l headress from one of these nomad Indians that'd been brought to the Indian post, with little pair of flowers hanging down... They were easily snared into 'civilization'; you just had to go on like they'll stay with you and then you give them manioc and they didn't have manioc, and manioc beer, mmm! ... and a decent thatched house instead of some kind of cheap shelter in which they usually do things; cooking pots, you could boil meat rather than just roasting it or sticking it on a stick over the fire - great advantage to be civilized. So the women stay around and after a time they like it. So much more beautiful!

They rub themselves all over with a bit of vetiver ... hmmm.. ...these guys talk about Guarani women like lower class English talking about the joys to be had in Boulogne or something, over the channel, French girls , wow!!! I never realized until I was there how much they were preoccupied by sexual topics- always something going about somebody fucking somebody who shouldn't be fucked...or the man who had such an enormous penis that he couldn't fuck anyone except his cousin- who was tired of being fucked by him because he was too big even for her... She could just about take it. One day she ran away and he came around shouting, "Shu-Yan! Shu-Yan! cousin! cousin! come with me into the woods I want to fuck you !". . . .he ran away into the jungle, got lost , and they heard him going hopelessly around shouting "Shu-Yan! Shu-Yan! I must fuck you - come on!"

SM: The Balinese are always telling ribald stories - the women too when they work in the rice fields.

FH: Every one is you know - I had by then French and Portuguese and Roman and English chroniclers of the Tupinanda Even so it came as a surprise to realize that they were just like us . If they were out hunting they'd take a rest. They'd often have their machetes with them or a large knife for hacking, for game and skinning it, and they'd come upon a fallen tree and they'd cut the image of a cunt on the bark - like that - it was diamond with a slit down the top half of the triangle. And I don't know why it's a diamond, it's a really interesting pattern -it's not like in paleolithic art just a triangle. It's a real diamond with a slit. And this top bit- I think it must be the image of the vagina, of the womb- the girls don't have any public hair. What they do is pluck it all out. They think it's actually shameful to have it-... Brazilian women give them a shudder- all hairy between their legs- disgusting!.

SM: Do those people adapt pretty well when they're swept into the modern Brazilian culture... in Manaus or wherever? What happens to them afterwards?

FH: It's pretty sad. I've met some tribes who.. well it depends on how long it takes for them to get used to Brazilians and how they get employed and what reward they get I imagine as much as anything. Because I met one tribe that had been saved from...well a road was going right through their territory and the moment you have a road through, then for a couple of miles on either side, forests are felled, plantations go in, and in two years the whole thing has come to an end and all the settlers population from Guyasse and Maragnon and Bara, are swarming down the road to find somewhere to set up and farm. Not even a farm, just somewhere to grow stuff. And this tribe had been in the way of this road and they were taken out by the Billas Boas (?) brothers who made it their business, and were walked to the enormous reservation on the Shingou river. But already they had been contacted - all their women had been debauched by lorry drivers quite willingly I think - the girls had gone out and got fucked, as well as syphilis and gonorrhea. And the men - looked awful- a lot of them had died from diseases of one kind or another. And all in a couple of years.

SM: From contact

FH: Yes, upon contact.

SM: Were the diseases smallpox and cholera that came from Europe?

FH: Yes and the flu sometimes. They died from the flu in quantities. They'd get the fever, go off to the stream to cool off and start shivering. Then sit in the blanket and just die from the shock and the cold.

SM: How long back did their oral history go? Do you have a rough idea of how many generations back their oral history contained? Were they very concerned about that?

FH: Well, they've lost their shamans.

SM: The shamans kept them...

FH: Well, I don't know. They'd lost their shamans. They'd lost quite a bit I guess. They still have their featherwork which is something - gorgeous stuff done in Brazil. I've got some. But they've lost their shamans so they used to go and learn about how to be a shaman from another related tribe, with a dialect similar to theirs, who kept it up in very good way, the Tende Indians- but they weren't successful; so it was a kind of - I mean they'd all really been so destitute, you might say. Trying to put it together again, but still . . . .

SM: I seem to remember that the Brazilians and Venezuelans together have made a huge reserve for the Yanomani Indians and possibly the others as well, I don't know.

FH: I was over there in 1972 on a commission from England to ah.. well that was one of the major things... and they kept on saying - yes they're going to do it, and then they'd take two steps backward and say, we can't do it because there's oil and minerals there and anyhow it's too big, and how about the fucking Venezuelans they won't do it, and we can't share a reservation with another country because that's against our ethos, ... I think at last they've got some kind of reservation but meanwhile those gold panners swarmed into Yanomani country. And so now they've got TV and everything else . . .

SM: You don't sound very optimistic that these Indians are going to survive much longer.

FH: Oh no.

SM: You don't think they will?

FH: I mean they'll survive - in sort of enclaves- for instance where the Catholic missionaries have taught them reading and writing and put them into hub housing and made them go to church and all.-it's better than what the Protestants do for them I must say. Very much better.

SM: Why, what do the Protestants do for them?

FH: Well the Protestants don't believe in . . .

SM: . . saving their souls?

FH: Oh yes very much. But individual souls, and not collective souls.

SM: Right, interesting...

FH: So I always preferred going with Catholics , even though I didn't like what had to happen, it did seem to be a much saner method. But even they weren't very good with those ones- there was one mission who had set up a credit union, a cooperative, so the Indians would come with their rubber and their palm nuts and their hides and pelts and whatever and the fathers would go off and sell these in town and get supplies for them. It's very hard I think being whitey under the circumstances because they didn't really have chiefs you see. There's no one you can sort of get hold of to say - it'd be a very good idea if all you guys would do this that or the other and see to it. There's no one to do that because the chief isn't back there. The chief is somebody who puts himself out for other people. He organizes things and he gives. He doesn't receive. He's always working twice as hard as anybody else. he usually has two or three wives to keep going and sons-in-laws to keep the whole concern going just to make enough money, as it were, to be Chief. But he can't tell anyone what to do. But when there is something to be done then he, shall we say, facilitates. Then he does what he can to make it happen. And if you don't have that kind of organization, which Amazonian Indians as a whole, when whitey came around, did not have at all, they didn't have a chief of that kind, then it's very difficult for these people to meet up with the market society -'chief' societies. Chiefs and leaders.

SM: So you don't think that the establishing of this reserve will lead some of the indigenous peoples whose communities are still healthy towards a revitalization of their cultures? I mean are these people going to back to their reserve and recreate a pure way of life like they had before?

FH: No of course they can't. They're much too fond of trade goods. Now the Yanomani for instance - look towards the Franciscans there - I think they were Franciscans - who had decided just to help out, not to convert, just to be there and to help out and they brought trade goods with them. You give a machete to a man, as a friendship or in exchange for something else. Five days later somebody else has got hold of this machete. He's looked at it and he says . . gYTFGU!!. . . I want it! Okay so you have it! And so he goes off with it. Five days later somebody says to him, GRAJAKASA!!.. . so he gives it away. So these things travel enormous distances throughout the tribe with everyone wanting it. It's like The Gods Must Be Crazy. And now they can't do without it. I think the most hopeful sign are maybe the Andean Indians- the lowland, foothill Indians are the ones because - especially the Ayahuascero guys because now they're making federations of different tribes. They understand they can't do it on their own as one small tribe. So they have a federated alliance; also some of the Ayapo!- oh, tough guys they are! They also are learning how to federate, so you're now getting federations; and if the Yanomani could start federating and not go on with the old ways.... but you can't keep them out of it. They want it. They want us too much, even though they distrust us.

I remember once I took a little razor, a Gilette razor with double edged blades and I'd used the same razor - every three or four days I'd shave off my stubbles - and I keep a blade going for quite a time you know. About a month or so because I hadn't brought too many with me. So I'd finished one that I didn't want anymore - I was about to throw it away. 'You throw that away?' 'Yeah, it's blunt.' 'Give it to me!' 'But it's blunt! ' Never mind blunt. To him it was wonderful. He took it and just with this blade he very carefully cut each hair off. He didn't have many, it was just a few. With this blade. And then, tin cans or something - I only had three or four of them, but when I had one and I emptied it, it was immediately taken off as the most useful 'calabash' - container- ever. And they loved the metal cooking pots which I had brought. Much better than clay ones.

SM: When you think about it, for thousands of years it would have been a big event if a tribe ran into a neighboring group who had some new utensil or some new great tool; and then all of a sudden they meet these people who have a cornucopia, an unending cornucopia of trippy things.

FH: I once ran out of things to give and I was told, "But we want them!" 'But look- nothing left.' "It's okay - we know you've got nothing left now, but we know also how you get them in the first place. You go into a house where there's actual walls" - a lot of them don't have walls at all - "and you point in the corner - and you say- machetes - and there are machetes - needles and threads - hammocks - tobacco - you just point and there it all is." What is one to say!

SM: Like a magic house.

FH: A magic house - you just point and - because it's inexplicable! You know, if they would ask - "So how do you make this?" "Well you blokes have to go and dig some metal out -" "What's metal ?" "You haven't got any here so I can't show you." " Well, tell me." " Well you have a kind a stone you know and you have to heat it up in the fire, but really hard, you have to have bellows - "What do you mean bellows? "Well you know how you heat- phoo-phoo, you heat with your mouth but these are things made of wood and whoosh!- you get the real temperature up and the steel melts and." "Come on - and then what?" "Oh then you make Spooja with it. "How?" " Well sort of make it, beat it with a hammer, or you could cast it" " - What do you mean cast it?" " Well, a flat stove with a big little thing in it and you fill it up with metal" " - Oh come on. And how do you make -?"

So it might as well be magic. I had a typewriter - how could I explain how you make a typewriter? Or a book. Moby Dick. Is it talking? Yeah, it talks - I was reading Moby Dick and I was really pissed off about everything - and wanted to have a little private time. There was always somebody hanging around making me feel guilty that I wasn't taking part in life. Ridiculous. What are you doing? Does it speak to you this? Yes, it speaks to me. How? What? Look, ah .. . 'and their next possession the Bengals marched with go-ahead field goal -' that sort of thing. 'How does it say that?' So they would sort of look at me in awe, amazement, twenty minutes and then sort of fade away . .

SM: because they couldn't figure it out.

FH: And I felt so guilty I'd hardly read anything because it made me feel so bad, so impolite. I think they were really happy to see me, because there was - just because I was always interested in what was happening and their questions.

SM: They appreciated that a lot.

FH: I think they did a great deal and certainly Tdak! appreciated that very much. He loved telling stories and people didn't ask him very often.

SM: Cause he told such a long story ?

FH: No, I don't know why . I mean there wasn't any sort of set pattern to do that. Something had to come up and then it happened I suppose.

SM: Were these people aware that their culture was disintegrating at that time or were they . . .

FH: They were half aware, they knew they'd shrunk dreadfully . . . .I think when they were discovered there must have been over 2000, 3000. when I visited there they were about 1000. Twenty years later I don't know the number. There was once in the next village an epidemic of the flu and there people dying off left, right, and center and I wanted to go and help and they said - Don't do it, you'll bring it back. But I actually went to the outskirts and left bottles of aspirin. So they knew that Brazilian life was not accomodating in that way - it made it difficult for them.

On the Net: Suicide Thins a Dying Tribe

Part 3: Lourival

Part 1