Word: funai
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...scene: a Brazilian government outpost called Abunari Two, on the northern fringes of the Amazon Basin. There, recently, 27 Indians of the Waimiri and Atroari tribes emerged from the jungle. Ostensibly, they came to trade for food and medicine with Gilberto Pinto Figueiredo, an official of FUNAI, the government-run National Indian Foundation, but they were clearly angry about the building of new roads through their tribal lands. They came equipped with bows and arrows decorated with red macaw feathers, a symbol of war. Even after a supply of food and gifts arrived by plane, they remained dissatisfied and agitated...
...past three months, Brazilian Indians have killed twelve people in this and other assaults against representatives of FUNAI, an agency that was set up to protect the country's vanishing tribes. The attacks mark a desperate new stage in a struggle that began more than 300 years ago, when the Indians first resisted white men who were looking for gold, rubber and slaves in Brazil's vast interior. Just since the turn of this century, more than 96 tribes have disappeared in the face of white expansion; the country's Indian population, which may once have been...
...refuge for tribes like the Waimiri and Atroari. "The Indians resent the speed and aggressiveness with which the road is being built," says João Americo Peret, a Brazilian Indian expert. "But since they can't confront the road-building machines, they take it out on the FUNAI people...
...FUNAI has tried to pacify the Indians by moving them to new lands away from the construction, but the tribes' delicate social fabrics have often not survived. Last year, for example, the Kranhacarore Indians of Mato Grosso state were moved to a plot of land away from their ancestral area but still only a few miles from the new road. Within ten months, Indian men were begging on the construction sites. Eventually, the government had to transfer the demoralized Kranhacarore away from the construction sites to Mato Grosso's 13,750 sq.mi. Xingu National Park...
Although Brazil has four national parks and 17 reservations set aside for the Indians, the tribes' future is gloomy. Except for a few dedicated Indianists in FUNAI, Brazilians on the whole have never cared much for the Indians, viewing them as embarrassing and obstructive Stone Age remnants in an increasingly modern state. The Waimiris and Atroaris understand only too well that modern Brazil, with its population of 100 million, will encroach ever more rapidly on Indian land. They know too that the trans-Amazon highway threatens to be more devastating than any of the slave traders or gold miners...