Aboriginal Obstacles

One of the difficult problems that has long faced the Brazilian Government is how to deal justly with hostile Indians. Much of the richest land in the great interior State of Matto Grosso is inhabited by aboriginal isolationists. The Government wants the land settled; the aborigines do not. The Brazilian Army could easily wipe them out, but the Government's policy of race equality precludes violent methods.

The Indians themselves feel no such inhibitions. Most ferocious are the Chavantes, a tribe of husky, dark men who hold a fertile area directly in the path of projected settlement. They are marvelous shots with arrows, but -- for reasons believed to be connected with their religion -- they prefer to mash the heads of palefaces with heavy, triangular clubs. Airplanes apparently have no religious significance. When an airplane recently flew over a Chavante village, the Indians neatly riddled it with arrows.

They did not frighten off the Brazilian Government, which last week was still trying, by dropping manufactured goods from airplanes, to rouse in the Chavantes a yearning for civilization.

The Chavantes seem to have fathomed the plan. The first presents were bundles of bandana handkerchiefs dropped on one of their thatched villages. The Chavantes built large fires and ostentatiously burned the bandanas.

Inaudible Christians. South of the Chavantes live the Bororos. Nominal Christians, they work on the farms of the Catholic priests who converted them, but frequently disappear on week-long hunting trips. Their big game is Brazilians, whose skulls they mash in the classic Chavante manner, in hope of laying the blame on their pagan neighbors. Brazilian frontiers men fear them more than they do the Chavantes, and wish that they had never been converted to Christianity.

Except for this feral foible, the Bororos are quiet folk. Their hearing is abnormally acute, their language so low in pitch that it is difficult for a white man to hear them. They often sit on stumps at a considerable distance from one another and murmur softly. Apparently each Bororo is muttering to himself. Actually they are telling stories which are the primitive stuff of all humor. Sample: "Once upon a time the jaguar had a fight with the rabbit. The rabbit won!" Then all the Bororos burst out laughing.

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