The Vanishing Indian

In the velvet darkness the posse of 16 white men crouched noiselessly at the jungle's edge. Just beyond, in a clearing, glowed the campfires of their prey: a tiny band of Brazilian Indians whose men had clubbed to death, in a reprisal raid, a white rubber tapper who had killed one of their tribe. When the campfires ebbed and the Indians had settled into sleep, the posse struck--with shotguns, machetes and vicious dogs. No one was spared. In a few minutes, 22 men, 18 women and 12 children lay dead. The posse cut off three heads as trophies, and left as silently as they had come.

This recent slaughter was yet another grisly incident in a mortal struggle against cruelty and civilization that has been going on in Brazil for more than 400 years. Like the North American Indian before him, the Brazilian Indian's enemy is the white man--and the white man's ways. Throughout the country's vast and still largely untamed jungle, the Indian stands dangerously close to extinction. When Portuguese Sea Captain Pedro Cabral discovered Brazil in 1,500, the lush tropical land teemed with 3,000,000 Indians of some 2,500 tribes. Today its tribal Indian population is down to an estimated 78,000 and falling steadily every year.

"Like Cattle." The proud and handsome Caraja nation has dwindled in two centuries from 500,000 to 1,200, and its domain, which once stretched 870 miles from northern Mato Grosso to the sea, has shrunk to the shores of a jungle island. Of the Pau d'Arcos, some 3,000 strong at the beginning of the century, a lone survivor remains--an old woman wearing out her days as a stranger in another tribe. Many tribes, among them the Amoipiras and the Potiguaras, live only in the history books.

Brazil's history is studded with examples of unspeakable cruelty to the dark-skinned natives who lived there uncounted centuries before Cabral. Early Portuguese colonizers enslaved natives by the thousands to work the sugar plantations, butchered whole tribes as a warning to others. Jesuit missionaries, serving as the Indians' first "protectors," instead became their oppressors by herding them into new settlements so that their lands could be more easily confiscated. Dreaded mame-luko* raiders--crossbreeds of Portuguese and native blood--disguised as priests, swept down on the missions to carry off their congregations, sometimes killing the Jesuit fathers as well. "[The captives] were led away, chained and corded, like herds of cattle." wrote one missionary in a horrified letter home. "Suckling babes were torn from the bosoms of their mothers and cruelly dashed upon the ground. The aged and diseased were either cut down or shot." In 130 years of terror, the mamelukos are said to have killed (though such old statistics are suspect) 2,300.000.

Die If You Must. In the 19th century, the exploitation of rubber in the interior introduced another wave of slaughter. To punish one miscreant slave, one plantation owner forced him to watch while plantation hands took turns raping the Indian's wife, then had the man emasculated. After a visit to Brazil in 1900, Lord Bryce, famed British Ambassador to the U.S., wrote: "The methods employed in the collection of rubber surpass in horror anything hitherto reported to the civilized world during the last century. Flogging, torturing, burning and starving to death have been constantly and ruthlessly employed." Along with the white man came his diseases: in the native village of Meinaco, 177 Indians died after being exposed to a white man with an ordinary cold.

No real move was made to protect the Indian until 1910, when the government asked Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon. an army communications officer, to make peace with the tribes along a projected telegraph route through the jungle. Moved and angered by the Indians' tragic lot, Rondon established the Indian Protection Service, inspired his men to live up to the service's creed: "Die If You Must. But Never Kill." One of them, a Brazilian of German extraction named Harold Shult?, heroically applied this principle after a brave of the Xavante tribe, furious because Shultz had no gift for him, plunged a knife hilt-deep in Shultz's shoulder. Seriously wounded, Shultz made his way back to civilization, returned the following year, one arm hanging useless, to bestow a shiny new knife on his assailant. The shamed tribe made Shultz a member.

Such dedication helped Rondon, one of the most beloved Brazilians in history, to pacify 150,000 Indians through a network of 100 outposts, today linked by radio and airplane. But the continuing development of Brazil's interior has only aggravated the problem, as the advancing armies of road builders and jungle clearers encounter hitherto isolated tribes. And Rondon's successors--he died in 1958 at 92--are divided as to the problem's solution. Colonel Tasso Villar de Aquino, 49, who now heads the Indian Protection Service, thinks that the Indian must be integrated into the white man's society. In this cause, the government gives De Aquino little help: the service's current annual budget is a scanty $83,000.

Are We Less Human? Others, such as Orlando Villasboas. hold that the Indian mist be allowed to follow his own culture. Appointed director this month of he Mato Grosso Indian Reserve, an area he size of France in which dwell 38,000 Indians, Villasboas is convinced that the reservation approach is the only answer. 'The national park must be made to work," he says. "In Africa they guard animals that way. Are we less human here, that we can't look after our own Indians?"

So far, no one in Brazil has found a way. Murders and reprisal murders continue. While it is true that jungle tribes kill several hundred white men each year, it is also true that, in Brazil, no white man has ever been punished for killing an Indian.

*Named after Middle East slaves who became soldiers, converts to Islam, and brutal sultans before they were scattered and destroyed in 1811.

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