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People of the Rainforest: The Villas Boas Brothers, Explorers and Humanitarians of the Amazon

2021; Duke University Press; Volume: 101; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-8897919

1527-1900

Seth Garfield,

Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management

In 1961, the Brazilian government ratified the creation of the Xingu National Park, an area of roughly 22,000 square kilometers in the central-western state of Mato Grosso. The expansive federal territory, later renamed the Xingu Indigenous Park, was then home to some one dozen different Indigenous groups. At the time, the park was a historical anomaly. Most Indigenous territories in 1960s Brazil were not officially recognized. Those reserved were undersized, reflecting policymakers' repudiation of Indigenous autonomy and noncapitalist forms of land use. Yet despite or, more accurately, because of the conceits of Brazilian developmentalism, an extensive park devoted to Indigenous and environmental protection emerged in the name of national patrimony, scientific advancement, and defense of Native peoples' constitutional rights. The Xingu Indigenous Park clearly testifies to the cultural resilience of Brazil's Indigenous populations and the progressivism of non-Indigenous allies. Among these advocates, the Villas Boas brothers—Orlando, Claudio, and Leonardo—are the most renowned in Brazil, thanks to their media presence, multiple honors and publications, and even feature-film renditions. Their inspirational story, and that of the park, have long deserved an English-language monograph. Readers now have a masterful chronicler in John Hemming, who brings to bear his vast knowledge as historian and ethnographer of Brazil's Native peoples, Amazonian explorer, Indigenous rights activist, and personal acquaintance of the book's protagonists.In 1943, the three Villas Boas brothers traded in their São Paulo desk jobs for the thrill of joining the Roncador-Xingu Expedition, spearhead of President Getúlio Vargas's project to colonize Brazil's western frontier. With the expedition's northwestern trek traversing dense forests and hostile Indigenous territories, its commander insisted on recruiting only rugged backwoodsmen. After a failed first bid to join, the siblings, feigning illiteracy, were signed up and later assigned to lead the vanguard to the Xingu. In vivid detail, accentuated through personal recollections of Amazonian exploration, Hemming conveys the arduousness of trail cutting and survival in the bush. Sixteen months later, the expedition reached one of the Xingu's dozen headwaters.The historic isolation of Native populations on the upper Xingu from the non-Indigenous owed to the river watersheds' relative impenetrability prior to the aeronautical age—although German ethnologist Karl von den Steinen had gained overland access via the Bakairi trail in the 1880s, followed by anthropologists over subsequent decades. The relative paucity of commercial forest goods likewise deterred interlopers. Aeronautics, industrialization, and a centralized state were game changers. Through the strategic courting of the media, the backing of civilian and military influentials, and alliance with high-profile scientists, Orlando and Claudio Villas Boas secured the Xingu National Park's establishment. Though significantly reduced in size by the time of homologation, the park would buffer this luxuriant region and its multiethnic Indigenous communities from the ravages of frontier development. Over more than two decades, the Villas Boas brothers, working with Indigenous partners, led missions to contact and reconcile with upriver belligerents, such as the Juruna and Metuktire (Kayapó), and to encourage hostile or scattered groups, such as the Kaiabi, Suiá, and Ikpeng, to resettle near the government post or, later, within the park. An air force base and post airstrips supplied Xinguanos with basic goods and medical services. Restricted access by outsiders modulated Western society's impact on kin-based aboriginal cultures.This precocious experiment in sustainable development—decried by regional elites as a federal land grab or Indigenous menagerie and by revisionist scholars as a geopolitical tack—witnessed highs and lows. Epidemics decimated the Kalapalo, Waurá, Kaiabi, Kamaiurá, and other communities. The Brazilian government relocated Panará, Ikpeng, and Tapayuna refugees to the park rather than reining in the development plans that victimized them. Military-era road construction bisected the park's northern portion, excising a large forested swath home to the Metuktire. Politicians with checkered pasts touted the protection of Indigenous cultures and their “pristine” environment as evidence of good governance. And the exclusion of the Xingu River's headwaters and tributaries from the protected area has exposed its waters to contamination by encroaching agribusinesses. Yet, as Hemming argues, the Xingu Park, whose Indigenous posts were administered by the Villas Boas brothers until the mid-1970s, enabled a gradual, controlled process of social integration. The Indigenous held fast to communal practices and ethnic pride while acquiring Western technical skills. Since 1984, the park's directors have been Indigenous. Moreover, the Xingu Park served as a template for the larger Indigenous parks established in Brazil since the return to democracy, with Indigenous reserves now accounting for some 12 percent of national territory.Hemming's account progresses chronologically from the 1940s through the 2010s. Key moments in the Villas Boas brothers' biographies—including Leonardo's untimely death in 1961 and Orlando and Claudio's retirement and withdrawal from the park in 1976—pepper the story. However, it is the Xingu's intricate cultural ecology, ethnohistory, and political dimensions that the book captures in particularly vibrant hues. Hemming's elegant descriptions of Xinguanos' agroecology, material culture, cosmological beliefs, and social rituals are paeans to biocultural diversity. How the idyll of the Xingu may distort dominant society's notions of what Indians in Brazil should resemble or where they should reside is a point the author does not fully address. But for Brazil's Indigenous, whose communities remain besieged and environments degraded, the story of the Villas Boas brothers and the Xingu Indigenous Park suggests the possibilities of radical experiments in hope.