![]() Reproduction is a collective, cumulative effort, and all of the men who sleep with her are the father of her child: plural paternity, the first I’ve ever heard of this. In fact, an Awá woman is not thought to get pregnant from one man-she has to have sex with several men, generally three. There seems to be a lot of flexibility in who sleeps with whom. But some of the men have several wives, so there’s polygyny too. And there being more men than women, some of the women have several husbands-polyandry, a rare marital arrangement, found most famously in Tibet. There is a lot of marriage between close kin here, there being no one else to marry. I think of all the speeches like this given by brave natives in the Americas over the last 500 years, who were trying to save their people and way of life and world but were unable to stop the inevitable, brutal advance of the conqueror and his “progress,” and how this is probably what is going to happen here, to this remnant tribe in its endgame. Two courageous Awá men, father and son, in their prime-there are not many others here in their demographic, nowhere near enough to take on the madeireiros, the loggers who are killing their trees and their animals and are now within a few miles of here, and the thousands of other invasores who have illegally settled on their land and converted a third of their forest to pasture. Then Iuwí gives an impassioned speech in Awá, which none of us understand, but his words have such conviction and pride they bring tears to my eyes. We don’t want anything from the whites but to live as we live and be who we are. We don’t want their money and their motorcycles. The Ka’apor and Guajajara”-neighboring tribes the Awá have testy relationships with-“are selling their wood to the whites. We have much courage, but we need you close to us. “We don’t succeed in living with chickens and cows. Piraí starts to speak in Portuguese, his voice full of gravitas and emotion. ![]() All these communications and interactions are going on that our contingent from the modern world is dead to. Our gathering, on one of the last islands of intact rain forest in the eastern Amazon, is taking place in the context of an entire eco-system. A rooster is prancing on the path for the benefit of a dozen hens and lesser males. Emaciated dogs, little brown bags of bones, are snoozing and rolling in the dust. He is listening to a bird in the nearby forest that is singing in triplets. Pirahá has a big smile, which I recognize is the smirk of someone with a sense of the absurd, who appreciates the delicious ironies, the constant outrageous surprises of existence, as people tend to do at the end of their lives. Their son Iuwí is to his right, and in the background is his father, Pirahá, who is also married to Iuwí’s sister, so Pirahá is both Iuwí’s grandfather and his brother-in-law. He sits on one of the benches behind the Brazilian National Indian Foundation’s post of Juriti, where I am staying, and his wife, Pakoyaí, in a skirt of finely woven tucum palm, sits next to him. They are carrying beautifully made longbows and arrows that come to their shoulders. Three of the men have yellow crowns of toucan feathers, red toucan-feather bracelets on their upper arms, and red toucan down dabbed on the tip of their foreskins, which are tied up with string. ![]() ![]() The welcoming committee comes down from the village. ![]()
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