9. The indigenous issue

In the enormous municipality of Tapaua live various ethnic indigenous, to whom the Church has attended to with itinerary teams of volunteers and professionals from the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI). On occasions this attention has been done from Labrea, although in the parish there are qualified people from CIMI. One of the Female Missionaries of the Oblates of the Assumption has traditionally been dedicated to this area of work.

The first meetings between Recollects and the indigenous were rather timid, and restricted to the desobrigas. In these beginning there was a different way of “addressing” the indigenous question, depending on the origin of the religious (Brazilians or foreigners), and the awareness at that time.

For centuries the indigenous in Brazil were considered to be people who were lazy, ignorant, with a tendency to violence, alcoholism and “uncivilized”. Neither the people in Tapaua nor the first religious were exempt from these prejudices, and episodes of violence from and with the indigenous were not lacking either.

The indigenous world was, on the other hand, one of the goals of the foreign Evangelicals. With financial help from the Linguistic Society and the multi-confessional evangelical organization, they implicated themselves into living with these peoples even when there were no protection laws or territorial borders. Their objective was to normalize their languages, and give them an appropriate translation of the Bible.

From 1970 onwards, there was an awareness of the preservation of the language, culture and indigenous lands as an important treasure and not as remains of an uncivilized past. The new laws ousted the evangelicals from the indigenous villages, and the Catholic Church organized meetings on the defence of human rights and territorial limits.

The indigenous assembly, on the 30^th of July 1977 in the Apurinã village of Tauamirim, was an important date in this ecclesial task. For the first time they designed an attention plan for health, education, and the marking of territory limits as this was the only way for these ethnic groups to survive. The CIMI sent volunteers from this year on to the Prelature.

The 80’s were years of fire, iron and blood in the Brazilian Amazon for economic interests in the indigenous lands. In 1983, the first General Assembly of the Prelature, the indigenous question was one of the four priorities. At this time was the assassination in Labrea (28/4/1985) of Sister Cleusa Carolina Rhody Coelho, female Augustinian Recollect Missionary. She was martyred for her work for peace amongst the indigenous and non-indigenous, and today is in the process of being beatified.

On the 13^th of November 1989 they created a specific pastoral team for working with the indigenous, focusing on the specialized attention to some ethnic groups. Amongst their assignments was the exclusive pastoral and social attention to the indigenous. This meant that Saint Rita’s parish would then carry out less frequent visits, and become centred on the Catholic villages for reason of the local saints’ feast days.

In the decade 1990-1999, there continued to be assemblies for the indigenous peoples. The Prelature proceeded in 1994 to register in the notary’s office the villages on the Tapaua and Cunhuã Rivers, and start the process for the later marking out of these territories by the Federal Government.

Another point for reflection was the meeting between the people of the Amazon from the 18^th to the 20^th of July 2005, and again from the 11^th to the 13^th of November. Until then, the inhabitants of the rural zone had been separated into indigenous and ribeirinhos (river people), with their sometimes quite violent clashes. With the new century, they understood that they had a lot in common in terms of educational and health needs and the organization of their lands.

With each one of the ethnic groups in Tapaua there has been different ways of relating to others, and a concrete history.

A. The Apurinã People

When they established the municipal of Tapaua, within its limits were left two well-known Apurinã villages: that of São João and that of Foz de Tapaua; very close to the then majority non-indigenous population. São João maintained a continuous and cordial relationship with the few families that lived in Foz de Ipixuna, the future city of Tapaua.

In March 1963, the evangelical Wilbur Pickering started to live with the Apurinã from São João. Accepted in the village, he helped the indigenous to trade with their products of mandioca, yam, sweet potato and green maize. The new local government helped him in healthcare and agricultural production.

The case of the Apurinã village of Foz de Tapaua was very different. It had existed for less time, and they came from the high Purus with almost no relation with the non-indigenous population. They became the main characters of a history of terror and death. In 1962 an epidemic of measles led to several deaths in the indigenous village. A shaman, hired by them to end the illness, blamed a non-indigenous trader of cursing the village. Some sources say that the accusation was to justify the shaman’s failure against the illness; others that he was ordered and paid by another rival, non-indigenous trader.

The Apurinãs, acting according to the ancestral cult, killed eight people from the blamed trader’s family and set fire to his house. He was saved from death for not being at that moment in the place, but various members of his family and workers were not. A week later, the Augustinian Recollects Saturnino Fernandez and Victório Henrique Cestaro, arrived to do the funeral for the victims. The military police detained the shaman, and another twenty-two indigenous who had participated in the crime. According to some sources, the police killed three Apurinãs who tried to escape. The Lieutenant in charge of the prisons who took the detained to Manaus also passed away a few days later, from malaria which he caught during the operation.

In April 1963, the indigenous were freed after a habeas corpus invoked by the Service for the Protection of Indians (SPI), who took them to Tapaua provoking fear amongst the population. The religious received them “as part of our ministry of peace and forgiveness”, as they wrote. Some believed that it was an invitation “so that they would stay in the city”, and ignite tensions.

The SPI decided to move the accused to the village of São João, to remove them from the place of the crime. Beforehand, they took them back to their village to retrieve their families. Meanwhile, the people of Tapaua debated the issue and refused to let the Indians live so near. When thirty-one Apurinãs with their families (more than one hundred people), arrived by boat to Tapaua on Holy Thursday 1965 a group of armed men stopped them from disembarking.

The Recollect Victório Henrique Cestaro helped in the negotiation, and finally they disembarked in Tauamirim a few hours away by boat, where a new village was created. Since then there have been no more armed conflicts, and they have marked off the territories of both villages.

B. The Juma People

In February 1964 a trader sent an expedition to the small river of Onça, a tributary of Itaparanã, in order to take out serba (some small, red pears). Everyone knew that they could run into the Juma, for in previous years there had been stories of tense encounters. A month later, there started to arrive unconfirmed rumours that there had been a huge massacre of the Jumas.

Wilbur Pickering, the evangelical missionary who lived with the Apurinã, decided to fly over the region. He went up in a light aircraft with the evangelical missionary Jack Walckey and the Mayor Daniel Albuquerque, who served as a guide to the pilot. During the flight they made out the Juma settlement completely abandoned. Pickering reported the act, but the authorities did not wish to investigate.

Fourteen years later, in 1978, the massacre of the Juma people arrived on the newspapers’ front pages. There were direct accusations about the people being indicated as guilty, with political implications as among them were the Mayor and various councillors. This provoked, for the first time, the attention of the authorities. The Federal Police opened a case, investigated, and found one of the people involved in the assassinations. But there was no later penal process.

On the 17^th of August 1981, the Augustinian Recollect José Luis Villanueva had the opportunity to visit the last of the Juma in their refuge on the River Joarí, in Canutama. There were seven Jumas left, who lived without any contact with the modern world, apart from a few clothes. “They live as they could have done three of four thousand years ago […] They still make fire by rubbing two sticks together”.

In January 1992, they announced the official extinction of the Juma. A tiger killed Karé, the last and only male capable of reproducing. There were left three girls of eight, ten and twelve years old and two elderly couples. In 1998 they were moved to the village of Uru-eu-wau-wau in the High Jamary, where the three young girls married men from another ethnic group. In 2010, there were only four Juma left.

C. The Zuruahã People

On the 7^th of May 1980 there was the first physical contact with the zuruahã. Their settlement was found in 1979, in a flight in which took part the Augustinian Recollect José Luis Villanueva. The next day, led by Jesús Moraza in a boat from the parish, they tried to get near them. But given that there was little water, for being summertime, they had to abandon the enterprise.

Only a year later they managed the first contact, but not without some tension for the complete lack of knowledge of their language. They start a progressive relationship, in which two Augustinian Recollects took part as members of the CIMI, until the territory was marked off.

The zuruahã, about 150 people, have been the motivation behind linguistic and sociological studies around suicide as one of the characteristics of their culture. They are, without a doubt, the inhabitants of Tapaua most reported on globally and most unknown locally.

NEXT PAGE: 10. The education issue

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