http://www.thestar.com/News/article/438984

THE NOBLE SAVAGE

Looking into the rainforest and seeing salvation
As last week's dramatic pictures of uncontacted Amazonians attest,
`primitives' remain a Rorschach

Jun 07, 2008 04:30 AM
DANIEL DALE
STAFF REPORTER

Except, perhaps, for the purpose of bow-and-arrow target practice, the
members of the "uncontacted" Amazon native tribe captured in dramatic
photos released last week have no use for us. We, however, need them.

Specifically: We need them to continue to exist as members of an
uncontacted Amazon native tribe. Our consciences – in particular, our baby
boomers' consciences – demand it.

"It's not necessarily totally logical," says Candace Slater, a University
of California-Berkeley professor who has studied the Amazon since 1988.
"But it doesn't have to be."

The tribe in question lives in Brazil's rainforest, near the border with
Peru. Thanks to photos taken by the Brazilian government's Indian affairs
department, whose researchers flew a plane over the tribe's land in late
April and early May, we now know its members live in thatched huts, use
bows and arrows, sometimes paint themselves with red and black dyes to show
aggression, and do not enjoy free-but-unsolicited air shows. And that's
all.

Ignorance, of course, is rarely as blissful as when it gives you licence to
make things up. For centuries, explorers, travellers and assorted others
have filled the yawning gaps in their knowledge about the various natives
they encountered with strong opinions about the various natives they
encountered.

Natives were, first, "savages," barbaric and uncivilized, people to be
killed or avoided. Then, as early as the 17th century but especially in the
Romantic era of the 18th, they were promoted to "noble savages" – no longer
"superstitious fanatics, poverty-stricken in material skills and resources,
half-crazed by fear, and continuously at war," wrote Annemarie de Waal
Malefijt in Images of Man: A History of Anthropological Thought, but
"naturally good, living from the fruits of nature, well adapted to their
environments, and above all poetic and creative. As such, they stood in
stark contrast to modern city dwellers, who were slaves of their own
institutions and laws, corrupted by their own technology and science, and
decadent in their morals."

We've retained – or some of us have retained – some of both perceptional
traditions. American conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh referred to the
red-painted tribe members in the photos as "these savages"; in the age of
the Blackberry, many of us can't help but feel a certain bemused awe that,
as Condι Nast Portfolio magazine's Liz Gunnison wrote last Friday, the
members of the tribe "don't even have Facebook profiles!" In some small
way, we slaves-of-the-office still want to be them.

Mostly, though, we – unlike previous generations – couldn't care less about
their lives. As a survey of Canadians' environmental attitudes released in
April helps explain, we just want them to keep on living as they live.

Are members of the tribe privileged or deprived? Are they savage or
enlightened? In today's Western industrial democracies, those questions
have been – on a basic level, at least – settled. We don't need lessons
from red-dyed Amazonians.

We do need those Amazonians, however, for one important purpose: to assuage
our guilt about the way we've treated the planet. Once-idealistic baby
boomers, in particular, thought they were going to change the world for the
better; instead, goaded by the slide shows of haughty former
vice-presidents, many of them now feel they've made it worse. In the April
poll, conducted by Harris/Decima, 79 per cent of respondents 55 and older
agreed their generation has done "an unacceptable amount of damage" to the
environment; so did 74 per cent of respondents 35 to 54. Their fundamental
problem, then: They're legacy-conscious – 75 per cent of survey respondents
said that, as they get older, they "think a little more about the impact I
have on those around me and how I want to be remembered" – but they aren't
confident their legacy will be positive.

When Canadian boomers are asked to assess the last 25 years, they are
typically satisfied with society's accomplishments, says EKOS Research
president Frank Graves. "What's surprising is that when you ask them to do
the same exercise and cast their view of the future, they go, `No. I think
things are going to be less prosperous, less ethical. There are going to be
terrible problems with the environment. There are going to be terrible
problems with geopolitical instability and terror.' So this sense of
achievement that people have going backwards 25 years, which is largely the
boomers' legacy, they don't extend to their children, the next generation."

Which is why the "uncontacted" tribes of the Amazon are important to them.
If such people still exist in such environments, unsullied by the evils the
people of the West have inflicted on the world, there is some paradise left
at the fringes of the West's global parking lot. If Eden has been
preserved, for somebody, somewhere, all is not lost.

"There's so much worry about global warming, about oil, about all these
kids of things that seem to be cataclysmic, and here are these people,
somehow, embodying the things people would like to believe the world either
is or could be," says Slater, a professor of Spanish and Portuguese who
wrote the book Entangled Edens: Visions of the Amazon.

"It's the untouched," she says, "the timeless, and in there the hope that
somehow, things can still be saved. I think the Amazon continues to be
something that is thought of as timeless, authentic, original...and even if
you have one Indian tribe that's untouched, there's a sense that these are
things that remain."

A myth, probably – and a myth based on myths.

It is highly unlikely, Slater, anthropologists and activists say, that the
tribe in Brazil has never had contact with other groups, highly unlikely
that it was completely unaware of Western civilization until the April
flyover.

The tribe is probably a remnant of a larger tribe that was decimated during
the rubber boom about a century ago, says Fiona Watson, a Brazil expert and
campaign co-ordinator for Survival International, a group that lobbies for
the rights of tribal peoples.

"And in the rubber boom," Watson says, "there were all sorts of atrocities
– massacres, killing, enslavement, and many Indians died from
disease...There's this very strong historical memory, and that kind of
memory is handed down. I think that accounts for the fact that they clearly
don't want contact."

Even in Eden, unfortunately for us, there are no blank slates.