Twilight of the Primitive

Let us suppose that a favorite fantasy of science-fiction writers came to pass: Beings with an advanced technology invade the earth and impose upon man an alien and entirely incomprehensible way of life, relegating the erstwhile "Lords of Creation" to the ignominious roles of servants, slaves or, at best, museum curiosities. How might human beings be expected to react? Some, of course, would try to learn about the invaders' superior techniques (assuming they were given the opportunity). Some, no doubt, would be horrified at the prospect of becoming second-class beings in a world in which they had once been supreme. They would seek places to hide or would even wage a tragic, losing struggle to affirm their sense of "human dignity." We would all yearn to survive, but only as men and only as we have learned to define our humanness. We like to think that perishing in behalf of a way of life is nobly tragic: Defeat at the hands of a superior force brings out human capacities of which most peoples on this earth have been traditionally proud. Yet, in our Western regard for the winner, and in our belief that God is on our side, we often forget that in this hemisphere people whom the earliest explorers mistakenly dubbed Indians have endured a five-century encounter with an alien civilization not unlike the fanciful invasion described above. By the time white Europeans began arriving in the New World during the 15th and 16th centuries, the first Americans had produced such a variety of cultural styles, levels of technical achievement and political sophistication that it is difficult to generalize about them in comparison with the "more advanced" Europeans. The Indian tribes of the Americas did share some obvious deficiencies: They lacked gunpowder, horses and artillery. And they were unarmed in quite another sense: They could not understand--nor could they have ever anticipated--the unquenchable thirst for land and resources that would possess the invaders. They were totally unprepared for the righteous cruelties that the Spanish, French, Dutch, English and Portuguese would inflict upon them in the name of civilization.

The pattern of barbarities that stains the history of the Americas right up to the present was begun by men who came to take what was not theirs to take. Columbus found the Arawak Indians of the Caribbean islands to be "a loving people." Peter Farb, author of Man's Rise to Civilization as Shown by the Indians of North America, has commented, "But in their haste to exploit the new abundance of the Americas, the Spaniards set the loving and gentle Arawak to labor in mines and on plantations." He adds that "whole Arawak villages disappeared through slavery, disease and warfare, as well as by flight into the mountains. As a result, the native population of Haiti, for example, declined from an estimated 200,000 in 1492 to a mere 29,000 only 22 years later." This has been the unhappy pattern on both continents. The only difference is that in South America much of the decimation of the Indian peoples has taken place in recent decades. And it is still going on.

The Jivaro of Ecuador cuts off the head of his enemy after a raid and shrinks it to the size of a fist, and many civilized people are appalled at this. Yet the Puritans of New England in 1703 paid about $60 for an Indian scalp, while later in that century Pennsylvanians offered $134 for a male Indian's scalp, $50 for a female's. Although they have been thought to typify the bloodthirsty savage of the New World, the Jivaros could never conceive of killing in this commercially systematic way. They believe that they must avenge the spirits of their kin slain in raids by rival clans; they mark individual enemies for death and decapitation. When they prepare for a raid, they have to work themselves into a frenzy by means of dancing and drugs. But bounties for dead enemies and killing by other indirect methods--the slaughter of game, gifts of poisoned food or of clothing and blankets infected with smallpox--are more the ways of the European than of the American savage.

By the time the Spaniards had completed their ravishment of the West Indies, some 6,000,000 Indians were reported to have been wiped out. It is said that there are no longer any true Indians there. Those who survived the slave labor, torture, rape and disease became mixed with their conquerors and with the Negro slaves imported to take their places. Jesuit missionaries record instances of Indians who, believing that the real god of the Spaniards was gold, addressed prayers to chests of that metal in a vain attempt to placate their tormentors.

In Brazil, enslavement was already in progress as early as 1511. Portuguese slave raids along the coast, numerous and bloody after 1548, constituted what the historian Arthur Ramos called "one of the greatest massacres in the history of the contacts of peoples in the world." So great was the Portuguese colonists' dependence upon slave labor that even the severest censures of the Church had no deterrent effect. In 1639, when Pope Urban VIII threatened anyone who enslaved an Indian with excommunication, the citizens of Rio de Janeiro rioted at the Jesuit college, nearly murdering some Paraguayan fathers; in Santos there was violence and in São Paulo the Jesuits were run out of the city.

Thousands of square miles in the São Paulo area were stripped of their native population within the first century and a half of colonization; 2,000,000 Indian inhabitants were captured or slain. Sometimes the Indians were herded in chains on brutal death marches. Certain converted Guarani Indians were tricked into slavery by raiders costumed as Jesuits, complete with rosaries, crosses and black robes. There are numerous reports of Indians who were made to turn over their own war captives. In 1696, Portuguese raiding the upper Amazon offered iron tools to the Yurimagua in exchange for slaves. When the chiefs refused to turn over captive Indians, the tribe itself was threatened with captivity. Some of the chiefs found it necessary to drug themselves in order to be able to cooperate. The Yurimagua, like other tribes, could not continue this collaboration and eventually deserted their lands. On this same expedition the Portuguese raided Indian settlements far up the Amazon, leaving a trail of death and destruction everywhere behind them.

Late in the 1600s, the Portuguese built forts at the confluence of the Amazon and its tributary the Rio Negro, where Manaus now stands. From there they were able to command the upper Amazon and depopulate the region systematically. Not even mission settlements were spared. Indians who were in the process of learning the ways of civilization were either captured or killed, or--if they were fortunate--escaped into the more remote parts of the forest. There they might survive--if they could quickly re-educate themselves in the ways of the jungle.

Slavery was officially ended in Brazil in 1888--for the record. Reports of forced labor have persisted right up to the present. At the turn of the century, during Brazil's great rubber boom, one of the cruelest forms of slavery, peonage, took root at Manaus and strangled Indian life as far upriver as the Putumayo in Peru.

Rubber boots, invented by Amazon-basin Indians, who molded the latex right on their feet, had been introduced in the United States early in the 19th Century. With the advent of the horseless carriage, there was a huge demand for tires, inner tubes and other rubber products, which led indirectly to an orgy of lawless greed and inhumanity that makes other terrible episodes in history seem pale by comparison. Upon reviewing the atrocities report of Roger Casement, the British consul general at Rio de Janeiro, James Bryce, British ambassador to the United States and a social commentator of some note, declared that "the methods employed in the collection of rubber surpasses in horror anything hitherto reported in the civilized world during the last century." According to Casement's report, the Putumayo rubber output of 4000 tons between 1900 and 1912 was directly responsible for the deaths of 30,000 Indians. The total population of the area shrank during this same period from 50,000 to 8000. It was estimated that every ton of rubber from the Amazon valley--gathered primarily by and for British and American firms--had been produced at the cost of two human lives.

This was a time when a canoeload of crude rubber was worth $2500, when astronomic fortunes were made almost overnight, when the citizens of Manaus were sending their laundry as well as their school children to Europe, when a grand-opera house was prefabricated in England, shipped and reconstructed in the capital, opening with a memorable consecration by the great Caruso.

For his share in delivering that canoeload of rubber, the Indian was permitted to buy from traders food, clothing and trinkets marked up 1000 percent over their original cost. Yet he was somehow never able to bring in quite enough rubber to pay for everything he wanted; he was perpetually in debt. His master, the patron, would set up a store filled with enticing goods all available on credit that would take a lifetime to pay.

If he balked at the arrangement, the Indian was often given a fatal flogging. Or he might be decapitated or drowned, burned alive, starved, hanged or used as a target by a sadist with a pistol. Nor were his wife and children spared. Women were violated, sometimes publicly, if their husbands had defaulted on a debt; mothers were beaten if their children were too young to withstand a (continued on page 158) The Primitive (continued from page 136) flogging. To punish parents, their children's brains might be dashed out. Even when the Indian managed to work hard enough to escape punishment, he might very well be tortured anyway for the sport of it. And those who escaped the white man's violence had a very good chance of succumbing to one of the contagious diseases of civilization.

The Europeans justified their treatment of the native Americans by the casuistic argument that because the Indians were nontechnological, non-Christian and nonwhite, they could be dealt with as nonpeople. (This despite the widely held romantic picture of the Indian as a Noble Savage that had been painted by poets and philosophers.) Actually, the New World's first inhabitants possessed a broad range of skills and accomplishments, and when some were given a chance to demonstrate these--before their cultural pride had been destroyed--they proved to be able adapters to the ways of the white man. A good example of this can be found in the Cherokees of Georgia. Before they were prodded into unwanted wastelands by the Removal Act of 1830, they had developed a memorable record of industry, agriculture and learning. A Cherokee named Sequoya had perfected a syllabary notation for writing their language. They had prepared their own tribal constitution and by 1828 were printing a newspaper.

The Cherokee achievement was not the rule, however. Most American Indian tribal groups found it impossible to adapt to white European culture. Even if they had been able to demonstrate that they were prepared to abandon their own traditions, there was little chance of their ever being integrated into American society of the 19th Century. Neither in North nor in South America could they hope to be treated as anything but hated and feared savages--as inferior beings by most, as benighted heathens, candidates for conversion to Christianity, at best.

Proof of the Indian's inferiority could be found in his "backwardness," his primitiveness and the religious, social and political customs that--when their existence was even acknowledged--seemed barbaric. That the Indian had achieved so little in the Western sense of achievement was attributed to his innate laziness. (Of course, the corollary was that a lazy individual did not deserve to control his own destiny and therefore needed a strong-handed taskmaster.) Yet anyone who has spent much time among primitive peoples, as I have, knows that what often seems in Western eyes to be laziness is really a highly practical and time-tested way of meeting human needs in a particular environment. Hunting peoples, for example, may spend many hungry days in tracking game; then, because they lack the means or the ability to preserve meat, will spend days gorging themselves on their quarry.

The Indians of the Americas do not need apologists for their so-called backwardness. Their contributions to the accumulated body of human knowledge are impressive. The great Amazon basin alone, where many of the most primitive people of the earth are still gathered, has given to medicine curare as a treatment for paralysis and as an anesthetic; the Indian pharmacopoeia also includes cocaine from the coca shrub, salicylate (aspirin) derived from the bark of the willow, digitalis from the foxglove plant, quinine from cinchona bark. Brazilian Indians discovered important drugs used to treat ulcers, wounds and skin diseases, including scurvy, eczema and leprosy; and drugs to induce sterility long before the pill became a part of our vocabulary. The list is virtually endless, because "civilized" medicine has still not completed the task of searching out and testing primitive drugs.

Foods that have become staple items around the world since their discovery in the New World are equally important. Men who came to South and Central America for riches took back knowledge of fruits and vegetables such as corn, pepper, guava, pineapple, pumpkin, tomato, squash, most types of beans and such important tubers as potato, sweet potato, oca and manioc. Indians had been eating "Irish potatoes," "Spanish sauce" and "Hungarian paprika" long before Europeans were aware that American Indians existed. In the New World they found not only cotton and rubber and chicle but also tobacco, the use of which spread so rapidly from the time it was taken to Europe in 1556 that by the early 1700s the Eskimos were getting their supply through trade with Siberia.

Unhappily, there are some Indian practices that were not taken over so completely by the white invaders: hospitality, generosity and kindness. Even among those tribes who have the best reasons for distrusting the white man, I have found a genuine willingness to accept each newcomer on his own merits once it has been demonstrated that he means no harm. Stories of lost or injured white men who have been cared for by Indians are legion. All things considered, a lone white man would stand a much better chance of remaining alive if he stumbled into a group of Indians than if it were the other way around.

The Bororo Indians of Brazil, on the verge of extinction, have good reason to be suspicious of white intruders. Yet they were happy to feed me, to take me with them on hunting trips and to perform their sacred funeral rites before my camera. I owe my life to a Jivaro family who nursed me through a serious case of dysentery with as much care as if I had been one of their own. The leader of this family, a chieftain with many heads to his credit, died in an attempt to help me. He was bitten by a bushmaster while traveling to a distant medicine man, or wishinu, who had once made a white man well.

This is not to suggest that primitive Indians have a monopoly on courtesy and kindness. And sometimes their social and moral codes are difficult for an outsider to understand--much less live by. We may find some primitive communal attitudes--the Indian's insistence that he share your goods, that you share his--not consonant with Western man's concept of property rights. Or we may find it difficult to fathom the primitive's sudden anger, his strange practical jokes and his seemingly unnecessary fears. But he is more than likely to apply the standards he lives by to the visitor. The Primitive expects the outsider to play by his rules; if he does, the reward is usually genuine friendship.

The white invader has not, on the whole, been as consistent. Indians have often learned, for example, about the white man's lofty moral and religious ideals from missionaries; then they are confronted by a group of bullies with rifles and pistols who deprive them of their land, their women, their dignity and--if they object--their lives. It has been recorded that a certain Caribbean chief was being told by a priest of the glorious life that awaited him in Heaven; he was at that moment tied to a stake and about to be burned alive by the Spaniards. "Let me go to Hell," he countered, "that I may not come where they are."

Franz Boas, the trail-blazing anthropologist and ethnologist, explained earlier in this century that achievement and aptitude do not go hand in hand, that a 4000- or 5000-year delay in cultural advancement could be explained by variations in the life history of peoples. Such a time lag appears insignificant when set against the entire span of man's occupation of this planet. "What does it mean, then," wrote Boas, "if one group of mankind reached a certain stage of cultural development at the age of 100,000 years and another at the age of 104,000 years?"

The date of man's first appearance (continued on page 254) The Primitive (continued from page 158) has been pushed back even further since Boas' time--by Louis S. B. Leakey and others to perhaps millions of years ago--and the gap between civilized man and primitive man now seems even less significant. Moreover, as Boas also remarked (and as Arnold Toynbee has since made common knowledge), peoples of a given culture, color or physique have shown particular capacities for growth during certain periods but not during others. The Arabs, for example, excelled in medicine, science and mathematics during the early Middle Ages and were in many ways more advanced than the northern Europeans, who were not to reach their peak until hundreds of years later.

When Columbus arrived in this hemisphere, the Indians living in southern Mexico and Peru were the most culturally advanced. The Aztecs, Mayans and Incas had not only developed well beyond other Indian peoples but in many ways their wealth, artistic achievement, communication systems, agriculture, city planning, mathematics, science and political systems were the equal of--if not better than--the accomplishments of their contemporaries elsewhere in the world. What levels of civilization might have been attained if the Spanish conquistadors had not plundered the cultures of the Andes and Central America is an intriguing question. It is quite likely that the influence of these high cultures would have been communicated to other parts of the Americas. In other words, a few hundred years more might have changed the story of European-Indian contact considerably. As in happened, the Inca Empire was destroyed in 1532 by a small army under Francisco Pizarro, who kidnaped the emperor, Atahualpa; and when a huge ransom in gold had been paid, the Spaniards treacherously murdered him.

Other peoples of the Americas were able to hold out against the incursions of Europeans, to delay for perhaps a few centuries their eventual destruction. Ironically, the conditions that saved them from subjugation also inhibited their cultural advancement: their isolation deep within jungles or beyond inaccessible mountain ranges, their warlike proclivities, their xenophobia or their inability to extract valuable resources. The Jivaros, secluded on the Ecuadorian-Peruvian border, had their first and, until recent decades, their last confrontation with gold-hungry white men late in the 16th Century, when a handful of conquistadors, led by Juan de Salinas, penetrated Jivaro country, set up towns and established themselves briefly as absolute rulers.

Salinas died in 1599, and the new governor was not only cruel and greedy for gold but also made the fatal mistake of not correctly assessing the Jivaro temperament. These ever-feuding headhunters made peace among themselves--"buried the lance"--and burned the Spanish towns in a nearly complete massacre of between 20,000 and 30,000 inhabitants. When the Jivaros took the governor prisoner, they assured him that he would be well supplied with the gold that he was seeking. After stripping and binding him, his captors forced his mouth open with a bone and poured molten gold down his throat. The Spanish made no attempt to settle among the Jivaros again, leaving the head-hunters undisturbed and free to war upon one another in their traditional way.

The Camayuras are another primitive people who were able to escape, until recently, the incursions of white men. They live deep in the Mato Grosso of Brazil, in what is still one of the least penetrated areas of the world. Here the South American Indian, with the help of sympathetic and knowledgeable Brazilians, is making a last stand before the inevitable meeting with civilization. The Camayuras were protected by 500 miles of jungle to the north and by the once-warlike Chavantes to the south. These are the same Chavantes who, only 25 years ago, were photographed from the air aiming bows and arrows at low-flying airplanes. There is now an airstrip in the midst of Chavante territory, and the Camayuras, when I visited them recently, numbered only 110. Since my earlier visit in 1949, the white man's illnesses--pneumonia, smallpox, influenza and tuberculosis--had taken a terrible toll. The isolation that so long protected these and other primitive peoples of South America has unhappily contributed to their susceptibility to civilization's diseases. So it is in Brazil, Ecuador and Peru that we find people in the twilight period of primitive life, people who have not quite lost their ancient cultural identities but who will undoubtedly vanish within a few short years, to be found only in anthropological texts and museums. Let us examine briefly what has been happening to some of them lately.

The modern conquistador--the civilizado--is likely to be a hardheaded businessman or government official with a 20th Century look but with methods and rationalizations for exterminating Indians that are not much more subtle than those of his 16th Century predecessors. His aim is "economic development," but it often has little to do with the economic health or the physical wellbeing of the Indian. The civilizado wants the rich lands that happen to lie within his national boundaries for the rich resources they contain, for cattle to graze upon, for settlement by agricultural pioneers. He is, above all, many different people, and this has made it nearly impossible for the Indian to understand him.

It has been said that there is no inherent evil in moving the frontiers of civilization into the huge Amazon basin. At any rate, it seems to be almost inevitable. This immense area, stretching from the Atlantic coast to the Peruvian Andes, has the land and resources to feed the men and fuel the machinery of the world. It has been estimated that Brazil could accommodate some 900,000,000 people. And what government would, for the benefit of a declining population of primitives, abandon such richly endowed lands when the economic watchword seems to be expand or perish? The United States has not been the only nation to cast covetous looks at South American iron, copper, manganese, petroleum, rubber, industrial diamonds, tungsten, zinc, emeralds, hardwoods, vegetable oils--to name but a few of the resources there. Nor is it a question of ideology; no nation, whether capitalist or socialist, has ever allowed primitive peoples to retain their own lands simply because of a moral claim to them.

So those surviving bands who held out the longest must now prepare to meet the thrust of the civilizado. The Indian has a kind of Hobson's choice. If he is in the path of the resource extractor, he can expect to deal with a man of checkered origins, who arrives without family or a sense of law. Not all the Indians of South America are as fortunate as the Aucas. In 1968, when I visited the Napo River area in Ecuador, the Texaco exploration parties had come to an impasse. The oilmen had been warned by a missionary that any intrusion into Auca territory was certain to be met by fierce resistance, so they were willing to wait until the Aucas could be cleared out before proceeding with their geological survey. Usually the extractors attempt to "hire" the Indians (whether they want to be employed or not) and destroy community life in the process. The Indians are required either to help locate forest products or to serve as rowers or bearers, while the women do the cooking or are made concubines.

The Indian may encounter another group--the herders who will clear him off the land to make room for cattle. If the Indian happens to be a member of a hunting community, he must abandon his traditions (and learn that the white man's cattle are not to be hunted). Or the Indian's lands might be appropriated by agricultural pioneers, in which case he is quickly made to understand that he is an obstacle to progress. His best course is to move his village before the farmers arrive in great numbers with heavy mechanical equipment. The Indian who chooses to remain soon must cope with a changed environment and he discovers, perhaps for the first time in his people's history, what it is like to be a member of an unwanted minority.

In the face of such wrenching confrontations, it is a rare Indian who will not have his spirit broken. It does not seem to matter whether the intentions of the civilizado are benign or malignant. In the case of primitive cultural life, the result is usually a lingering death. Those who are concerned with the problems of primitive peoples cannot agree whether it is better to prepare the primitive at once for his inevitable encounter with economic change or tc fence him off in splendid isolation.

There are some, notably missionaries, who feel that the Indian's best interests are served by his abandoning his traditional way of dress--or lack of it. I have returned to some villages after an absence of 10 or 15 years to find onceproud bodies looking more like slum products draped with sorry-looking hand-me-downs. The most brutal contacts, however, occur between the Indian and those who intend to enslave or exterminate him. This is still common in areas where the intruder is his own policeman and makes his own law.

In fact, the Jornal do Brasil's disquieting report that the Indian Protective Service was no longer shielding the Indian but was assisting his enemies took me back to South America in 1968 and indirectly inspired the book of which this article will be a part. That respected newspaper fearlessly charged that recent administrations of the I. P. S. had aided the systematic genocide of primitive peoples in order that their lands, guaranteed to them under the Brazilian constitution, might be taken over by private interests.

Indians, according to the Jornal do Brasil, had been clubbed to death, inoculated with smallpox, shot down and even massacred by explosives dropped from airplanes. In Rio Grande do Sul, the Guarani and Kaingang Indians had been systematically robbed of forests once rich in pine trees. There is not enough timber there now to build a single house for an Indian family. Instances were common of the enslavement of Indians--600 Ticunas, for example--by farmers who proceeded to whip or starve them if they did not work. The rationalization in such cases was always the same: The Indians were lazy and had to be treated harshly. It did not matter that they had been given neither tools nor the skills to use them. Even when the Indians evidenced a willingness to work hard, the farmers still maintained that a good beating had a salutary effect.

Foreign land speculators, aided by bribed officials, were able to clear Patacho Indians off lands on the coast of Brazil. When members of one village objected to being dispossessed, they were inoculated with smallpox, for they had learned to trust the men who came with little black medical bags. With insidious efficiency, their infected clothing was later distributed to a neighboring village. When the Patachos complained to the I. P. S., their complaints were ignored. Angered, they retaliated with blowguns, bows and arrows. Their persecutors quickly had what seemed to be a change of heart; the following day civilizados appeared with sacks of sugar, which were happily received. Within 48 hours more than 50 additional Patachos were dead; the sugar had been laced with arsenic.

One reporter learned of Indians in a farming community who had been enslaved and raped. Near one farm a group of terrified children were herded to the bank of a river and forced to take part in an orgy. When one child escaped, according to some sources, she was quickly captured and killed; her dismembered body was thrown piecemeal to the piranhas. One rubber-plantation owner was accused of kidnaping girls from the Ticuna tribe and exporting them as prostitutes.

A group of Cintas-Largas Indians who had been enlisted as slave laborers in a mining camp were on the brink of rebelling after having been fired upon for disobedience. They made the mistake of holding a meeting on a jungle plateau. The miners learned of the meeting and sent up an airplane loaded with dynamite. Before the Indians could escape, they were blasted to bits from the air.

Luis Neves, former head of the I.P.S., had been charged with 42 counts of corruption, among them the taking of $300,000 in bribes. Yet some of the most dedicated men I had ever known, men like the Villas Boas brothers, who would give their lives to help the Indians, were themselves connected with the I.P.S. Still, a picture of sorts was emerging; apparently the civilizado was coming in for the kill--too impatient to wait for Indian life to come to an end through disease, loss of will or social disorganization. The stakes were high, indeed, so why wait for someone else to grab the Indian's lands?

More recently, the Brazilian government has emphatically denied any complicity in the mass slaughter of Indians. Certain I.P.S. men, the government conceded, may have been bribed by unscrupulous commercial interests to look the other way while the Indians were disposed of, but it insisted that the government itself bore none of the blame. Officials pointed out that Indian territory is too big, hence too expensive, to police properly. Men in the upper echelons of government did acknowledge a limited responsibility inasmuch as they did not know what was going on. Clearly, no one wants to accept much of the guilt, but there seems to be very little ground for anyone to feel pious.

What I found on my return to Peru, Ecuador and Brazil in 1968 convinced me more than the headlines that the Indian's days were numbered: the son of a fierce Jivaro chieftain who wanted to teach school, a now-mendacious Bororo chief who had lost his former majestic air, the once-secluded Yagua Indians on a tourist itinerary, Chavantes working under the stern gaze of men who they had once sworn would never set foot on their territory. And behind all the changes lay the grim message of statistics. A numbers game, perhaps, since the data on primitive depopulation are so often disputed; yet the discrepancies are never as significant as the compelling fact that the graphs all point the same way: down, and out.

There were perhaps 10,000,000 Indians living in the Amazon basin five centuries ago. Today there are scarcely 200,000. (During this same period, the world's total population has climbed from fewer than 500,000,000 to more than three billion.) In Brazil, the Indians numbered 3,000,000 in 1500; less than a tenth of that number were living there at the beginning of this century. There are about 78,000 living in Brazil today. The Bororos were still a people 5000 strong in 1900; victims of contagious diseases, they are now down to fewer than 150. The Nhambiquara tribe once numbered 10,000; only 1000 remain, tragic victims of genocide. In two centuries, the Carajas of Brazil have declined from 500,000 to 1200 for the same reason. The Guarani of Paraná were reduced by slavery and torture. In ten years they have declined from 5000 to about 300 (and by the time you read this that figure is likely to have dropped even more).

In Belém I spoke to the Brazilian anthropologist Edward Galvão, who told me that, since 1960, big business organizations, having accumulated new fortunes in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, have begun to penetrate the terra incognita of the Mato Grosso. In this once-inaccessible sanctuary of the Indian, these companies are purchasing huge tracts of land for speculation, mining and cattle raising. Unlike the old-style pioneer who needed cheap labor to help locate and extract minerals, semiprecious stones and forest products, these huge operations have little need for the services of the Indian, since modern equipment is now available. Such companies have both the motivation and the money to corrupt I.P.S. officials to secure the removal of the Indians from vast stretches of the Amazon basin. The I.P.S., unlike the Villas Boas brothers, failed to survey and record title to the lands of various Indian groups. Knowing this, big companies paid the legal registration fee and claimed these huge tracts of land. Thus they drove out both the Indians and the casual white settlers.

Since the Indian is patently unable to catch up with the rapidly paced mechanization taking place in Brazil, he finds himself on a treadmill to oblivion. He cannot assimilate, because he is too unskilled for a genuinely productive role in an industrial society. Neither does his world view accord with a routinized, machine-tending life, and he is discouraged from undertaking farming, which might suit him. Wherever he is or wherever he has moved turns out to be directly in the path of progress. And his instruction in the ways of civilization is usually just enough to disrupt his traditional life, but not enough to prepare him for its dizzying pace. Almost every contact with the outside world endangers his health, diminishes his pride and disorganizes his community. He finds himself a misfit.

I came along at a time when it was still possible to see people living as they had for 10, 20, perhaps 100 centuries. I cannot say often enough how lucky I regard myself to have worked in a period when modern technology made possible for me trips that would once have taken years of preparation and sapped the energies of much stronger men. Paradoxically, this same technology has contributed to the demise of the cultures I have described.

The sad truth is that we are witnessing the end of primitive man, man as he has lived for much of his time on earth --at least since he first learned to use tools and to communicate his ideas from one generation to another. While individual primitive men may die off during the next few years in bitterness and confusion, it is not for them that we need compassion. In my view, it is already much too late to do anything but help new generations find their own way in a rather maddening world; we may already have helped the older generation too much.

The principles of living that we define as civilization may call not for a hymn of triumph but for a dirge. Man as a primitive has done quite well if we use time as a yardstick: The cultures I have studied have endured for a far longer time than has Western civilization. And civilization, after all, may yet have to be tested.

To take this thought a step further, the very civilization most responsible for the end of primitive life is now itself facing disaster. Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich puts it this way: "There is no, I repeat, no conceivable technological solution to the problems we face." Other civilizations have risen, had their day and left the stage. But what other civilization in history has been "advanced" enough to drag down with it the primitive sources that could one day, perhaps, replenish its sapped vitality?

We have absorbed primitive man into a system of life that is considerably more fragile than his own tradition-oriented cultures. Hence, it is not wholly clear to me why we should congratulate those peoples who have succeeded in making an adjustment to modern life, who have given up the ways of their ancestors and joined us in our precarious dependence on the complex instrumentalities that now rule our lives. We can congratulate them for having withstood our superior weapons, our whips and diseases; we can admire their flexibility and intelligence in learning to play our games. Are we so sure, however, that we want them to follow our lead?

Not only have we been engaged in destroying indigenous cultures the world over, we have done it while saying that if these children of nature had any sense they would follow our example. And this may turn out to be, at the very least, one of the boldest pieces of ignorance--or simple falsehood--in man's history. It has become appallingly clear that in order to sustain our idealized "standard of living," we must draw from the earth's total resources at a rate that is 50, perhaps 100 times greater than the primitive's modest demands on his environment. Moreover, it is increasingly the primitive man's environment that we have been tapping. And if a high standard of living means almost limitless consumption, then those who can afford it will become fewer and fewer. It is probably too late, but would it not be better to begin asking what primitive men can teach us?

Western nations have long deluded themselves with the prideful and foolish notion that they were best suited to regulate the lives of primitive peoples. But since the frightful world wars that culminated in the holocaust of Hiroshima, Western man has begun to question in earnest his own moral superiority as well as his faith in the benevolent qualities of his machines, his cities, his institutions and even his philosophies. And it has become terrifyingly clear that we stand in danger of using up our air, fresh water and living space. The inevitability of disaster does not seem to be in question--only the timetable.

This is the final irony: We are losing faith now in the very values we have been attempting to impose upon primitive man. Our governmental, religious and educational values have been questioned on every side. Our youth are rebelling not only against routinized and uninspired occupations but against the materialism that creates them and makes them necessary. Perhaps the bitterest irony of all is that the very machines with which we have awed primitive man have now begun to frighten us as though they were visitations from some alien world rather than the products of our own ingenuity.

So one must ask the inevitable question: Whose twilight is it?