In When We Sold God’s Eye (Grand Central, Dec.), journalist Alex Cuadros explores the agonizing passage of the Cinta Larga tribe from their pre-contact life in Brazil’s Amazonian rainforest to an often harsh modernity.
Pio and the other Cinta Larga whom you profile were kids when they made contact with Westerners. How do they remember the time before that? And what was their experience of contact?
It was a world of hunting and of extravagant feasts that lasted for weeks. But life was violent. They fought with neighboring tribes all the time. And contact was horrifically violent. In the 1960s, settlers started clearing the rainforest for cattle ranches and prospecting for gold. There were campaigns where gunmen would kill any Indigenous person they could find.
You describe Pio waking up after an influenza epidemic to an apocalyptic scene.
He was nine years old, and all the adults in his village died. The disorientation was total. He and a few other kids had to figure out how to feed themselves. They entered a new reality. It was 500 years of history compressed into a lifetime. They confronted capitalism, money, and cell phones in one generation. It was amazing to hear what it was like to encounter Western technologies or see money for the first time—not knowing what it is and trying to tear it up. Salty food felt like it was burning their mouths.
Why did the Cinta Larga start to allow logging and ranching, and eventually open an illegal diamond mine?
There is a cognitive dissonance in wanting to protect the forest but also being pragmatic and feeling that “we have to put food on the table.” Before contact, the Cinta Larga had no need for money. But post-contact, they had no way to get what they wanted except by selling forest resources.
Your narrative builds to a violent 2004 confrontation with prospectors. How did that brew up?
The prospectors wanted to mine without permission. The Cinta Larga told them to leave, but they refused. They unwittingly dredged up traumatic memories of the early contact, which led to retaliation from the Cinta Larga.
What have the Cinta Larga preserved from their past way of life?
It’s truly a collective existence. Kids roam free and are looked after by all the adults. People still occasionally go hunting, and they share the catch with neighbors. Westerners think of ourselves as our professions: “I’m a writer.” People in the non-Western world often talk about themselves in terms of relationships: “I’m a brother or a son.” It made me think about my own family relationships differently and value them more deeply.
