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Ademir Assunção & Kaká Werá
Jecupé
Assunção One of the things that catches our attention in your book The Land of A Thousand Peoples is the power that words have for the Indians. In one passage you say: “According to our tradition, a word can protect or destroy a person. A word in one’s mouth is like an arrow cocked in a bow.” What exactly do words mean for the Indians? Jecupé Those passages refer specifically to the peoples of the Tupy-Guarani tradition. For the Tupy-Guarani, being and language, language and being, are the same thing. The word that means being is the same one that means word. Ayvu. Soul and sound. The very word Tupy means sound standing upright. Our people see being as the tone of a grand cosmic song, played by a great creating spirit, which we call Namandu-ru-etê, or Tupã, which means the sound that expands. Human beings are seen as a vibration, a pulsation. This is the starting point for the relationship that the Tupy-Guarani have with words. One of the names for soul is neeng, which also means speech. A pajé [a shaman] is one who can emit neeng-porã, beautiful words. But not in the sense of rhetoric. The pajé is he who speaks with his heart, because speech and soul are one and the same. You are what you speak. That is why the Guarani-Cayowá, because of their disillusionment with relations with white people, prefer to withdraw their word-soul. They hang themselves (as has been happening for about the past ten years, in Dourados, in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul) because the throat is the house of one’s being. Thus you can see that the relationship between language and culture is deep for the Tupy-Guarani. A You also say that the name of a person is very important for indigenous peoples. How is a child named within this tradition? J In the Tupy-Guarani tradition there only exist seven names, seven universal names. The others are human reinventions. These seven original names are our first seven parents, our ancestors. Human beings inherited from these seven parents the power to name, to continue creation. These first beings, which the Tupy-Guarani call Nanderu, are divinities. They are what sustains the movement of the world. All of our lineage comes from these names. When a being is spiritually baptized, he receives what would be the equivalent to a family name, which marks his heritage. This is the importance of names—it is the name to which his soul is tied, his spiritual ancestry. A Who are the seven divinities you referred to? J They are known as Werá, Karaí, Jacairá, Tupã, which are the four that sustain the world. Then there are Namandú, Jasuká and Jeguaká, the divinities that sustain the spirit. A Does everyone within the Tupy-Guarani belong to one of these lineages? J That’s right. It is very common among the Guarani to meet people called Werá Popyguá, Werá Mirin, or Tupã Jeguaká, Tupã Poty, Karaí Poty. These names are very common. A In your book we also notice the use of words linked to nouns, such as Moon-Man, Sun-Woman, Bird-Tribes. Why is that? J Within these primordial lineages, which are structures of sustenance, there have been mixtures. Moon-Man is linked to a mixture of inheritances, of inherited powers, of a quality of a man with a quality of the moon. This created a temperament, a quality that is Moon-Man. These linked words define these mixtures that define the structure of a being. Like Bird-Men, they are part of an ancestry, in a remote time, from moon to moon, which became myths. They are part of the ancestral memories of the culture. A In this specific case the inversion is interesting, because normally the man is associated with the sun, and woman with the moon. J The Tapuia culture believes that this is the human ideal, Moon-Man and Sun-Woman. This is the ideal of the perfect clan. Some beings exist that manifest this quality. They are perfect beings that have managed to attain these qualities on Earth. A You also refer to the first seven tones, the last of which is silence. Considering that words are so important for the Tupy-Guarani, what does silence mean? J Silence is in everything. The Tupy, this sounding standing upright, is manifested in three bodies: the physical body, a body that we call the body-of-sound, and a body that we call the body-of-light. The body-of-light is represented in the culture through head ornaments, through colors. The body-of-sound is linked to two qualities of energy, which are the katamiê and the wakmiê, the feminine and masculine poles. This movement of being is balanced in seven ancestral tones, which are vowels. Many dances serve to align, to tune the instrument that is the soul, which is this body-of-sound. For Tupy philosophy, this means the body that links the heavens and the earth, its residence in the material and its residence in the spirit, through which you experience sensations, feelings, perceptions. This body is moved by vibrations, it is a body-of-sound. Chants are sung to balance, to harmonize this body. And silence is the sound of the sounds. It has this meaning of the essence of the whole. There are sounds that are linked to the physical structure of the body, others that are linked to the sensory structure of the body and to the most subtle structure of the body, the spirit. Therein lies silence. The Portuguese language has five vowels; the Tupy-Guarani language has six: a, e, i, o, u and ÿ, which is a more guttural sound. And the seventh is silence. A Is there a specific dance for each of these tones, these vowels? J No. Our expression has all of these tones, like a song. Each tone deals with different artistic matters: ÿ, for us, is linked to the earth, to vitality; u, with water, emotion; o, with fire, energy; a, with the heart, with qualities of attracting and expanding, with feelings that flow; e is linked to expression; i, with perception, intuition. Each tone has connections to aspects of being. The Guarani say that we all have a nanderekó, our place in the world. This nanderekó possesses temperaments. These temperaments are linked to four sounds, each linked to four elements that manifest themselves in our moods: earth, water, fire and air. It is these four elements that somewhat determine our personalities. And there are tones that make our interior selves live; they are like musical notes. When songs are sung, those aspects that need further work are given attention. Our nanderekó has a quality that makes a certain harmony possible. This harmony is manifested through our spirit, through our language, through our internal being. The songs and dances manifest this harmony, they tune, they align our being in the world. A In this being in the world, we see dreams as something very important for a large number of indigenous cultures. What are dreams? J Dreams are the moments in which we are stripped of the nanderekó, of the rational structure of thought. We are in a pure state of spirit, in the awá, the integral being. In these moments we connect with a deeper reality. For this reason, dreams are vital. They create this connection with our true selves, because the nanderekó leaves us with a very limited perception of things in life. Within the dream state you connect with the whole and with that larger self that you are. In dreams your spirit literally travels and can be directed wherever you want or to whatever moment you wish. Of course this requires training, like learning to speak. A Who is responsible for this training in the tribes? J Normally a wise man. Every master has his own way of teaching. In general the teachings are to prepare you to have your dreams consciously. The whole system consists of educating your rational mind to perceive that it is not the master of your body, but an instrument of your dreaming spirit, your unbounded spirit. The concept of a dream for an Indian is not that of an unreal and impalpable thing. In the dream you realize the multidimensionality of the world. The doctrine that educates for dreaming consists of your perceiving the layers of dimensions that make up the world and orient this more rational side to be conscious to these other dimensions. A wise man prepares you to make these flights consciously. A Do you control your dreams? J You do not control the dream, but your conscious mind can direct it. For example, say you need to give a message to someone that is two hundred miles away. You can direct your dream, through your reasoning to yourself, and say “I will travel now in my dream and give a message to so-and-so.” And the person there will receive it. A And the person will be dreaming too? J That’s right. A Does the tribe receive signals about how to act in certain situations? J Yes, it happens frequently. It’s natural, because dreams are the moment in which the spirit is free. A Is the pajé [the shaman] the main person responsible for having these dreams? J No. A Can a child have dreams that indicate direction for the tribe? J Yes. Among some peoples there exists a morning activity called the Dream Circle. They put fifty people together in a circle and they begin to tell their dreams. And that dream begins to give direction to the daily life of the village and sometimes it creates a change in the village’s life. Sometimes a dream appears that has signs saying, look, you must all move the village immediately—a series of dreams that all indicate that. Of course there is always someone that knows how to interpret dreams. Among the Krahô tribe, which is a tribe that has many celebrations, there is a person who is the tribe’s dreamer. If there is a meeting, a dance around the fire, he lies down with his head toward the fire and sleeps. The next day he tells what he dreamt about. These are some of the ways the Indian peoples deal with dreams, having as a starting principle the relationship of dreams to a moment of liberty for the spirit, when the spirit sees everything from every angle possible. A Is this relationship to dreams common among all the Indian peoples? J Yes, it is. A You say in your book that there was a moment in which the Indian nations divided themselves into three different traditions: that of the Sun, of the Moon, and of Dreams, which is the tradition of the Tapuia. Does this mean that the Tapuia are more dreamers than the other tribes? J No more and no less. The Tupy developed a whole philosophy and ethics that sprang from words, from sound. The soul-word is the axis that orients spatial life, and the forms of the ocas [Indian homes]. The Tupy influenced many other peoples in Brazil for thousands of years. They are an expansive people, a sun-like people. But there was also another, more contemplative people, more like the moon, despite the fact that the tradition of dreaming has a more contemplative character. This other people left a greater mark of this tradition in its art, these people, the Marajoara, the Tapajó, left fragments, a complete cultural practice. And the tribes that left behind no philosophical system, no defined system of art, but which had a great power of expression, were the Tapuia, the Xavante, the Krahô. They are more nomadic peoples. They left behind no system of agriculture, but they did leave a system based on liberty and the relationship with the spirit and with the earth, through the process of dreaming. Not that that was all they did. The Xavante, which are remnants of the Macro jê [one of the main linguistic groups among Brazil’s native peoples] are one example. They are a people with a strong cultural identity, a people that establish themselves through dreams. A Writing has always been a determining factor in telling History. In your book you refer to a kind of Indian writing found in basketweaving and drawing. Is this indigenous writing? J Writing as conceived by western peoples is concerned with linear time, present, past, future, in which civilization is caught. The writing that indigenous people left, and which is still found today, is linked to another frequency of reality that is much more symbolic. Indigenous peoples have their writing, but it is inaccessible to that frequency that western civilization recognizes as such. This writing is found on the body, through painting of the body, in basketweaving and ceramics. There is a book that Lux Vidal organized called Grafismo Indígena [Indian Writing]. This book gives an idea of the richness of this native writing. Indian peoples left behind this quality of writing that is attuned to the part of the human being that deals with his interior “I.” A You mentioned the relationship of writing to time, saying that white people’s writing is concerned with linear time. What is the relationship to time that the indigenous peoples have? J I had the opportunity to live within an urban society, and also lived a part of my life in a Guarani community and short periods of time among the Kamaiurá, the Krahô, and the Xavante. One thing that determines time for the Krahô, for example, is the movement of the rainy season into summer, or the movement of the day into night. They never concerned themselves with dividing up or breaking apart this movement. Because they live this passage of time so integrally, it is as though there were only an eternal today, even as children are born, as they become adults, as they grow old. Every cycle is experienced fully through its rites of passage. One lives the present moment. There is the celebration of the chestnut, of the pequi fruit, of the manioc. These rhythms of the village give a melody to the culture. The people live this melody and everything is one large present moment. The time of civilization is very tense. A The year 2000 marked the five hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the Portuguese in Brazil, or as we learn in school, the “Discovery of Brazil.” In your view, was this a discovery or an invasion? J It was a mismeeting. A mismeeting that provoked and continues to create serious problems, even massacres. The present situation for the indigenous people is not easy. Even today, in large areas of the country, the situation is defined by shootings, dispossession of land, conflicts with ranchers and miners. The interests that provoke these actions are the same as ever: economic interests. Today there is an additional element: the megainstitutions of science, of chemistry, pharmaceutical industries, which are practicing biopiratry, stealing an ancestral knowledge that indigenous peoples have of herbal medicines. Religious missions also cause considerable tumult. The Guarani people are deeply religious. If you break the natural religious structure of a people, under the pretext that they are not religious, you destroy them. A And what is the main cause of this mismeeting? J Its seed is a society that has in its cultural structure the matter of possession. It found here a society oriented towards being. This was the crux of the mismeeting. A society that is oriented towards possession generated points of view that are still present in its conduct, in class divisions, in ideologies. Behind it all is a vision of possession and accumulation of wealth. These two different visions create the difficulties that the cultures have in meeting. The Tupy is not concerned with marking territory; his very name, Tupy, means “sound standing upright,” a being. The Xavante calls himself awen, which means “people.” Then people arrive that say they are Portuguese. And what is a Portuguese? A people that lives in a marked-off land, that is the owner of that territory, and that wants to expand to other territories, do you see? Like the French. These two very different visions provoked the difficulties in the meeting of these two cultures. A Europeans arrived bringing “progress,” treating those who were here like primitives. How do you see this relationship: civilized versus primitive? J For those who base their life and culture on having, the notion of progress consists in seeing around them the accumulation of material wealth. When it encounters a civilization that is not oriented towards possession, it finds that civilization inferior. The notion of progress for the indigenous peoples, especially for the Tupy-Guarani, consists of respecting the principles that things exist to be transformed and recreated by human beings. This is our skill, the skill of creating. And these created things can be exchanged; this is a basic tenet, so that our skill in creating can continue to manifest itself. The other tenets say that there are four things that cannot be exchanged or sold: the sun, the air, land and water. Progress, for us, is developing one’s creative capability, one’s expression in the world. This manifests itself in the way one deals with space and with nature in the form of a celebration. The progress of this people is within this law. A So these are very different ways of viewing “progress”? J Yes—the development of science and wisdom of the indigenous peoples came about through this interior perception, through the development of celebration through dance, songs, body painting—through a harmonious relationship with nature. We had our own progress. This is a point that needs to be made in order to perceive the size of the abyss that this mismeeting of cultures provoked. A Notions of material wealth did not make sense to native peoples? J Well, consider this example: when the Spanish arrived they found three great civilizations, the Incas, Mayans and Aztecs. They had monuments, pyramids, and hydraulic engineering. They attempted to deal simultaneously with these two essences: having and being. When the Spanish arrived, they asked the Mayans if they knew of any wealthy tribes. They said that there was one beyond the mountains, the Incas. But the Mayans were saying that the Incas were rich because they had the largest variety of corn and the best technology for planting it in inhospitable environments. When the Spanish arrived there, they saw the artwork in gold, but the gold itself was not the wealth of the Incas. It was not the gold the Mayans were referring to. They were talking about the technology of agriculture, that knowledge, that science. The notion of wealth of the peoples here was very different from that of the Europeans. So there was progress here, but it was undermined, and we have to reconsider the notion of progress to truly respect the civilization that was here. Civilization needs to view the Indians with less arrogance; then it might see that civilization itself is collapsing. A Why is civilization collapsing? J Civilization is not collapsing because the stock market falls or rises. This is all a bluff. Society today lives off the bluffs of those people that deal with future markets. How can you have an economy based on a bluff? What kind of progress is that? The economy of the Inca people was based on its capacity to deal with the winter and the infertility of the soil, without suffering, without the winter causing poverty for the population. That was wealth. The wealth of civilized society is founded upon a bluff. That which society calls progress has become so blinding that no one perceives how much it lives on self-deception. A Is it blindness to the deeper values of existence? J Yes. For the Tupy-Guarani this is a terrible thing. For the Tupy-Guarani words have spirits, and in civilized society people live on words without spirit. They have no strength, no truth. And this is called progress. An economy based on the talk of a bunch of people who scream like maniacs on the floor of the Stock Market, and then the dollar falls, affecting the lives of millions of people. Common citizens are the ones who suffer the consequences, and they are the ones that really construct, plant, create the structure for those people to be there talking about laws and discussing strategies for development. The common citizens are the ones who, in effect, deal with the reality of the situation. These two notions of progress have to become clear within these five hundred years. When this vision becomes clear, then it will be possible for us to promote a true cultural meeting. A How could this kind of meeting have happened? J There could have been a development of both peoples, without the destruction of either of their cultural essences. It could have been a meeting based on respect, on true integration, on exchange. Today there are indigenous leaders that have literally practiced cultural cannibalism [“antropofagia cultural”]. They discovered how to live in contact with white civilization while strengthening their own cultural heritage. These are examples of how such contact might have worked. There could have been a maturing of both the native culture and the one that had just arrived. This did not happen. Western culture today continues to practice values from an era that has passed—the notion of conquest, of expansion, of accumulating land and goods. I am not saying that this is the vision of civilization in general; it is the vision of a handful of people. It has nothing to do with today’s reality. It is completely backward, primitive. Unevolved. A You were one of the organizers of a meeting of indigenous organizations to mark Brazil’s first 500 years, through the Arapoti project. What was the idea behind this meeting? J Arapoti means rebirth. The death of our Pataxó relative in Brasília, after he was set on fire by white teenagers, made me begin to think about Brazil’s young people.1 To what level has this civilization sunk, to create a generation with such an attitude? I became very concerned. So I began to think about organizing a meeting of different tribes, to bring our different ceremonies and interact with young people, because they are the ones who need it, they are the ones who are showing the symptoms of their civilization’s disease. In April of 1998, we had the first meeting of tribes with young people, in Porto Seguro [where the first Portuguese ships arrived in 1500]. So our project for Brazil’s five-hundredth anniversary is not only for Brazil’s future, but also its present. Our notion of time is strongly linked to the eternal, so if we can manage to create a new relationship with what will be the future, then we can contribute to that civilization. A And what does this project with young whites represent? J Our project for Brazil’s five-hundredth anniversary is against ignorance; it is a project of disindoctrination. Indigenous cultures have many tools for educating one’s being, for teaching respect for humanity. This meeting is being called a New Rite of Passage for a New Human Tribe. The biggest problem for the young generation, which led to this horrendous crime, is that it lost contact with itself, with its internal rites, with its passages, its cycles. Indigenous peoples marked these cycles through rituals, ceremonies, in a process of education with its foundations in myth. [Western] society has none of this, so its youth don’t know what they are or what they are responsible for. A And how do you see the question of integration? There are still tribes in the middle of the jungle. What about their situation? Do you think they should be left there, that no one should go there, let them live in peace? How should this be resolved? J In Brazil there are currently about 350 thousand Indians, from 206 ethnic groups and 180 different languages. Of these, about 70% live within civilization’s confines, on the edges of the cities. The majority has lost much of its traditions. My project’s aim is to value and respect our roots, and recover the self-esteem of these peoples. The people of the Xingu, in the Amazon, as long as they can live in an ecologically balanced system, are the teachers of our ancestry. They should remain in the Xingu, if they want to. The ones who need to be educated are the aggressors towards these cultures. They need to be sensitized, so that they understand the stupidity they are practicing—the ranchers, prospecters, mining companies.2 These groups are the ones who need to be educated. It is the responsibility of this society’s culture to invest in this educational process. This would be a project for Brazil’s anniversary—to fight corrosive elements in the culture. The indigenous peoples are living patrimony of humanity. A In these last five hundred years, with the disappearance of hundreds of ethnic groups, which was the patrimony that Brazil lost? J The greatest patrimony that Brazil lost was that of knowledge. Many of these peoples developed systems of relationships with the environment, with medicine, which today are so relevant and sought after for sustainable development, for deep psychological truths—things this patrimony already possessed but that were not absorbed or applied. Biomedicine, phytotherapy, natural medicine. The economy, that is, what I call economy—the system of the people’s interaction with local cycles, local relationships—things that are being remembered now and that existed in abundance here. Look at the Japanese; they are recognized the world over as a technological nation, a wealthy nation, but they do not surrender their ancestral traditions, their art, their dress, their philosophy. But Brazilians are ashamed, because they don’t know their own culture. There is a popular image of the Indian as a poor victim, who was unable to develop shopping malls or to progress. This celebration of Brazil’s five hundredth anniversary offers the possibility for the society to revisit its roots and understand its patrimony. A And to understand its own wealth? J Exactly. This idea of separating people into first world, second world and third world is false. With all its riches of flora and fauna and people, do you think Brazil is a poor country? No way. We are a great nation; there is no such thing as the Third World. This is another bluff that society believes for some reason. I walk through the hills, the forests, I work directly with nature, with indigenous people, with people from the interior. No one is wealthier than we are. I’ve also been outside Brazil—everyone always talks about New York. I’ve never seen such a dreary place! Always so dark, with steam always coming out of the ground. They call it the Capitol of the World. If that’s our model of civilization, we have a long way to go. But I don’t think it’s a model for [Americans] either. There is an anguish inside them; Americans want to understand indigenous culture. I felt in them a need to recapture something that would make sense for them on the inside, that would help them remember who they are. Human beings are not the children of that dismal steam seeping out of manholes. They are children of the earth. The human essence was born in the waters, in the mountains, trees, animals. Not in the megalopolis.
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