Brazil's Indians Trying to Keep Culture Alive

XINGU NATIONAL PARK, Brazil — Naked children are leaping from mango trees and tumbling into the mild water of the Xingu River without a care.

But up by the grass-roofed long houses, the village elders fret that their way of life may soon end.

"We're worried for our children and grandchildren," said Rea, a Kayabi Indian woman. "Our Xingu is an island, and if the white man enters with his machines, he'll break it all down in no time."

Xingu is Brazil's oldest and probably most successful Indian reservation -- 10,800 square miles of pristine rainforest where 14 tribes live much as their people have for thousands of years.

The reserve was established in 1961, just a few years after many tribes in the area had their first contact with white civilization. It sat in the middle of a vast undeveloped stretch in the state of Mato Grosso -- or "thick forest" in English. Today, it is surrounded by fields and pasture in the center of Brazil's fastest-developing agricultural region.

The Indians, whose numbers have nearly doubled to about 5,000 since 1961, say they are feeling the pressure.

"In 20 years, there won't be enough land for all of us. If you look at the park, it's just a triangle with a little rectangle on top," said Awata, the schoolteacher at Capivara, one of several Kayabi villages that line the river.

In the villages, life goes on much as it always has, but there are signs of the encroachment of civilization all around.

Shiny metal faucets are now a fixture in most villages, thanks to a well-digging project that aims to protect the Indians from polluted headwaters outside the park. Once-crystalline rivers are muddied from erosion from farming and logging upriver.

"We can no longer fish with bows and arrows, so we need to buy fish hooks from the white man," said Mairawe Kayabi, president of the Xingu Indian Land Assn., who like many Indians uses his tribe's name as a last name.

The sound of Indians stomping and chanting is still heard in the villages, but now it is as likely to emerge from a cheap tape recorder as from a live ceremony.

In Ngojhwere village, the cooking grill is a bicycle wheel with its spokes hammered down. Three metal car wheels turned on their sides raise the grill over the wood fire on the dirt floor.

Breakfast is piraucu, a freshly caught river fish. The Indians stew it in water and, when it's ready, wrap it in pieces of a big gummy manioc pancake called beiju, with hot pepper and store-bought salt for seasoning.