Tribes in danger as rainforests fall to farming

We glimpsed her on the bank as our wooden boat skimmed the creepers after a long day rounding the bends and rocks of the Caru river. She was fishing, a child asleep against her breasts and a pet monkey perched on one shoulder, at perfect peace in the shade of the rainforest.

When we landed we followed Kawaia to the hut built of palm fronds where her husband, naked except for a twine armband, was whittling sharp points on a cluster of bamboo arrows. Kawaia gutted the fish and chopped leaves for their meal.

The forest has always sustained the Awa people and they have sustained the forest. Now the tribe's way of life is at risk, and so is their existence.

Kawaia and her husband were found hiding in the trees, the only survivors of a massacre after ranchers and loggers started to exploit their stretch of the Amazon. A swath of forest has since been cut for timber, burnt and turned to grazing to split in two the lands they had always hunted as nomads.

Some Awa still roam uncontacted out in the forest. The rest – 230 in all – stay reluctantly, for safety, in villages supervised by the national Indian agency, Funai. They want the forest back, and they have taken their fight to the Brazilian courts.

Kamara, an Awa hunter who took us on a trek, led us to a hillside where a few charred tree trunks rose through acres of green scrub. "They plant this grass for the cattle," he said. "But it does not last and then they move on to plant more. The forest can never grow back. They will finish it off, and we cannot live without it."

All around them modern Brazil's priorities are closing in fast. A new railway line has opened the way for settlers, many of whom are escaping the cities to try their luck at farming on this far frontier in the state of Maranhao.

To defend the Awa's interests, Brazil's government has stationed a couple of officers from Funai at each of the four villages. They are well meaning but, in effect, powerless.

Patrolino Viana took us to the makeshift sign erected on the border of the Awa land he is charged with protecting. It read "Keep Out" in Portuguese, but as he showed us a settler wandered past. He admitted defeat. "All the time there are more and more invasions," he said. "There are no police, no government forces here to stop them."

We went on to a nearby settlers' farm. Their house was made from mud and bare of furniture. "Life is not just hard for the Indians, it is hard for us too," the woman said. "We need land as well."

The conflict between Indian rights and development is not new to Brazil. World leaders gathered at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro a decade ago endorsed this process of demarcation of ancestral indigenous land. Some of the Amazon tribes have seen demarcation happen, but not the Awa.

The economy of Maranhao state relies on an agriculture based on cattle ranching. If the ranchers are not politicians themselves, they have influence where it matters.

This is why the Awa have taken recourse to the law. A prosecutor will press their case for demarcation against the determined resistance of one rancher, who claims that the state sold him his holding and gave him a paper attesting there were no Indians on it.

The rancher asked in a local newspaper, "Why do the Indians need my land? They have so much already." The court case will almost certainly take years, too long for the Awa.

The only pressure which may tilt the odds a little more is a campaign launched by Survival, the international organisation that supports tribal peoples. It is led by a Briton, Fiona Watson, one of the few Westerners to visit the Awa. "This is not a people who need aid or handouts, they can care for themselves," she says. "They just need their land rights respected so they can live the life of their choosing."

With sustainability as the theme for the latest summit, the Johannesburg delegates could do worse than turn to the example set by the Awa.

As dusk falls in their village the children swim together in the river. The hunters gather to sing in their strange staccato language. Their songs celebrate days in the forest and the good things it provides.

Man may be perfectly in tune with nature here, and nature with man. But if the Awa's voice is not heard and heeded soon, the rainforest will echo to a people's lament.

Mike Donkin is a BBC World Affairs Correspondent

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