for the fi rst time. He was 7. He sat in the back
of a single-engine Beechcraft looking down at
the uninterrupted forests below, wondering
what exception to the foliage might allow the
airplane to land, and then, during the descent
into Esperança, with trees fl ashing by the wing-
tips, wondering how the airplane could survive
such a narrow runway. Afterward, he spent the
fi rst of several long stays with his family at the
station. He made friends with Zo’é children and
began to learn their language. He now calls that
experience the greatest privilege of his life.
But all was not well with the Zo’é. At the
mission station and in their forest settlements,
many grew sick and died from fl u and malaria.
At fi rst this posed less of a burden to the New
Tribes Mission than might be expected, perhaps
because the organization was focused primarily
on the Zo’é’s afterlife.
Brazil, meanwhile, was moving in new direc-
tions. An early sign appeared in 1978, when an
attempt by the military regime to off er up Indig-
enous lands to free-market forces (the so-called
Indian Emancipation Decree) provoked urban
protests against the abuse of Indigenous peo-
ples. Seven years later, following waves of unre-
lated street demonstrations, the dictatorship
was forced from power. The change stripped
the New Tribes Mission of a useful alliance, and
three years later exposed it to the new national
constitution — the one that remains in eff ect
today and mandates protections for Indigenous
groups. With Zo’é deaths outstripping religious
conversions, Luz turned to FUNAI for medical
help if perhaps only to buy time. Shocked by
the abysmal conditions they encountered upon
arrival, FUNAI offi cials soon shuttered the sta-
tion and banned the New Tribes Mission from
returning. (New Tribes Mission Brazil denies this
version of events.) FUNAI installed a medical
clinic to handle the immediate crisis and encour-
aged the Zo’é to embrace their earlier isolation.
The Zo’é never quite did, but eventually they
gained a territorial reserve and slowly rebuilt
their population. The elder Edward Luz moved
to other pastures, and with him went his family.
Among the toxic legacies of Brazil’s former
military dictatorship, only deforestation in
the Amazon still threatens the world. To the
extent that its eff ects spread into the global
atmosphere, it has raised doubts among envi-
ronmentalists about the very validity of national
sovereignty — particularly that of Brazil. This is
paradoxical because the military leaders were,
to a man, ultranationalists. Large-scale defor-
estation dates back 50 years, to the early 1970s,
when Brazil’s economy was booming partly
because of its investments in totalitarian-style
megaprojects — monumental bridges, dams,
divided highways and a whole new capital city.
These were seen to refl ect Brazil’s modernity.
To the military mind, the Amazon forest was a
vulnerability and a void. As part of a new nation-
al ‘‘integration’’ plan (‘‘Integrate not to forfeit!’’),
the generals resolved to conquer the wilds in
imperial style, by building roads.
At the top of the plan was the Trans-Amazoni-
an Highway, the 2,500-mile lateral that parallels
the Amazon River south of its course and feeds
through Altamira before proceeding toward the
Peruvian borderlands, days of rough travel to
the west. This is the road, still largely unpaved
and incomplete, that passes 100 miles above
Ituna-Itatá and has ushered in so much destruc-
tion and confl ict there. In a sense, the generals
meant it to do so from the start. Accompanied
by an off er of small homesteads, the road was
intended to provide Brazil with a social outlet,
relieving economic and political pressure pri-
marily from the country’s parched northeast,
which had long been feared by the military
government for its revolutionary potential.
The regime promoted the Amazon as ‘‘a land
without men for men without land.’’ The claim
was untrue, and soon the homesteading plan
was riddled with problems. But over the years,
tens of thousands of people answered the call
and came down the road anyway. Most of the
newcomers were very poor. Once they arrived,
they found ways to stay.
Many who failed at homesteading ended up
in Altamira and a string of smaller towns. Oth-
ers remained in the forest as hired hands and
subsistence farmers. At fi rst their clearings were
confi ned to the proximity of the main roads,
but as side roads proliferated and land specula-
tion and corruption grew, the invasion got out
of control. By the late 1980s, it seemed for the
fi rst time that the very existence of the Amazon
might be threatened unless a suffi ciently large
network of self-policing Indigenous reserves
was established. Self-policing would be the key,
which in turn would require the legitimization
of special Indigenous rights, if not necessarily
of cultural preservation. But such niceties went
largely unheeded by powerful forces in Brazil.
The generals were pushed out in 1985, and
the constitution of 1988 cemented the new
democracy and guaranteed Indigenous rights,
but every successive civilian government —
left, right, reformist, reactionary — continued
with the road building and policies that fur-
thered the destruction of the forest. Indeed,
it was under the fi rst civilian government (led
by President José Sarney) that a military-era
hydroelectric project to dam the Xingu River
at the Belo Monte cascades, downstream from
Altamira, was put forward. This was to be one
of the largest dam complexes in the world. The
design required the creation of 700 square miles
of holding reservoirs, energy banks that would
drown untold numbers of trees, disrupt the riv-
erine ecosystem, bleed methane gas into the
atmosphere, fl ood Indigenous lands and pro-
foundly disturb the lives of many thousandsof inhabitants, including Luciano Pohl’s future
guides, the Asurini and the Kayapó Xikrin.
In protest of the initiative, Kayapó from a
number of regions staged a media spectacle.
Known as the Altamira Gathering, the event
took place across fi ve days in 1989 in an Altami-
ra community center. It featured 600 represen-
tatives from as many as 40 Indigenous groups.
The participants performed ceremonies and
made speeches. Many dressed traditionally in
colorful feathers. Reporters, camera crews and
advocates fl ew in from abroad, as did politi-
cians and celebrities, most notably the British
musician Sting, who had allied himself with an
upstream Kayapó leader known as Chief Raoni
Metuktire, and later toured Europe and the
United States with him.
As a consequence of the Altamira Gathering,
the dam initiative was forced into a decade of
delays, resulting in an ineffi cient run-of-river
redesign that accepted seasonal fl uctuations
in the Xingu’s fl ow and, with it, reductions in
electrical-generation capacity for roughly half
the year. Eventually, the structures were built.
In aggregate they were completed in 2019 as
one of the world’s largest dams, diverting most
of the Xingu’s dry-season fl ow into excavated
channels that feed the generators’ turbines and
leave 60 miles of the riverbed largely denuded
of water, interrupting the river’s ecosystem and
threatening the natural balance of the region.
A consensus exists that however spectacular
the Altamira Gathering may have seemed at the
time, the completion of the dam meant that
the protests had proved ineff ectual and that the
Kayapó had been disregarded as usual.
But alternative understandings are possible.
An argument can be made that for the Indige-
nous groups who were not directly dependent
on river bank living, the gathering was in the
long term a success. It taught lessons about
the power of spectacles, the ease with which
the press could be enlisted, the sympathy that
resides overseas, the potential for funding and,
most crucial, the need to frame initiatives with-
in the views of foreign advocates. These were
homegrown Amazonian insights, but they were
noted within academic circles abroad, where a
dynamic new fi eld of anthropological inquiry,
the study of ‘‘dressing up’’ — of the importance
of costume and adornment — was born. The
seminal thinker was a longtime observer of the
Kayapó, the late Terence S. Turner of the Uni-
versity of Chicago, whose article ‘‘The Social
Skin’’ helped shape the fi eld. He started as a
conventional anthropologist, coolly observant
of his subjects, but gradually began advocat-
ing for the groups he studied. He attended the
Altamira Gathering. Afterward he promoted the
idea of Kayapó-made video productions to rein-
force Kayapó culture. The Kayapó embraced the
idea to the extent of developing a distinctive
cinematographic style that involves extensiveThe New York Times Magazine 41