said, ‘‘I thought this is exactly what I want to
do with my life.’’
His Xerénte informants were dualists whose
world consisted of paired oppositions: the sun
and moon, day and night, woman and man,
good and evil. He says they told him that they
were the children of the sun and that before
the Portuguese possessed technology — the
guns, the clothes, the cars, the computers — the
sun off ered it fi rst to the Xerénte. The Xerénte
said, What is that? The sun said, It’s a rifl e: You
can kill whatever you want. The Xerénte fi red
the rifl e and were surprised by the noise and
smell. They said obviously we don’t want this
device. So the sun gave the rifl e to the moon,
and the moon gave the rifl e to the Portuguese.
The sun also off ered clothes to the Xerénte. The
Xerénte began to wear clothes, but the clothes
soon smelled and grew scratchy, so the Xerénte
gave them back to the sun, and the sun gave
them to the moon, and the moon gave them to
the Portuguese. And so on. Luz says he heard
the story several times. After each recount-
ing, old women came to him and lamented
the decisions that their ancestors had made.
‘‘How stupid we were in the past! If we had
accepted the technology, we would be rich now
and the whites would be a poor tribe like us.
They would be hunting like us, and we would
be traveling by car!’’
This was not a theme that Luz wanted to hear,
but he came to see it as their legitimate choice,
and it resonated with memories from his child-
hood. He told me: ‘‘I realized that these people
were not fi ghting development. They had cell-
phones and wore new bluejeans and sunglasses.
And I was walking around in T-shirts with heroes
of the revolution on them, thinking I could help
keep capitalism from continuing to destroy their
tribe. But the Xerénte were thinking the oppo-
site. They wanted to make up for lost time.’’
People who worked with Luz then remem-
ber him as a promising fi eld researcher but
an unusually private one. Luz kept his doubts
to himself — ‘‘I did not want to mess with the
establishment,’’ he told me. An infl uential pro-
fessor who wishes to remain anonymous now
because of the increased polarization of Brazil
under Bolsanaro recommended him for a doc-
toral program. Luz took a temporary contract
job with FUNAI to travel to the upper Solimões
River, near the border with Peru, and perform
the cultural surveys necessary for the demarca-
tion of three new Indigenous reserves. He said,
‘‘I felt like a hero because I was helping those
guys to live like Indians.’’
In 2005 FUNAI gave him another temporary
job, to go back to the upper Solimões and adju-
dicate Indigenous claims that had been vouched
for by another contract anthropologist. This
time it did not go so well. Luz came to believe
that the claims were fraudulent or infl ated, and
he wrote them up as such. He says that he was
disappointed by what he found, but he contin-
ued with his studies.
Two years later FUNAI dispatched him once
again on a survey mission, this time as a team
leader tasked with creating a large new reserve
on the Rio Negro. It was 2007, long before Luz
fi rst heard of Ituna-Itatá. He was 28. The team
was to be based in Barcelos, a former colonial
capital 270 miles upriver from the Rio Negro’s
confl uence with the Amazon at Manaus. The
town was the urban core of a huge municipal-
ity of the same name — 47, 288 square miles
of rivers and rainforests inhabited by numer-
ous Indigenous groups whose historical pres-
ence was well documented. Prominent among
them were the Baré and Warekena, who lived
in dispersed villages along the Rio Negro and
its northern tributaries. These people had been
brutalized for centuries, and many had lost their
traditional beliefs and language.
Luz told me that he approached the project
knowing that the claims were indisputable, as
was the need for restitution; he said that after
the earlier disappointments he viewed the Bar-
celos assignment as a way to legitimize himself
within the anthropological establishment. But
his fi nal FUNAI supervisor, who came aboard
partway through the eff ort, told me that she
believed he had secretly opposed special gov-
ernment assistance from the start. Asking that
I not use her name out of fears for her personal
safety , she said, ‘‘His work was bad work,’’ mean-
ing she thought it was biased. She added: ‘‘He
took a position against those people. This is a
complicated subject because he does not under-
stand who the Indigenous are and how many
were forced to hide their identity to survive.
But Edward Luz is a missionary. He is trying to
get the missionaries back onto Indian lands.’’
Luz denies being a missionary and told me
that he did not mean to make trouble, but that
the fi rst meeting in Barcelos proceeded awk-
wardly when he laid out unmarked topograph-
ical maps and the Indigenous representatives
countered with an electronic satellite image of
the forest on which they had superimposed their
request. He says it was an enormous expanse
almost as large as the nearby Yanomami reserve
(at the size of Indiana, one of the largest in Bra-
zil) and included the city Barcelos. This was
probably just an opening gambit, but Luz was
shocked. He said, ‘‘Wait, you also want the city
of Barcelos?’’
‘‘Yes,’’ they said.
According to Luz, the representatives rea-
soned that Barcelos had been an Indigenous
village before becoming a colonial capital.
They also argued that most of the city’s cur-
rent residents were Indigenous. Surveys showed
that since the year 2000 the declared Indige-
nous population had indeed rapidly increased,
while the number of non-Indigenous residents
(known to some as neo-Brazilians) had leveledoff. This raised the question of defi nitions. A
Brazilian sociologist named Sidnei Clemente
Peres has written extensively about the connec-
tion between new territorial demarcations and
ethnicity in Barcelos and has made the case that
the prospect of reparations has enabled previ-
ously oppressed groups to renew their collective
life and reaffi rm their identities. As a scholar,
Luz might once have made a similar case. How
Indigenous do you have to be to be Indigenous,
and how is Indigenousness measured? How long
must your ancestors have inhabited a patch of
the world for you to take possession of it now?
If you currently live in the manner of neo-Bra-
zilians, should that disqualify you? And what is
the measure of the manner? Reasonably enough,
FUNAI relies on judgment, compromise and
negotiation. In Barcelos this turned out to be
diffi cult for Luz to provide.
To me, he said, ‘‘I realized that in the city,
there was no diff erence between the ‘Indians’
and other Amazonian citizens.’’ Using a some-
times derogatory Brazilian word for the mesti-
zos of mixed Indigenous and European descent
who constitute the majority of the Amazon’s
residents, he said: ‘‘This is caboclo territory! You
lived for centuries as caboclos. Why now do you
want to be an Indian?’’Luz returned to Brasília empty-handed and sub-
mitted a report to FUNAI in which his skepti-
cism showed through. His FUNAI supervisor
terminated the agency’s relationship with him
and dispatched a replacement team to patch
things up. Luz admits that he failed in Barcelos,
but he blames the local residents, not his refusal
to compromise.
Two years after returning from Barcelos, he
spoke publicly about his perceptions. It was- He went to the Brazilian Congress and
described his suspicions of fraud. Initially,
his message interested only the extreme right
wing: disciplinarians who yearned for the for-
mer military regime; evangelicals called the
Three Bs for Bible, bullets and beef; oppressive
farmers known as ruralistas; and a group of fas-
cist Catholics in a movement called Tradition,
Family and Property. These groups overlapped.
They saw Indigenous peoples as obstacles.
Bolsonaro once went on record asserting that
in the 19th century, the United States cavalry
had done things right. Today’s Brazilian Army
cannot now do the same, but if the Indigenous
peoples could be absorbed into the mainstream
of society, the conquest of the Amazon could
proceed unimpeded. With his warnings about
fraud, Luz played into that thinking. His univer-
sity colleagues looked on in surprise. He says
he believed that he was politically neutral. He
criticized the academy for stylish thinking and
the fi eld of anthropology for paternalism.
His initial objections were mostly confi ned
to his area of expertise: the procedures used by
The New York Times Magazine 43