FUNAI to conduct its surveys. Lengthy guide-
lines including cultural and linguistic studies,
historical studies and archaeological evidence
mandate the process. But Luz came to believe
that the process was often politicized and
arbitrary. In 2010, at a congressional hearing
in Brasília, he went further, questioning the
formation of a certain Indigenous reserve and
proposing what he called ‘‘technical reforms’’
to how such territories were granted. He
maintained that his colleagues had fallen for a
‘‘sacred story’’ — that Indians will preserve the
forest and are environmentalists by nature —
but that this was in fact a lie. To me, he said : ‘‘My
colleagues would not speak to me anymore or
even be seen in my presence. It was as if I had
become radioactive.’’
Luz left the Brazilian Anthropological Asso-
ciation, which issued a statement emphasizing
that he did not speak in the association’s name.
Luz retorted that of course he did not speak in
the association’s name. He said the academics
wanted to keep Indians in the past and treat
them as if they were animals in a zoo. Bolsonaro
had used similar language but to insult Indians
as less than fully human. Luz expected people
to accept his claim when he said that his own
meaning was diff erent.
He went home to Santarém in 2010 and set
himself up as a consultant — an independent
anthropologist with an unfi nished degree and
no clients in sight. For Luz, his beliefs were
affi rmed when a delegation of Zo’é leaders trav-
eled the following year to Brasília to demand
less isolation, not more. He acknowledged that
the Zo’é had suff ered grievous injury from con-
tact with his father and the New Tribes Mission,
but of the Indigenous as a category, he said:
‘‘They are tired of being poor. They are tired
of living by making manioc fl our, fi shing and
hunting. They realize that they can have much
more. Many of them have smartphones and
internet, and they can watch videos. They see
that Indians in the U.S. and Canada — they have
oil wells, mining.’’
I answered skeptically, ‘‘Some do.’’
He mentioned that the Seminole Tribe in
Florida owns the Hard Rock empire. He said:
‘‘The people here see that North American Indi-
ans can be rich. Maybe they are not rich, but
they can be rich. And our people ask: ‘And we are
condemned to poverty? Is that our fate?’ Brazil
has to start listening to what they are saying. ‘We
have our land, we have our resources, we want
to exploit them!’ ’’ He added, ‘‘I don’t know if I
make myself clear?’’
I said that he did but noted that many of the
assimilated Indigenous peoples in Brazil have
dispersed into the country’s urban slums and
that some have been reduced to sheltering in
cardboard constructs beside country roads.
‘‘Isn’t it possible that some want to join the
modern economy and others do not?’’
‘‘Yes, of course,’’ he said.
Luz mentioned the Yanomami, who say that
the sky will fall if it is overcome by a smoke they
call shawara that emanates from mining. Luz
told me that he believes their thinking should
be respected. He said: ‘‘The shawara is their
cosmology, their apocalyptic mythology. OK,
that’s very comprehensible to me. I have mine,
you have yours, they have theirs. But ask a Kay-
apó on the Xingu river or a Munduruku on the
Tapajos. Ask them about gold mining. They have
wanted to mine their land for the last 30 years.’’
This has been true for some, not all.
He went on: ‘‘Tribal mining has been out-
lawed as one of the original conditions on Indig-
enous reserves. But they are no more stupid than
you and I. They know what precious metal is.
They know what gold is. They follow the market
on their smartphones. They’ve watched ‘Gold
Rush’ on the Discovery Channel.’’rich but impoverished place. The dilemma is
simple and intractable. Despite its size, the
forest cannot accommodate all the demands
that are placed on it. It may endure in patches
on some hard-fought reserves, but elsewhere
it will disappear. In its place will come home-
steads, followed by consolidated properties,
followed by denuded scrublands with dirt
roads that turn muddy among mines that scar
the earth. The pressures are overwhelming.
The anecdotes swing to extremes. The strug-
gle over Ituna-Itatá dates back to a time, more
than a decade before Edward Luz roared into
the clearing to confront the agents of IBAMA,
when the forest had been cut down for miles
around Anapu, a lawless settlement on the
Trans-Amazonian, and territorial clashes were
common. The most violent of them lay an hour
to the south along the receding frontiers where
subsistence farmers were invading forests on
behalf of wealthy speculators fi ling fraudulent
claims. The claims formed redundant grids on
a confusion of maps, eventually including those
that covered the lands of Ituna-Itatá. Forged
deeds that needed to look historical were aged
in boxes containing crickets that chewed the
documents’ edges and defecated on the sheets
— an art form known as grilagem (from grilo for
cricket) that is widely practiced in rural Brazil.
Around Anapu, early land claims soon achieved
legacy status within established families, andnew ones bred raw emotions. It was easy to
guess which of the invading homesteaders
worked secretly for the land-grabbers. They
were the ones who were not being brutalized.
Legitimate homesteaders had to band together
to keep their equipment intact and their build-
ings from being burned by thugs.
When the government of President Lula
da Silva, a left-wing populist, revived the plan
for the Belo Monte dam in 2010 — this time
unstoppably — Altamira boomed with workers
seeking construction jobs. Then as now, illegal
logging led the invasions, bulldozing primitive
roads deep into previously untouched territo-
ry in order to harvest the rare hardwood trees
called ipé, whose extraction opened the way for
the wholesale logging and ranching to come.
Given the obviousness of the logging roads
(which necessarily cross reserve perimeters
after approaching from the outside), you would
expect that they would stop at the edge of the
Indigenous reserves, where logging is strictly
forbidden, but often they do not.I set off with an IBAMA patrol that passed along
a newly cut road within view of an Indigenous
village. We followed the road 20 miles into a
reserve to an illegal logging site from which a
crew had just fl ed, leaving behind a fortune in
felled ipé trees. The IBAMA agents expressed
frustration about lacking the heavy equipment
necessary to confi scate the logs or even suffi -
cient personnel to guard the site. Inevitably
the illegal loggers would return after hours and
haul away the treasure. It was impossible that
the Indigenous residents did not know. When
I expressed surprise after my return, Luz called
me naïve. He said: ‘‘If illegal loggers are caught
by IBAMA, they get arrested. If they’re caught
by Indians, they get killed. So what do you think?
No one is logging on that territory without Indi-
an permission.’’
I thought he might be simplifying matters,
and I mentioned it to an anthropologist of out-
standing authority, an emeritus professor of the
universities of Chicago and São Paulo, Manuela
Carneiro da Cunha, who is the former president
of the Brazilian Anthropological Association and
was instrumental in writing the Indigenous rights
clauses into the constitution. Da Cunha is familiar
with the Kayapó, a former student of Claude Lévi-
Strauss and highly respected in Brazil today. She
is a formidable opponent to Luz and his clients.
She disagreed with his portrayal but did not sum-
marily dismiss the idea that corruption exists on
Indigenous reserves.
To paraphrase her, she said, look, this is Brazil.
She said: ‘‘In mining — in gold, in diamonds,
in logs — there is always an attempt to co-opt
Indigenous people. Corruption is always part
of the story. Men are more easily co-opted
than women’’ — some tribesmen, for example,
have been recruited by illegal gold miners, or44 3.20.22
As Luz puts it, the Amazon is a