Epidemic Disease

In the time of our ancestors, the white people were very far away from us. They had not yet brought measles, coughing disease, and malaria into our forest. Our people were not sick as often as we are today! They were in good health most of the time and when they died their ghosts were not tainted with the fumes of epidemics. Now, when someone dies of white people’s diseases, even his ghost gets sick and returns to the sky’s back with fever. His breath of life and flesh are soiled all the way there! In the past, people never all got sick at the same time! They did not die as much as now.

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Our fathers and our grandfathers did not trust the white people and had always feared their epidemic fumes. Yet they never really tried to find out what had brought them to their home. They did not know that they had come to mark the edges of Brazil in the middle of our land. They made themselves available and friendly. They readily gathered to accompany the white soldiers and transport their food and metal tools in big carrying baskets. They merely looked on with curiosity when the white people cleared large paths and erected big stones at the sources of the rivers. They never imagined that later these people’s children and grandchildren would come back in large numbers to dig gold from the rivers and make their cattle eat in the forest. They never thought that these outsiders would one day want to chase them from their homes to take their land! On the contrary, once their initial fright passed, our elders were happy about their visit. Day after day, they examined the big wooden boxes full of machetes and axe heads that these white people had brought all the way up the Rio Demini. A single thought was on their minds: “From now on, we will never lack for metal tools again!”

Much later, once I had become an adult, I began to ask myself what these white people had come to do in our forest. I came to understand that they wanted to know it and plot its limits in order to take possession of it. Our elders did not know how to imitate these outsiders’ language. This is why they let them approach them without hostility. If they had understood their words as well as they understood ours, they would probably have prevented them from coming into our forest so easily! I also think these strangers duped them by flourishing their merchandise with good words: “Let’s be friends! See, we offer you so many of our goods as presents! We do not lie!” This is always how the white people start talking to us! Then the xawarari epidemic beings arrive in their footsteps and we immediately start dying one after another! Our elders did not know anything of all this yet. They simply wanted to trade for machetes, axe heads, clothes, rice, salt, and sugar. They spoke to the white people by joyfully repeating a few of their words like parrots. They told themselves: “These outsiders are truly friendly, they are very generous!” But they were wrong! Once they obtained the precious things and food they coveted, they soon fell ill, then perished one by one. It makes me sad to think about it. Our elders were taken in by all this merchandise, and that killed every one of them. This is how my older relatives disappeared, wanting to make friendship with the white people. And after their death, I remained alone with my anger. It has never left me since. It is the anger that makes me fight today against those outsiders who think only of burning the forest’s trees and soiling its rivers like hordes of peccaries! I always feel sad when I see the emptiness of the forest that my elders traveled, for the xawara epidemics never left it. Since that first time, our people have continued to die in the same way.

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Now we fear the garimpeiros’ malaria, which is also very fierce. It is so. The people of the forest’s breath of life proves fragile in the face of these epidemic fumes. It takes a long time before our flesh learns to harden and resist them. But this did not happen without reason. Our ancestors had never breathed their odor. Their bodies had remained cold. When these fumes appeared, our long-ago elders did not have any strength to defend themselves. All burned with fever and entered a ghost state at once. Then they perished rapidly, in great numbers, like poisoned fish in a dry pond. This is how the first white people made nearly all of them vanish.

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What we call xawara are measles, flu, malaria, tuberculosis, and all those other white people diseases that kill us to devour our flesh. The only thing that ordinary people know of them are the fumes that propagate them. But we shamans, we also see in them the image of the epidemic beings, the xawarari. These evil beings look like white people, with their clothes, their glasses, and their hats, but are wrapped in a thick smoke and have long, sharp canines. They are the t[^h^]okori beings of the cough, which slit our throats and chests, and the xuukari diarrhea beings, which devour our guts, but also the tuhrenari nausea beings, the waitarori scraggliness beings, and the hayakorari weakness beings. These evil beings do not eat game or fish. They only starve for our fat and thirst for our blood, which they drink until it has dried up. They know how to listen from far away to the voices rising from our villages to guide themselves to us. They approach our houses during the night and set up their hammocks inside but we are unable to see them. … Then they look for the most beautiful and chubbiest of our children. … If our xapiri do not act to rescue these children very quickly, they die instantly. After this, the xawarari epidemic beings tie up the elders and the women who have the weakest breath of life. First they cut one entire group’s throats with their machetes, then they rest for a while before coming to get new prey. Little by little, they gather great quantities of corpses to roast them like game. They only stop killing once they think they have gathered enough human flesh to satisfy their appetite.