On Being… “less white” : A week with the Suruí Tribe of Rondônia

Last I wrote I was “waiting at the jump off”, but the theme of the Amazon seems now to be less waiting and more jumping. Last Thursday I walked into a planning meeting with my advisor expecting to talk logistics for the long tedious process of getting permission to enter indigenous territory. Two hours later I walked out with a round-trip flight and permission to enter the Suruí territory of Rondônia (an Amazonian state of Brazil on the border of Bolivia). My only instructions were… “Pretend you’re our intern, don’t do any interviews until you’ve won over the chief.. and ya know… just be like… less white”

One week later, I coincidentally am far less white than I was when I entered. The combination of scorching sun and tribal paint has left my body a mix of red, brown, and patterned black dots from the seed of the jinny pappou. I carried the team camera and pretended to take orders from my make-believe bosses to successfully play the part of an Idesam intern, and received an impromptu marriage offer from the chief within five days, which I’m pretty sure counts as “winning him over” soooo Mission complete? Details below.

The point of this jump off was a carbon verification. Idesam and a few other partner organizations created a carbon credit project with the Suruí back in 2006.  Seven years later, the day of verifying the credits in order to sell them to interested buyers finally came, and I just happened to arrive at the perfect time to get a front seat to the entire process. What this basically means is that The Suruí have a huge swath of amazon jungle that has been demarcated by the government as theirs and theirs only. But over the past years, timber gangs and gemstone whores have been lynching into their territory and in many cases, paying the poorer Surui’s to deforest their own land. This was happening at such a break-neck pace that calculations showed the territory would be completely deforested within 50 years if nothing was done. For a tribe who depends solely on the life of their forest, this was a death sentence. So chief Almir did something no tribal leader had ever done… he googled.

                                                 

Chief Almir was the first indigenous chief to form a partnership with google, to make his territory and its deforestation trackable by the general public and his own people. Now, his is the first tribe with a fully certified REDD+ carbon credit project meaning interested buyers can offset their emissions by buying the carbon credits generated by Suruí standing forests. Almir has been revered as a fearless leader even in the face of two years of record-breaking assassination threats from nearby timber gangs. He picked up four armed guards from the National Police Force and never skipped a beat in protecting the territory

                                       

Pretty incredible stuff to say the least but what struck me most was the fact that this tribe only made contact with the outside world 44 years ago. This moment which they still refer to as “o contato” was with a Brazilian government official of FUNAI (The National Indian Foundation of Brazil). One of the greatest ironies in Brazilian history is that it was a member of Funai, the government arm created to protect Brazil’s indigenous population, that nearly killed off an entire tribe when he gave one Suruí the flu in 1969. Within a few years of contact, the Suruí tribe had dwindled from 5000 people to less than 250 from the flu contracted by foreigners. Yet today, they are actively including the outside world in their fight to rebuild themselves and their territory.Theirs is a trust, and a drive, and an intelligence that absolutely blew me away.

To date it was one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had in all my wanderings, hiking into the Amazon with the technical carbon team to plot key forest and crop points on their GPS data map, tagging along on the cultural team’s risk assessment interviews, and, conducting my own set of interviews with all of the clan heads and various Suruí villagers to gauge their perceptions on the project for my own research.

I still don’t know how to be “less white” or “less gringa” or “less American”, or whatever it was my boss meant for me to be, but after a week with the Suruí, I’m not sure “being less white” was ever actually necessary. The Suruí were just as curious about me as I was about them. After I’d ask a clan leader what he hoped to gain from the carbon project, he asked me what life was like in New York. I asked him if the majority of Suruí supported the project, and he asked if the majority of Americans preferred baseball or football. I asked him about which village he was from, and he asked me if this placed called “Brooklyn” that he read about was a real thing. I failed at translating the idea of a hipster in Portuguese but the conversation would continue on like this for hours in a mutual curiosity swap.