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The Village People
Brunton's solution? Build the boat, use it as a tool for publicity, make indigenous people their own ambassadors.
Get Brunton going, and he dreams out loud bigger and bigger. Maybe the Embera could meet the Penobscott of Maine to discuss common challenges. After a fall cruise of Caribbean nations, maybe the Maya could come aboard in Guatemala.
  Embera Indians dance onboard the Pajaro Jai in traditional garb, although at home they are more likely to be found wearing shorts and shirts. (By Robert A. Reeder -- The Washington Post) |
With the publicity, and more funding from his company, Brunton wants to support projects such as bringing the Internet and satellite technology to the rain forest. Then the Embera could build world markets not for mere crafts but mass-produced wood furniture. Cutting trees for furniture is more sustainable than burning forests for farmland, the current practice. Cabinetry from one carved tree could sell for $20,000, compared with the 10,000 trees the Embera cut down a year for agriculture that yields $50,000, Brunton claims.
"He has transformed that passion into real opportunity for the indigenous people," says Peace Corps Director Gaddi Vasquez, who took a harbor spin with the group last evening.
Not all development professionals are impressed.
"It's a very complex area, and it's not going to be solved quite frankly by getting a boat and filling it up with Indians and driving them around the Caribbean," says Mac Chapin, anthropologist and director of the Center for Support of Native Lands in Arlington, which enlisted the Embera in a 1993 project to map the Darien region. He has never heard of Brunton. "You've got to really know what you're doing. If you just have good intentions, you're at best not going to accomplish very much at all."
So some see his vision as "quixotic" or "pie in the sky," says Brunton: "There are no guarantees here that all this will work. There are just observations that so much hasn't worked."
And, in the meantime, what a summer cruise! They have been gripped with fear in 12-foot seas and performed at a down-home barbecue in Charleston, S.C. They invited dozens of guests for a Fourth of July river tour.
Next stop: Annapolis tomorrow. But before their scheduled departure from the yacht club, the Embera put on their pants and shirts, went to the National Zoo and looked at the animals.
