Awaiting Internet Access, Remote Brazilian Tribes Debate Its Promise, Peril

"We're always looking for ways to improve our quality of life while protecting our culture," said Bartolomeu Patira Prenhopa, 37, who was born in the village and educated at a university in Campinas as a biochemist. "The main benefit is that it could be a way to record our history."

Prenhopa said the generation of Xavante that came before him learned Portuguese as a way to work with -- and protect themselves from -- a Brazilian government that had become an inextricable presence in their lives. The computer is the next step, he said.

The government's stated objective is to encourage tribes to report any illegal logging or ranching they might witness, and to help better coordinate efforts to preserve the wild areas in a country that loses thousands of square miles of forest each year to development, mostly logging and farming.

It's a strategy that Chief Almir Narayamoga Surui, leader of a 1,200-member Amazonian tribe in Rondonia, has been advocating in recent months while appealing for international help from nongovernmental organizations and corporations.

Surui, whose Catholic education first exposed him to computers in 1994, said he is convinced that computer technology is the most powerful tool available to protect tribes like his that are looking to protect themselves from illegal loggers. Though his community received electricity just this year, he has already secured laptops for his tribe, provided by the nonprofit Amazon Conservation Team, based in Arlington, Va.

"The use of computers helps us manage any funds we receive as support, to create new projects and to record memoirs," Surui, 32, said in an e-mail. "Using the Internet, we can enter into contact with the world, learning about what is happening and distributing our news to others. When we have any problems with invasions from loggers, hunters or miners, we can denounce them in a quicker way."

Surui, along with representatives from the Amazon Conservation Team, visited Google officials in California in May. The company agreed to work with third-party satellite data providers to create high-resolution images of the tribe's area on Google Earth, the satellite mapping service. Working with the tribe, the company will annotate the images of Surui territory on the Google Earth Web site, giving viewers a more comprehensive view of the land and potential threats.

Other companies have also recently launched programs in the Amazon, including Intel, which last year worked with Brazilian government officials to install wireless broadband to Parintins, an Amazon River city reachable only by small airplane or boat.

Even with the support of the government and businesses, it is likely to be years before Internet connections -- or even electricity -- reach all of the villages that want them. But the mere possibility of computers coming to the villages has had an impact on life and language.

The Xavante language, for example, already has a word for computer: romnurinhepetse dzá. The word for a computer mouse is rure.

"The Internet is just Internet," Prenhopa said. "We don't have our own word for that yet."