And Then There Was One

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Last of His Kind

A Brazilian team's first face-to-face encounter with a man said to be the last living member of his indigenous tribe.And Then There Was One (Post Magazine, Jan. 13, 2008)

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"You know, Altair," the man told him, "we're always looking for allies."

That exchange is what eventually led to his introduction to his trusted friend and mentor Marcelo dos Santos. Marcelo had joined Funai's jungle crew years earlier, after growing up in Sao Paulo, one of the most relentlessly urban environments on Earth. After dropping out of college, Marcelo sold all of his possessions and moved to Rondonia, where a friend had told him the trees were enormous and the lifestyle slow. When he arrived in the summer of 1974, he discovered that his friend had recently moved. He drifted for a while until he stumbled upon Funai's local office.

Indians, he thought . They live without money, without possessions. Sharing all, claiming nothing. Maybe this is the place for me.

Marcelo went native, dramatically. After being hired by Funai, he spent almost all of his time in the jungle with tribes. He hunted with them, choked down the same insect larvae they ate, journeyed across untrodden paths in search of fruits. For nearly two years, he went barefoot -- until his feet were so battered he could barely walk. In 1979, he began working with a tribe called the Negarote, which had only 18 members surviving from the estimated 300 in the late 1950s. His job was to nurse the tribe back to health, acting as a sort of social worker. For several years, he went from hut to hut, living among the families. He built a small house next to the tribal village and lived with the Negarote until 1990.

He eventually left the village to head a mapping project in southern Rondonia, where the jungle was rapidly falling to logging and ranching. Marcelo and Altair hit it off instantly, and they soon formed the core of the Guapore Contact Front, assigned with the mission of minimizing the clashes between loggers and whatever uncontacted tribes might remain in the forest. Their expeditions took them to the most remote areas of the region, and they often camped out in the forest for months at a time.

But their assignment at hand -- making contact with the lone Indian -- was a challenge like none they'd ever faced. Fresh off of their successes in contacting the Kanoe and Akuntsu tribes, they set their sights on recruiting the one man they figured would be most able to provide a window onto the life of the lone Indian: Pur¿ Kano¿.

It had been just over a year since they had made first contact with Purá, the only adult male in the five-member Kanoe tribe. Marcelo and Altair had sat for hours with Purá, patiently communicating with hand gestures. Eventually, an elderly Indian from the other side of Rondonia who spoke Portuguese and a related tribal language was brought in to translate the stories of Purá and his mother, Tutuá. Slowly, the team pieced together the Kanoe tribe's grim history.

In the 1970s, when the group numbered about 50, all of the tribe's adult males ventured out of their tiny village together in search of different Indian groups in the hope of arranging marriages. After several days, the men didn't return, so a small group of women formed a search party. They found the men massacred, killed by unknown assailants. The women panicked, convinced they couldn't survive and care for their children on their own. So they made a pact: All of them -- women and children -- would drink a deadly poison derived from the timbo plant and commit collective suicide. But Purá's mother, Tutuá, refused to swallow. As she vomited fiercely, she rid herself of the traces of poison and was able to stop her two children, her sister and her niece from sipping the fatal brew.

The tiny tribe had lived on its own for nearly two decades -- until Marcelo and Altair encountered Purá and his sister on a jungle trail in September 1995. The team members figured that if anyone could help them find the lone Indian, an Indian who had been in a similar situation until very recently might be their best bet.

So now, in 1998, Purá was walking alongside Marcelo, Altair and Vincent as they discovered the spiked trap on the narrow trail.

Not long after that, Purá stiffened and motioned to the others -- he'd heard something behind him.

"Quiet!" Marcelo whispered to the others.