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“THE FUTURE? WHAT’S THAT?”
BY PETER KURTH (published 05.17.06)
A story in The New York
Times last week drew my attention to the plight of the Nukak-Makú, a
rapidly vanishing group of nomadic Indians from southern Colombia, who
recently -- and “rather mysteriously,” according to the
Times -- wandered out of the jungle to the dusty frontier town of San
José del Guaviare “and declared themselves ready to join the modern
world.”
“We do not want to go
back,” said a Nukak by the name of "Ma-be," speaking
through an interpreter and surrounded by about 80 of his
“malnourished and exhausted” compatriots. “We want
to stay near town.” A San José
doctor, called in to attend to the tribe’s immediate needs, told the Times
matter-of-factly, “The Nukak don’t
know what they’ve gotten themselves into.”
I should say
not. “Since time immemorial,” the Times reports,
“the Nukak-Makú have lived a Stone-Age life, roaming across hundreds
of miles of isolated and pristine Amazon jungle, killing monkeys with
blowguns and scouring the forest floor for berries. [They] have no
concept of money, of property, of the role of government, or even of the
existence of a country called Colombia.” Worse,
they “have no government identification cards, making them
nonentities to Colombia’s
bureaucracy” and leaving them effectively stateless, cut off from
their traditional way of life and “wholly unprepared for the world
they have just entered.” Asked about their future, the Nukak
reply in bewilderment, “The future? What’s that?”
They want to know if the planes they see flying overhead “are moving
on some sort of invisible road.” They can’t even say where they
came from, exactly, except to call it “the bush.” But they know
they don’t want to return.
Indeed, until 1988, the very
existence of the Nukak-Makú was unknown to anyone but missionaries, drug
lords and the various paramilitary factions, both “left” and
“right,” who are the main combatants in what’s amounted
to a 40-year “civil conflict” for control of Colombia’s
cocaine trade. Since then, however, according to United Nations relief
agencies, more than 60 percent of the Nukak population has died, mainly
from malaria, flu and the common cold -- diseases against which they have
no immunity -- but also through random slaughter and forced labor in the
coca fields. Their leaders have been shot and their women have been
raped. Their children have been sold into bondage while their
environment deteriorates, destroyed by “cultivation,” climate
change, and war. There is, in fact, nothing “mysterious”
about the Nukak’s flight from the jungle or their urgent need for
protection.
“Colombia
is the worst humanitarian disaster in the western hemisphere,” the
United Nations affirms, “and the worst on the planet after Congo
and Darfur. But the world is paying very little
attention.” Rather, the world is paying attention in just the
wrong way, regarding the Nukak and other displaced “indigenous
peoples” as cute little muffins, pre-modern cartoons, who, in an
earlier era, would doubtless have been shanghaied by P. T. Barnum or
Buffalo Bill and displayed in cages for a nickel a peep.
Out in civilization, of
course, gawking at the natives is a form of entertainment. The Times even
titled its report on the Nukak, “Leaving the Wild, and Rather Liking
the Change,” basing this assumption on a quick visit to a refugee
camp in San José, where “dozens” of the same tribe pitched up
several years ago and have been idling ever since, leading “listless
lives, lolling in their hammocks [and] awaiting food from the
state.” The paper of record notes little in this but fun and
frolic:
Are they sad? "No!" cried a
Nukak named Pia-pe, to howls of laughter. In fact, the Nukak said they
could not be happier. Used to long marches in search of food, they are
amazed that strangers would bring them sustenance -- free…
One young Nukak mother, Bachanede,
breast-feeding her infant as she talked, said she was happy just to stay
still. "When you walk in the jungle," she said, "your feet
hurt a lot."
I’ve got a feeling the
Nukak’s heads are going to hurt more than their feet before this is
over. As I sat down to write this column, I wanted to make it funny. I
was going to suggest that we bring the Nukak to the United
States -- provided we can get them past
the “Minutemen” at the border. I thought we should bring them
right here to Burlington, Vermont, where the mayor wants to establish a
safe haven for “illegal immigrants” and where they could all
get jobs at Wal-Mart and "pasteurized processed cheese food" at
the Burlington emergency Food Shelf. Since they won’t have
health insurance, we could cover the Nukak under Vermont’s
new Catamount Health plan when they catch cold or malaria, even though no
one knows if or how this "plan" is supposed to work. We could
give them special deals on cell phones, if they don’t mind their
calls being monitored by the federal government. We could send them to
political fundraisers, where they’d not only get spaghetti suppers
but free computers for the kids if they pledge to support Republican
senatorial candidate Rich Tarrant. Hell, somebody could even write a
Nukak version of the national anthem.
But then I thought,
“This isn’t funny. This isn’t funny at
all.” And the Times’ editorial board evidently
agrees with me. “In one sense, there has never been a better time for
a people like the Nukak to leave the wild,” the paper writes in a
post-report mea culpa. “Yet the fact that they're
leaving suggests how much their world -- and ours -- has been
impaired… It's hard to escape the feeling that their self-sustaining
existence was holding something open for us, something that has now been
lost.”
If I knew how to say
“Amen” in Nukak, I’d say it now.
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