After the Rubber Boom
When the first ‘conquistadores’
travelled down the Amazon in the 16th century, they found populous
settlements, hierarchical chiefdoms and complex agricultural systems
all along the main river. The ‘Indians’, they reported,
raised turtles in ponded freshwater lagoons, had vast stores of
dried fish, made sophisticated glazed pottery, and had huge jars,
each one capable of holding a hundred gallons. They also noted these
peoples had flotillas of canoes and traded up into the Andes and
down to the mouth of the great river. Their numerous warriors carried
wooden warclubs and thick leather shields made of the skins of crocodiles
and manatees. Behind the large settlements, they noted ‘many
roads that entered into the interior of the land, very fine highways’
some so broad they likened them to a royal highway in Spain. These
stories were later discounted as the puff of promoters trying to
magnify the importance of their ‘discoveries’, for since
the late 18th century the banks of the Amazon have been almost entirely
depopulated. During the 20th century the archetypal Amazonians were
‘hidden tribes’, groups of hunters, gatherers and shifting
cultivators, who lived isolated in the headwaters of the main rivers,
eschewing contact with the national society.
With the benefit of hindsight
and new insights from history and archaeology, we can now see that
these two perceptions of Amazonia are strangely and tragically related.
Archaeology now teaches us that lowland Amazonia, even in areas
of poor soil and blackwater like the Upper Xingu, was indeed once
quite heavily settled. Regional trade and dynamic synergies between
Amazonian peoples had led to the sub-continent being densely peopled
by widely differentiated but inter-related groups, who specialised
in local skills to work and use their specific environments in diverse
and subtle ways.
The onslaught of western
societies brought much of this complexity to an end. Warfare, conquest,
religious missions and the scourge of old world diseases reduced
populations to less than a tenth of the pre-Colombian levels. Slave
raids, both by European soldiery and by other indigenous groups,
who traded the ‘red gold’ of enslaved ‘Indians’
for the products of western industries, stripped the lower rivers
bare of any remnant groups. Raiding, slaving and competition for
trading opportunities with the whites created turmoil in the headwaters.
The myth of the empty Amazon became a reality, as any survivors
moved inland and upriver to avoid these depredations.
In the late 19th century,
overseas markets and advances in technology created new possibilities
of exploitation. In particular, the discovery of the process of
vulcanisation, led to a global trade in a non-timber forest product,
rubber, which could now be hardened for industrial use. The onerous
task of bleeding latex, yoked to global trade, yielded fortunes
for entrepreneurs prepared to penetrate the headwaters, enslave
local tribes and force them to work the scattered stands of rubber
trees. International capital flooded in to make the most of these
opportunities. Tens of thousands of indigenous people perished from
the renewal of slaving, the torching of settlements, the starvation
of survivors, the forced labour and diseases. The process also led
to further waves of surviving indigenous peoples fleeing deeper
into the forests, seeking to break off contact with a changing world
that brought them death and cultural degradation.
Of course, not all the indigenous
peoples in the Amazonian headwaters are refugees escaping the brutalities
of contact, but the impact of the outside world on even the remotest
headwaters is often underestimated. For many indigenous peoples
in the Amazon and also in other parts of the world, the search for
isolation has been an informed choice – the logical response
of peoples who have realised that contact with the outside world
brings them ruin not benefits. Life in the forests without trade
may have its hardships, not just because the absence of the metal
goods like axes, machetes, fishhooks and cooking pots makes subsistence
harder work, but also because customary trade, barter and exchange
between indigenous peoples were also once ways of making life more
varied and richer. But it is these peoples choice.
21st century industrial
societies are now being drawn into the last reaches of the Amazon,
where these indigenous peoples now live in voluntary isolation,
for other globally traded resources – not slaves or rubber
this time, but timber, oil, gas and minerals. If we deplore the
horrors of death and destruction that ineluctably accompanied previous
penetrations of the Amazon, can we now show that modern industrial
society is more civilised? Can we respect the choice of other societies
to avoid contact and leave them in their homelands undisturbed until,
perhaps, some future time when they themselves decide on the risky
venture of contacting a world that they have learned by bitter experience
is not safe to interact with? If we can’t, then it is almost
certain that future generations will condemn us for the same avarice,
indifference, selfishness and greed, for which we today condemn
the conquistadores and the rubber barons.
Marcus Colchester, Forest
Peoples Programme.
