The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

“Anything the gringo did, we can do better. “ a \m n inet n TIEN Brasitia, Brazii - Brazil was the site of the seventh . annuai Inter-American Congress on Indigenous Popula- tions in August. And it was an event of great irony. First was the site, chosen through the Organization of American States. Brazil has been under attack for its 60. strong, They Had No Way To Bef J saw what happened with the Vuruna tribesmen whose village was between Claudio Vilias Boas’ outpost at Diaurum and the area ‘of Xingu which the read destroy- The sjuruna are only about ut they were absolu- tely con: tent, self-sufficient, and proud of their distinctive tradi- small and beautifully kept vil- jage. After our expedition, during which time the BR8O read had reached Xingu, ! revisited th Juruna and found that everything had changed. With the arrival Fad 32 President of FUNAI, who recent: ly called the Indian population of razil the country’s “ethnic il,” “| have seen the photographs of ‘this Xingu inauguration barbecue and one can easily precanise ine faces of several of the big: cattlemen, who have raditionally Gisregarded all Indian rights and. offered great sums for the tribal lands, When | revisited the Juruna, this yomen and girls, eaten their food and left behind a form of grippe that had most of the Juruna hammock-ridden when | arrived. $s; fros they were going to ae ree in- _ Side the village and that would come again. The suruna fied from their vil- last saw then, just below the Diaurum outpost. The people wha less thana month before had impressed me with the tranquillity and joy of their lives and the abundance of defending itseif or truly under- standing what had happened in this confrontation with the out. side world. (This report by a Brecher was ublished in the Aug: 72, Survival Internatsonal News published loads of military personnel and General Bandeira de Melo, the They had told the Juruna that in London, England, Bureau of Indian Affairs, said the Indians he saw were “magnificent People” a and that he was “impressed” with their health. To the charges by Ralph Nader, published in the last issue of NOTES, ti i world” of Buffalo Bill and General Custer. “He's crazy,” they added, unofficially. The agency pointed out that it has 140 Indian posts © throughout the country, with 144 schools and 115 teachers for 15,102 Indian children. They said they had medica! teams to inoculate against tuberculosis. Nader had said that the Indians were massacred and ressed, but FUNAI said that a series of reports by international agencies” in 187G and 1971 had conclu- ded that Brazilian Indians are treated “humanely, al- truistically, and in a Christian manner by FUNAL and . by religious, scientific and anthropologicat missions.” However, the Indian agency did not comment on the charge of an ex-official, Antonio Cotrim, 31, who had spent the fast ten years with the Indians, that FUNAL had become “the grave digger of the Indians‘! He charged that agency employees who try to protect the Indians are shunted aside. Four years ago, the foundation for Indian Affzirs was completely reorgan- ‘Re. mail attens cmacccattmme ohne ta mead Within three months, the lands of the jatar Kayupo were sold and the native people moved. Pur- chasers of their lands were the Minister of the Interior, SUDECO (a Brazilian Gevelopment scompany) and an unknown American company. “Progress” is also called “ natin security”. The Trans Amazon Highway is being financed largely by the U. Ss. Agency for International Development (AID). Even some Brazilian politicians are not happy about the forcign investment. Senator Ermizio Moracs of Pernambuco points out that concorns such es Bethtchem Steel own anywhere from one (0 two-and-a-half million acres in mineral-rich regions. 5. “We are building a bigh- iy for U.S. Steel,” he say: Aroup of 28 Catholic priests, nuns, and bishops set up a Catholic Indian Council to act as a watchdog over problems in the Government's administration of Indian affairs. The group is particularly opposed to certain clauses of the new Indian Statute, particularly Article 22 which states that all lands occupied by indians belong to the Federal Government. T! 198 that lands inhabited by Indians shal! be the proper- . ty of the Indians themselves. FUNAI has attempted to reduce the infiuence of mis- sionaries. And the missionaries themselves are agreed