National Post (National Edition)
WHEN A DEBUTANTE WENT TO THE AMAZON
Why a Toronto woman left high society to spend 50 years living with an Amazon tribe
The four-seater plane touched down in a clearing about three hours northwest of Brasilia, where the jungle gave way to a dirt landing strip in Xingu Indigenous Park, near the Xingu River.
Claudio Villas-Boas, short, bearded and gregarious, greeted Ruth Thomson and Mickey Stout as they stepped from the aircraft. Villas-Boas, a Brazilian adventurer and fierce advocate for indigenous people, had made first contact with the Kayapo a decade before. The Kayapo had a reputation for killing foreigners who strayed into their territory. They raided other tribes and took captives.
They were warlike and proud.
Villas-Boas introduced Thomson, a Canadian, and Stout, an American, who had come to live among the tribe as missionaries.
“These are your sisters,” he said. “Look after them and they will look after you.”
Some of the men carried rifles — expropriated from dead Brazilians. Others had bows and clubs, perfect for killing wild pigs or bashing in an enemy's skull. Their faces were brilliantly painted. The women felt Thomson's skin and hair. Young children fled at the sight of her. The Indians didn't speak Portuguese. Thomson didn't speak Kayapo. No foreigner did, aside from Villas-Boas, who, upon making the necessary introductions, departed.
The Kayapo and the missionaries paddled by dugout canoe to their village. They lived in long, rectangular homes with palm-thatched roofs, mud-wattle walls and beaten-earth floors. Thomson and Stout stayed with the chief, Ykakor (pronounced u-ca-core-o). Ykakor was known as a great weaver and maker of colourful headdresses. He adopted Thomson as his “daughter.”
In a photo from that time more than 50 years ago her face is painted black and red. She is laughing along with a Kayapo woman of a similar age at some long forgotten joke. Thomson is in jeans and a shirt. Her companion is naked.
“Most of the people in these photographs are dead now,” Thomson says. “Look at their beautiful faces.”
The woman in the photograph is 19. She is wearing a white ball gown, white high heels and white operalength gloves that hide her elbows. Her dark blond hair is straight and cut short. Her head is cocked slightly to the left. Pearls dangle from her ears, while her hazel-coloured eyes stare intently at the camera. The woman isn't smiling, but she looks beautiful, in a defiant, I'd-rather-be-anywhereelse-but-here-way, which is exactly how Ruth Thomson felt over her parents insistence that she have her portrait taken in the backyard of their family home by the exclusive Toronto photography house of Ashley and Crippen on the eve of her debut to Toronto society at the 1959 Governor General's Ball.
“My parents were wonderful people,” Thomson says. “The only big disagreement I can ever remember having with them was over them insisting that I become a debutante — going to lunches with the other debutantes at private clubs, learning how to curtsey, the Governor General's Ball and all that other stuff. “I had no patience for any of it. It all seemed so artificial. It wasn't the life for me.”
This is the story of the remarkable life the former Toronto debutante chose instead: to work as a missionary among the Kayapo tribe in a remote corner of the Amazon jungle. She has, by her count, survived multiple bouts of malaria, battled typhoid, worms, fleshing-eating maggots and burrowing fleas; dined often on armadillo (it tastes like chicken); impaled her foot on a poisonous fish; been shocked by electric eels and chomped by caterpillars, whose bite she equates to “liquid fire.”
She has narrowly escaped death by anaconda, witnessed a villager get his finger bitten off by a piranha and been asked to bury a dead Brazilian on a beach — after her Kayapo hosts murdered the man for straying into their lands. Thomson used to spend up to a year, without break, among the Kayapo in her younger days. Now 76, she spends up to half the year in Canada. When she left for the Amazon on Dec. 6, she planned to stay for five months.
Thomson went to a girls' private school set amid the mansions of Rosedale, in a part of Toronto where the Who's Who of the city resided. Her father, Clive, was a prominent lawyer. Helen, her mother, was an accomplished horsewoman. The Mellon family dynasty of Pittsburgh, Penn., would recruit Helen to ride for them in competitions.
For all their society connections, the Thomsons were rooted in their faith and driven by adventure. Hiking, paddling, picking wild blueberries at the cottage, horseback riding, getting outdoors and being active were integral to Ruth Thomson's upbringing. She could handle a rifle. She took judo lessons. She always kept her word.
“In many ways, my parents were ahead of their time,” Thomson says.
Adrienne Pitt is a childhood friend and former schoolmate. She can remember Thomson, at around age 10, pulling a book off the local library shelves about missionaries. The girls looked at the pictures, and read about good deeds and adventure in exotic spots.
“Ruth said, “Maybe I'll be a missionary when I grow up,” Pitt recalls.
Pitt had no doubt her friend would do it.
Thomson studied theology at Toronto Bible College and linguistics at the University of North Dakota and the University of Oklahoma before joining the Wycliffe Bible Translators, a missionary group. She was 25 when she flew into Kayapo country in January of 1965 with Mickey Stout. They brought medical supplies, notebooks and pens and a few changes of clothes.
“The Kayapo of the 1960s were like the Sioux Indians in the 1840s and 1850s,” says Barbara Zimmerman, director of the Kayapo Project for the International Conservation Fund of Canada.
“The frontier was moving in and they were a warrior culture. They were still regularly killing people, and by killing people, I mean people they viewed as a threat or had somehow trespassed on their land.
“They are not killing people as much now, although they still do.”
Like most cultures, the Kayapo are inherently ethnocentric: They think they are the greatest culture on Earth. As such, they were eager for Thomson to learn their language, a process that unfolded through hand gestures and smiles.
“They would bring me a fish, point to it and say — “tet, tet” — and so I'd write down tet — and fish — in my notebook,” Thomson says.
There is no “th” sound in Kayapo, and so Thomson's Kayapo 'grandmother' named her “Birbir.” It took a long time for the Canadian to figure out that she was named after a tree frog. She spent five years developing a Kayapo alphabet, consisting of 17 vowels and 16 consonants. Children are taught it today in Kayapo village schools.
Zimmerman, the conservationist, has tremendous respect for her fellow Canadian. But she also agrees with the overwhelming consensus of contemporary anthropologists who view missionary work as utterly “anachronistic.”
“The missionary effect has had zero impact on the 21st century outcome of whether the Kayapo are going to be able to protect their lands and protect their rights from the onslaught they are facing,” she says.
“Every bad guy you can imagine wants to get into that region to exploit it. It is the Wild West, in every sense.”
Seeking Christian converts, and only a handful of the estimated 8,600 Kayapo have converted, won't stop illegal logging camps, gold digs, cleanse polluted rivers or restore ancient rainforest tracts that have been clear cut to make way for ranching.
And prayer won't prevent Brazilian politicians from tinkering with the country's constitution to open up the tribe's territory for development.
Zimmerman believes Thomson's greatest contribution to the Kayapo isn't religion, but their written language. Writing things down — history, customs, ceremonial practices — preserves them for future generations. Literacy rates among the Kayapo are rising. In this analysis the Canadian has been a teacher, and an accidental anthropologist, as much as she has been a missionary.
Thomson counters, in a most polite way, by arguing that the Kayapo who adopt the faith are deeply grounded in a sense of self. They ask introspective questions. They search for meaning in their life and, she says, they find it in their Kayapo identity.
‘The Christians in the community want to live a Kayapo life,' she says. ‘They are not tempted by the frontier towns.
“I don't think the Kayapo are going to get steamrolled by the 21st century. I know these people. “They are warriors.” What can't be debated is that a former Toronto debutante has experienced 50 years of Kayapo history in real time. Thomson has recorded the Amazon tribe's myths and legends, danced in their festivals, shared in their food, nursed their illnesses, bandaged their wounds — buried their victims — taught their language classes, named their children, mourned their deaths and slept in their homes.
Fifty years ago they didn't wear clothes. Now they call Thomson on their cellphones. Times have changed but the missionary, in some ways, hasn't. She may have hated being a debutante but admits that her past came in handy in the months prior to her first flight into the jungle. She was billeted with a Brazilian family to learn Portuguese. They were a well-to-do clan and impressed by the Canadian's blue blood roots.
‘Brazilians are very classconscious,' Thomson says. 'In that environment, me having been a debutante served a practical purpose.'
Doors opened. Thomson was invited to exercise horses for the Brazilian military, and did so for decades thereafter during her ‘furloughs' away from the Amazon in Brasilia. She has met some influential people, and so while partial to prayer she isn't afraid to make a few well-placed phone calls when outside opportunists are found illegally encroaching on Kayapo lands. She declined to give specific examples, however, since the Amazon remains a dangerous place.
Several Kayapo parents have asked the missionary to become a grandmother to their newborn, a role that includes naming it. Naming festivals last several months and conclude with a dusk-todawn celebration, where the grandmother dances through the night with the unnamed infant in their arms.
“It is exhausting,” Thomson says.
Instead of passing on her own name as is the custom — the Kayapo still can't pronounce the “th” in Ruth — Thomson “Kayapo-ized” her father's name. Clive, in Kayapo, is Kraxti. Kraxti means Big Stump.
Thomson closes the old photo albums and steps past the Kayapo machete — ideal for hacking through dense jungle and removing burrowing fleas from your foot — hanging next to her front door, and heads for a hiking trail on her property. The sparsely furnished bungalow is on 42 acres near the village of Varney, two hours northwest of Toronto. She pauses to point out some watercress in a meandering stream, and a spot where she found the most “delicious” wild mushrooms.
The late November sky is pink. The trees are bare.
“I'll keep going back for as long as I am physically able,” she says. “The Kayapo are warlike, aggressive and brave. They value being generous, above all, and they are extremely proud of their culture.
“I see them as family.”
I’LL KEEP GOING BACK FOR AS LONG AS I AM PHYSICALLY ABLE.