Sisters save tiny tribe from extinction
At night, in this village near the Assua River in Brazil, the rainforest reverberates. The sound of generators at times competes with the forest, a sign that there are people here. Until recently, the Juma people seemed destined to disappear like countless other Amazon tribes decimated by the European invasion.
In the late 1990s, the last remaining family was made up of three sisters, Borea, Mande, and Mayta and their father, Aruka, in his 50s. In 2021, Aruka died of Covid-19, prompting obituaries like the one in The New York Times that said the “last man of his tribe” was gone, pushing the Juma, a patriarchal society, closer to extinction. Or so it seemed.
The sisters and their father had had another plan.
“I became interested in trying to gather more strength,” said Mande Juma. “So, I started taking on the role of the leader, the first woman to do so. My sisters and my father encouraged me to assume the position.”
In fact, she was the first woman to become a chief in this part of the Amazon. On her left arm is a tattoo of her father’s bow and arrow. The actual bow and arrows are in her home, shown with pride to a visitor.
During a forced relocation earlier in their lives, Mande and her sisters made the decision to marry men of other tribes, maintaining their people’s lineage, despite a patrilineal tradition.
Today, against long odds, Juma are making a comeback. In their territory, a two-hour boat trip from the nearest road, their village is full of life.
Children of varied ages play in the river. People fish with nets and rods, throwing back the small fish. Women grind cassava into flour, manually, preserving scarce fuel for the generators at night. Others are out hunting.
Throughout the day, people gather at a soaring maloca, or common building, designed in the traditional Juma way, to eat, tend their macaws and parrots, lounge on hammocks during the warmest hours, pound cassava, and check WhatsApp messages on their cellphones, connected to the internet by a dish antenna.
Aruka, the women’s father, is buried under the maloca. Mande has been chief for more than a decade, recently stepping down in favour of her older sister, Borea. She left behind her initial adjustment to travel and leadership.
“As we were few, people didn’t recognise us, didn’t respect us,” she said. “There had never been a woman leader before, and then people came to tell me, ‘You shouldn’t have assumed it because you’re a woman.’”
At first, that hurt, she said. Then she stopped caring.
“I adapted to seek solutions for our people,” she said.
The Juma Indigenous Territory, roughly the size of Las Vegas, is covered by old-growth Amazon rainforest. A top priority is to protect their territory, located in the south of Amazonas state, a hotspot of landgrabbing and illegal deforestation.
Mande fears they could be invaded the same way as the village where she grew up. Once immersed in the forest, it is now surrounded by pasture illegally planted by nonindigenous invaders.
“I went back there for a visit, and the forest . . . ” she trailed off, weeping. “It’s very painful; this is what we don’t want to happen here.”
The planned paving of a highway next to the territory increases the likelihood of being invaded by landgrabbers. Cattle farming and soybean crop expansion across the region are palpably changing the environment.
“The river doesn’t fill with water as it used to . . . It’s much hotter, it wasn’t like this before. Our concern is this: Why is this happening? Because of deforestation,” she said.
To protect against this, young men, including Mande’s nephew, Pure, patrol the territory by boat. They use drones donated by a local indigenous non-profit, Kaninde, to monitor the most remote areas against loggers, poachers and fishermen.
“I kind of broke the anthropology rules and followed my mother’s lineage,” 22-year-old Pure proudly said. “If I don’t identify myself as Juma, who else will?”
His mother, Borea, married a man from the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau. Following a tradition among indigenous Brazilians, he was registered with his tribe father’s name as his surname. But when he was 15 years old, he demanded to add his mother’s tribe. Now his full name is Pure Juma UruEu-Wau-Wau.
The Juma most likely numbered a few thousand before contact, but they resisted non-indigenous invaders and suffered several massacres in reprisal. The last one happened in 1964.
An estimated 60 people were killed, including children. Aruka, one of the few survivors, lost his father. His mother would die years later of malaria.
In 1998, as the six remaining Juma were struggling to survive, the indigenous bureau transferred them to an Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau village, a few hundred kilometres away.
Despite sharing the same language, Kawahva, the elders struggled to adapt. A few months after the arrival, Aruka’s sister and her husband died of sadness, according to an account on the Amazonia Real news website.
Aruka, unhappy and restless, successfully pressured for a return to his home village, with his daughters.
For Mandei, her people’s language has also been key to this survival. She invited a linguist, Wesley dos Santos, to visit in 2019. As part of this collaboration, a multimedia dictionary was created for cellphones, along with an online collection of digital archives with traditional narratives, monologues, and songs in the Juma language.
However there are only 24 people living in the village and Mande believes there are not enough Juma men to increase their population. More than ever, the three women are grappling with how to pass down Juma’s traditions to the next generations.
“The largest responsibility I share with my sisters is to not lose Juma culture as taught by our father,” Mande said.