Although guajás was known of the existence of the
indians since the beginning of the century, the same
ones had been only found by the Funai in 1973. According to anthropologist Mércio Pereira Gomes, who helped to identify to the indians guajás in the Awá area in 1980, is probable that they are the last Brazilian nomads.
The Txipatxiá village, bes situated in the maranhense city of Saint Ines, in the verge with Pará.
While they rambled for the Amazonian Forest naked, without saying Portuguese, in harmony with the nature as it has 500 years, guajás of the Awá reserve nor imagined how much the whites want to steal this space. As it does not have official landmark in the Awá territory, it it passed to be coveted by agropecuaristas, lumber, entrepreneurs and politicians.
At the time that these andarilhos indians had been discovered, the same ones added 600 men and women more - three times than today, later that the whites had brought it diseases as the grippe, the malaria, verminoses, the tuberculosis and the illnesses of skin. According to Funai: “To fix them it was an alternative to prevent the extermínio”.
Indefirentes to the problems, guajás still lives of traditional form. The men hunt and fish, the women take care of of the village, the
children trepam in
trees and swim between the
fish punarés in the rivers and the
younglings of animals circulate in return of the houses wooden, calls of tupiris. If the indians, for accident, kill a female during the hunted one, bring the younglings so that the indians feed them and finish of create them until they can abated and be eaten.
In the full moon nights, they carry through the Karawarakaia, species of preparation spiritual for the hunting, where dresses with cocar and penalties dance until the dawn. Chieftain in the Awá
village does not exist. The authority is the woman oldest of the tribe, makes childbirths and remedies, always baptize the babies - with names of birds and trees. Since that he lost the fertility, it third husband yielded its, Taitakuará, for the Yauatraí goal, then with 12 years. The couple already has two children and all live with the matriarca.
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