SAVAGE OR SAVANT?:

INTERVIEW: A SAVAGE INJUSTICE: Guests: Joe Kane, author (MARY GRAY DAVIDSON, December 31, 1996, COMMON GROUND RADIO)

Author Joe Kane first wrote about South America's rain forest in his national best seller, Running the Amazon. In his new book released in paperback this fall, he focuses on a tribe of Amazonian Indians isolated from the rest of civilization until very recently. The book titled, Savages, is partly an adventure story about the months Kane spent living in Ecuador's rain forest with the Huarani Indians, and in part it's a plea both to preserve the territory the Huarani roam and their fast disappearing way of life. This rain forest is one of the richest places on the planet in terms of biodiversity, but that diversity and that of the indigenous people there, has been threatened ever since the discovery of oil in the region called the Oriente.

DAVIDSON: You titled your book Savages, but clearly there is more than one meaning to who are the savages?

KANE: The title came from a Capuchin priest who was in Coca. Coca was the town on the dateline in the letter and it's a little oil boomtown on the Napo River of about 1,000 people. In 1987, the Brazilian National Petroleum Company had a concession in the Ecuadorian Amazon and they sent a team of mercenaries after the Huarani. They managed to kill some of the Huarani and the Huarani in turn injured some of the mercenaries and the Bishop of Coca found out about that and he had befriended some of the Huarani clans that were on the periphery of the territory, he had learned some Huarani, which is not easy. They are so isolated, they speak a language unrelated to any other on the planet. But he went to oil company and said, "Please, let me go in there and contact these Huarani and warn them that you're coming so they'll move so you won't kill them." And Conoco Oil dropped him by helicopter in a settlement, a Huarani clan hut, right next door to the hut, and left him there and came back there days later and found him pinned to the ground with seventeen palmwood spears sticking out of his corpse like porcupine quills. His body had been punctured in 89 places.

I showed up three years later and went to the Capuchin mission in Coca and talked to his closest friend, Jose Miguel Golgaraz (sp?).

DAVIDSON: This was before you went out and met the Huarani?

KANE: This was before I actually went into the territory. Yeah, and it was Jose Miguel Golgaraz who told me where the Huarani were. They were right in the mission compound. There was a funky little cinderblock shack in the back of the compound. Jose Miguel still had the 17 spears taken from the bishop's body. But he said, "You want to see the Yuarani; there they are." And he pointed me toward this shack and I walked back there and knocked on the door and a very robust young man opened the door. He was quite quiet but you know he was heavily muscled, wearing a clean white tee-shirt, blue jeans, long black hair and he just looked at me and said, "Are you still alive?" I said yes, I'm still alive. He said, "Are you coming here?" I said, "yes, I'm coming here." And he left it at that.

DAVIDSON: Who did he think you were?

KANE: He didn't know. He was just opening the door. And I could see there were four or five other young men behind him and I had this letter and I said, "I was told that I could meet some Huarani here." And he said, "Yes, I'm Huarani." I said, "well, I've got this letter and I'd like to know if it's for real."

DAVIDSON: Now you're speaking in Spanish, right?

KANE: We were speaking in Spanish, yeah. And I said I'd like to know if this letter is for real. And he said, "Of course it's for real; I wrote it. There's my name on the bottom. Why would anybody say it wasn't for real." And this was Nanto, the president of the Huarani organization. And I said, "well, in the United States, they say this letter's not real and that there are no Huarani in the oil zone." This is what I've been told by the NRDC and by the oil companies. And he said, "No, this isn't true." And I said, "well, can I talk to you about it?" He said, "Okay." And I went inside and there were I guess five other young Huarani men in there, all very silent as I walked in, sitting on four bunk beds and just checking me out as I went in. And we went in and nobody said a word and I didn't know what to say. And there was a man sitting off to my right, Enqueri as it turned out, who I would come to know very well. And he was wearing a pair of head phones and the wire was tucked into his right hip pocket. And so to make conversation I asked him, I said, "what are you listening to?" He said, very solemnly, "I am listening to my pants."

Enqueri was just ahead of his time.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 11, 2006 2:09 PM