Indians' Lore Held Vital to Saving Rain Forest : Brazil: Researcher believes the Amazon's tribes have much to teach about the ecologically efficient use of the jungle's plants and wildlife.

By PETER MUELLO

Feb. 17, 1991 12 AM PT

ASSOCIATED PRESS

RIO DE JANEIRO — When the fierce Kayapo Indians meet Darrell Posey, an American anthropologist, they cover their eyes and weep.

The ritual weeping is the greatest compliment Kayapo warriors can pay an outsider. It symbolizes the grief of separation from a respected member of the tribe.

“It’s a long wail and goes on and on,” said Posey, 42, one of few whites the Kayapos hold in such high regard. “I get goose bumps just thinking of it.”

Posey, from Henderson, Ky., has lived with the warlike Kayapos in their Amazon jungle villages and studied their knowledge of the rain forest. He speaks their language and has been given a tribal name.

He is convinced that only the traditional knowledge of the Kayapos and other Indians can save the rain forest.

“The forest is being destroyed through ignorance,” he said. “Research shows 98% of the species of plants native to tropical areas are being destroyed to utilize 2% that currently have economic value.”

Loggers and ranchers already have cut or burned about one-tenth of the 2 million square miles of Amazon wilderness. Scientists say the destruction adds to the greenhouse effect many believe is making the planet warmer.

“Native groups use 90% to 95% of all plants,” Posey said. “A single variety may have as many as 85 or 100 uses: as a natural insecticide, a coloring, an edible fruit, an aromatic root, for construction materials and so on.”

Unfortunately, he said, scientists have largely ignored the Indians’ experience.

“From the 1% of Amazon tribes that have been studied, we can project that the rest of the groups know the same thing, but they never get studied,” said the anthropologist, a stocky man with a reddish beard and collar-length hair who speaks with a soft drawl.

Posey’s own discovery of Indian knowledge began with bees, when he came to Brazil in 1977 from the University of Georgia in Athens for doctoral research in ethno-entomology. He now is a senior researcher at the Emilio Goeldi Museum in Belem, an Amazon River port 2,100 miles northwest of Rio de Janeiro.

He found that the Kayapos classified bees in a much more complicated way than scientists, handing the knowledge down from generation to generation in certain families.

“We discovered 85 species of native, stingless bees, including nine that were previously unknown to our scientists,” he said.

Posey’s bee research led him to study plants and soils. By 1982, a 20-member scientific team was studying the Kayapos’ knowledge and marveling at the results.

They found that the Indians had solved a problem that has stumped Amazon settlers: how to make the notoriously poor jungle soil suitable for farming.

“Every modern method of utilizing the Amazon results in weakening the soil’s fertility,” Posey said. “Our study shows that, where Indians manipulated the land for agriculture over 40 years, the soils were actually becoming richer.”

The Kayapos did it with sophisticated use of ashes and organic fertilizer and knowledge of a mysterious “empathy” among certain plant species, he said.

“There are plants you use to ‘bathe’ other plants,” Posey said. “We don’t know how they work, but they seem to act as natural growth stimulants.”

In 1986, he founded the Institute of Ethnobiology of the Amazon, a nonprofit research organization that receives money from the World Wildlife Fund in Washington and Cultural Survival of Cambridge, Mass.

Two years later, Posey’s defense of the Kayapos nearly got him thrown out of Brazil.

Posey took chiefs Payakan and Kube-I to a seminar at the University of Florida, where they spoke against a planned hydroelectric dam in the Amazon. They repeated their views to the World Bank in Washington, which often financed such projects.

The Brazilian government declared that Posey and the chiefs had broken the “foreigners law,” which prohibits non-Brazilians from interfering in domestic matters. The case caused an international outcry, especially because Brazil was treating native Indians as foreigners, and was quietly dropped in 1989.

Recently, the Institute of Ethnobiology began a project to educate Indians about the importance of their culture.

Since gold miners, loggers and cattle ranchers began invading the Amazon, many young Kayapos and other Indians have left their villages, seeing no future in the traditional ways.

Brazil’s Indian population was 1 million at the beginning of this century and has shrunk to 220,000.

“All they get in school is a constant diet of white man’s ways: Build a farm, cut down the forest, put on cows, sell your gold, sell your lumber, sell your souls and be like us,” Posey said. “The young kids want to have a watch, a radio, a tape recorder, maybe a car or truck to carry their produce.”

His project consists of 40 booklets, a slide show, a video and theater presentations. After being shown to a meeting of tribal leaders in November, it was submitted to FUNAI, Brazil’s Indian agency.

“It’s our version of the Kayapos’ own knowledge,” Posey said. “We’re saying, ‘Hey guys, your old people taught our scientists.’ That’s a pretty powerful message.”

Posey also is trying to develop local Amazon products for export, ranging from essences, perfumes and oils to fibers, sachets and carved, decorated gourds.

“The market is absolutely enormous,” he said, placing on a table three bottles of cologne in coarse cardboard packages, marked with the names of Indian tribes. “The idea is to use this line of perfumes to generate income for native peoples. Eventually, the tribes themselves will be able to do it and produce truly traditional native essences.”

Other projects include two books and two feature-length movies, one a $30-milllion Hollywood epic based on Posey’s experience with the Kayapos.

In early January, the anthropologist left for a year at the Zoological Collections of Bavaria in Munich, where he plans to research the possibility of patenting the Indians’ knowledge.

“We’ve always recognized intellectual property for the West in terms of corporate ownership of patents, copyrights, royalties,” he said, “but we haven’t recognized collective property rights of native peoples.”

Posey believes the Indians’ forest lore deserves international protection.

“They must have some way of being recognized for having created, preserved and protected not only the knowledge, but the plants to which the knowledge is being applied,” he said.