
In the 1980s a series of development projects in the margins of the Amazon forest, in the state of Maranhão (Brazil), favoured the invasion of Indian territory by landlords, timber merchants and miners. The local groups were decimated by new diseases, mass killings and the dispossession of their lands.
Two men from an unknown group live in an isolated hut in the Awá people's reservation. They are not Awá, they do not mingle with them. Nobody understands their language. Their neighbors and families were massacred long ago. They are the only survivors and the last representatives of a culture lost forever. Modernity transformed a living culture into an archaeological one in just a few years, maybe months.
The two men spend their time making arrows. Thousands of arrows. We counted 1,630. For the revenge to come, somebody tells us.
by Alfredo Gonzalez Ruibal
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