YAWALAPIT - Where Brazil's massive central savanna meets the Amazon jungle lives an Indian chief who has turned the tide of history.
There, on the banks of the Tuatuari River chief Aritana of the Yawalapiti leads a tribe of 180 people that half a century ago was threatened with extinction. Sitting in the middle of his village under the blazing sun, Aritana utters the words death, struggle and sadness over and over again as he tells of his tribe's revival from just 12 living members.
"When I was born, there was just one house in the Yawalapiti village," he says in softly spoken Portuguese.
"That was about 50 years ago, I don't know exactly," he adds, laughing about his age.
The history of Brazil's Indians is a tragic one, with their population falling to about 350,000 now from an estimated 6 million when the first Portuguese arrived in 1500. Still, in the last two decades there has been gradual recovery in the Indian population, largely thanks to medical care.
Aritana's tribe is one of those rare cases. Now, 12 houses form a traditional circle in his village around a central dirt area about the size of two soccer fields, hard and dusty during this dry season.
Built with long boughs of bent wood and straw on the outside and reaching as high as three-story houses, the mound-shaped huts look like stranded whales. The Yawalapiti spend most of their time in or near the huts if they are not fishing or collecting manioc, a potato-like vegetable.
It was the arrival in the 1940s of Brazil's best-known Indian experts, the brothers Villas Boas, to this area in the heart of Latin America's biggest country that started the recovery of the Yawalapiti tribe.
The Villas Boas' main achievement for the Indians - winning them a Nobel Peace Prize nomination - was the creation in the early 1960s of the Xingu Indigenous Park, giving some 17 tribes the rights to their ancestral lands. The park, of about 5.7 million acres (2.3 million hectares), is slightly smaller than Belgium.
In this oasis of tropical forests interspersed with short, stubby savanna trees, grasslands, rivers, lakes and marshes the Yawalapiti live along with the other tribes that today total an estimated 4,000 people. In the park jaguars prowl, abundant fish splash in the rivers and rare Lear's macaws flutter around the huts.
Aritana, his robust build hinting at his past as an unbeaten champion of his people's Huka Huka wrestling jousts, says the Villas Boas arrived by river and found the Kalapalo, another Xingu tribe.
YAWALAPITI KNOWN IN 'WHITE MAN'S BOOK'
"I don't know how Orlando (Villas Boas) knew the Yawalapiti, but I think the name Yawalapiti was in the white man's book," says Aritana.
Word of Villas Boas' arrival spread to another Xingu tribe, the Kuikuru, with whom Aritana's father Kanato was living. Villas Boas eventually found Kanato and set off to rebuild his tribe, which had abandoned its village and dispersed to live with other tribes some years earlier for unknown reasons.
One of the tribes' elders remembered the Yawalapiti village used to be in a forest clearing near the Tuatuari River.
"And then, when the rest of the Yawalapiti knew that my father was here with the white man, one by one they came," says Aritana. "They started to build the village, plant manioc."
Around that time Aritana was born.
In a rare interview, the surviving Villas Boas brother Orlando, now in his late 80s, recalls that Aritana "was born looking like a chief."
"He is a formidable Indian," says Villas Boas, who spent a lot of time with the young Aritana when he lived in the Xingu.
Aritana would need those qualities as his growing tribe faced greater challenges as the white man opened Brazil's central frontier, bringing farms, illegal logging, forest fires and illnesses the Indians had not faced before.
Seen from the air, cattle farms have gouged massive pockets of forest and encroach on the Xingu reserve from all sides.
With that came the inevitable attractions of and clashes with the culture of the white man. That has been Aritana's real struggle since he was named chief in 1986.
"I visited many relatives from other tribes, outside the Xingu, and I see there that they no longer have their cultures," says Aritana, who has two wives and nine children and underwent a tough traditional upbringing to prepare him for leadership. "The white man dominated everything, ended those cultures. That is my fight, we must not forget our history."
Five years ago, the other Xingu tribal chiefs unanimously agreed to appoint him as their combined leader, something previously unheard of in Indian politics.
"He is the most respected Xingu chief," says Villas Boas.
Ironically, a white man's concept - multiculturalism - helped ensure the Yawalapiti recovery and Aritana's regional role. At the beginning the Yawalapiti married women from other villages, bringing with them different influences. Up to 10 Indian languages are spoken in the village today.
Aritana's upbringing included five years in seclusion - a period of learning and discipline when young men and women are barred from leaving the semi-darkness of their huts. For the men, it includes eating special root remedies to fortify the muscles - a mix which these days has been known to be lethal.
"There was a lot of discipline. Today it is different, nobody is in seclusion here, everybody is free," he says. "My son only stayed a year, he couldn't take it."
But Aritana's vision has paid off.
Were it not for the occasional bicycle, visiting health workers and outboard-motor fishing boats, it is easy to imagine that the Yawalapiti way of life has not really changed for a thousand years. "The Xingu culture is still more or less untouched," says Villas Boas.
UNTOUCHED CULTURE
Waking before sunrise, the Yawalapiti bathe in the river as they have always done and the women carry pots of water on their heads back to the village.
After that, the young men go fishing and the women prepare the manioc bread that is eaten at every meal. Fish is boiled or grilled over open fires and eaten by hand. Multigeneration families share the huts, everyone sleeping in hammocks.
Most impressive is the way the Yawalapiti rejoice in their feasts and traditions, including the ritual painting in preparation for the biggest festival of all, the Kuarup. Marking the death of a member of the chief's family, the ceremony comes at the end of mourning, when the spirit goes to heaven.
In this case, the Kuarup will be for Kanato, Aritana's father, who died last year.
Naked except for feather headdresses, paint from neck to ankle and belts with tassels over the genitals, the tribe's men and woman practice the Kuarup dance, stomping back and forth across the dusty central circle, ankle bells jangling.
"Everybody likes to dance, I was invited too but I don't have a belt," says Kaiulu, 23, who lives in another village.
Aritana's father passed the reins of power to him long before his death, but he was always there to guide him.
His death puts the burden of leadership squarely on Aritana's shoulders. "I feel alone, without my father," he says, mourning for another two months before the Kuarup.:
