Xingu Indigenous Park


The Xingu Indigenous Park is an indigenous territory of Brazil, first created in 1961 as a national park in the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil. Its official purposes are to protect the environment and the several tribes of Xingu indigenous peoples in the area.

Location

The Xingu Indigenous Park is in the north east of the state of Mato Grosso, in the south of the Amazon biome.
It covers, with savannah and drier semi-deciduous forests in the south transitioning to Amazon rain forest in the north.
There is a rainy season from November to April.
The headwaters of the Xingu River are in the south of the park.
The area covered by the park was defined in 1961 and covers parts of the municipalities of Canarana, Paranatinga, São Félix do Araguaia, São José do Xingu, Gaúcha do Norte, Feliz Natal, Querência, União do Sul, Nova Ubiratã and Marcelândia in the state of Mato Grosso.

History

The national park was created after a campaign by the Villas-Bôas brothers for protection of the region.
An account of the exploration of this area by the Villas-Bôas brothers and their efforts to protect the region is documented in the film Xingu and in the book by John Hemming, 'People of the Rainforest: The Villas Boas Brothers, Explorers and Humanitarians of the Amazon'.
The Villas Boas and three anthropologists and activists had the radical idea of creating a vast area of forest protected solely for its indigenous inhabitants and invited scientists. This was put to the vice president of Brazil in 1952, at which a much larger park was proposed. However, the proposal was opposed by the state of Mato Grosso which began granting land within the proposed area to colonizing companies. Nine years of bitter political and media struggle ensued, until a new president of Brazil, Janio Quadros rammed it through as a presidential decree, but at a greatly reduced area to satisfy the state government. The park came into existence by decree 50.455 of 14 April 1961.
The area was soon given the designation of "Indigenous Park" to cover the dual purpose of protecting the environment and the indigenous people, with all others excluded. It was the first such vast protected area in the world, and was the prototype of large indigenous territories throughout Amazonia which now protect a significant proportion of surviving tropical rain forests. The Xingu Indigenous Park was initially a presidential department, but is now subject to both the indigenous agency Funai and the environmental agency Ibama.
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By the late 1990s livestock and soya farms to the north east of the park were starting to reach the park, as was deforestation to the west of the park. The effects of human activity outside the park were starting to pollute the waters of the park.
The park remains as an island of forest and rivers increasingly threatened by polluting activity and deforestation outside its perimeter.

Peoples

The people living within the boundaries of the Park are the Kamaiurá, Aweti, Mehinako, Wauja, Yawalapiti, Kalapalo, Kuikuro, Matipu, Nahukwá and Trumai, who all share a common cultural system. Also living within the Park are the Ikpeng] ], Kaiabi, Kisêdjê, Yudja , Tapayuna and Naruvotu peoples.
The Xingu area is of great interest because its rich indigenous cultures escaped devastation by Europeans and their diseases, thanks to a lack of rubber or mineral resources in the region, and to a waterfall-rapids barrier on the Xingu river.
The first explorer to contact and write about the people of the region was the German anthropologist Karl von den Steinen in the 1880s, followed by short visits by other anthropologists and government surveyors. But the first outside permanent residence there was by the Sao Paulo brothers Orlando and Claudio Villas Boas, from 1947 to 1976. They devised a new system for helping indigenous peoples, as friends, helpers and equals rather than as colonialist officials. This is now adopted throughout Brazil. By slowly introducing change at a rate that the indigenous peoples wanted and could absorb, they brought them in only two generations to awareness of all aspects of modern Brazilian society without losing their respect for their traditional communal societies and way of life.
Leaders of Xingu indigenous groups such as Aritana Yawalapiti and Raoni Metuktire, both trained by the Villas Boas, are now spokesmen for all Brazil's indigenous peoples on a world stage. Ever since the late 1970s the Director of the Xingu Indigenous Park has been indigenous, chosen by the area's chiefs.
In the sixty years after contact by Von den Steinen, the Xingu peoples had been struck by alien diseases such as measles and influenza that reduced their small populations by two-thirds. The Villas Boas completely reversed this decline through an agreement with Professor Roberto Baruzzi of a Sao Paulo teaching hospital, whereby for over fifty years teams of volunteer doctors have inoculated and tended the Xingu peoples to the highest medical standards.
In June 1925 the British artillery Lt.-Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett visited the upper Xingu with his son and son's friend, by the same trail and river route used by all previous visitors. They spent a few days with the Aweti and Kalapalo peoples before either being killed by one of these tribes or continuing their journey into the forest. A trained surveyor, Fawcett had between 1907 and 1911 mapped four boundaries for the Bolivian government. A devotee of spiritualism, he became convinced that the Amazon forests might contain a lost city of an extremely ancient 'superior' civilization. After distinguished service in the First World War, Fawcett spent several years pursuing his fantasy in the north-east and other parts of Brazil, before the 1925 incursion to the Xingu. The disappearance of a British lieutenant-colonel, seeking a mystical city in Amazonian forests, caused a media sensation. David Grann wrote an article about this exploration, followed by an expanded book, The Lost City of Z (2009