Brazil today and tomorrow

by L. E. Elliott Joyce

Farther south the Indian seems to have been of a different origin, whose cradle is assigned by some scientists to Paraguay, and who are identified with the fierce Caribs, invaders of the West Indian islands and destroyers of the gentle aborigines of those shores before the Spanish came. No pottery remains are found in the south as in the north; these tribes seem to have been nomadic in tendency, cultivators of no arts that have left traces, builders of but light and temporary dwellings, living upon few foods and those obtained chiefly by hunting. The chief articles cultivated were mandioca and maize, the forests yielding wild fruits and nuts. There seems to be no doubt that the majority, if not all, of these natives were given to cannibal feasts, but in some cases the act was ceremonial and in others was confined to enemies of the tribe. Apart from these propensities the native appears to have been a gentle and even timid creature, endowed with simple good sense, and quite a man of his word. With the Portuguese settler he was almost always at loggerheads, but the French knew well how to make a valuable and faithful ally of him, loyal supplier of food and shelter in the darkest day of the French attempt at colonization both north and south; the Jesuit priests, too, who followed the Indians into the wilderness were able to make quiet converts out of them, and to train them to domesticity. Since the Jesuits’ work was destroyed and the missionaries themselves expelled from the country the Indian has been practically let alone; withdrawn socially, his part in Brazilian life has been a silent one. He has been still living in the Stone Age. He never knew and has not adopted the use of metal, erected no stone or other permanent buildings of any kind, and set up no temples to his gods. Idea of a deity was to many tribes represented by Tupan, a being somewhat resembling the North American’s “Great Spirit;” medicine men, called pagés, performed and still perform, wonders and enchantments to cure the sick. When Prince Adalbert of Prussia went up the Amazon in 1843 he was able to see one of these wizards at work upon a sick man, and himself complained of a pain in his arm, asking the pagé to cure it; the spot was rubbed with unguents, covered with leaves, exorcisms were made, and at last the pagé blowing upon the arm freed a butterfly and declared that this was the disappearing pain; the European onlookers said that it was a marvel that the wizard had been able to go through such a performance with the butterfly concealed in his mouth: evidently these are quite good conjurers. It is not unknown for the position of pagé to be offered to a distinguished foreigner: I heard on the Amazon of a German doctor, whose cures had won the confidence of a remote tribe, receiving this curious honour.

The only man of modern times who has had continued success with the native of the interior is that great Brazilian, Colonel Candido Rondon: in his work of constructing telegraphs and roads and mapping and surveying in the vast sertões of Matto Grosso, Rondon has laboured for twenty-five years to win over the timid and hostile Indians. He has so far succeeded that not only do they now refrain from destroying his lines and stations, but have been trained to the service of the Commission which Rondon heads, guarding the posts and cultivating fields in their neighbourhood for the supply of the engineers. In 1915 a series of moving picture films were shown in Brazilian cities, made on the route of the Commission’s work, and showing interesting pictures of Parecís, Nhambiquaras, and other Indian tribes friendly to the invaders of their interior regions; they are frequently fine-looking, welldeveloped, sturdy people, very well worth saving among the world’s races.

All over the Americas the question of the fate of the native is a painful one. In North America, both in Canada and the United States, he has diminished with extraordinary rapidity even when wars have ceased; contact with the white man seems to be fatal to him. It is only of late, since he ceased to be a physical danger, that conscience has been aroused on his behalf and efforts made to retain the survivals. Farther south the Aztec is still holding his own, a hardy race living its own life yet and able to preserve customs and wide land spaces. In Central America the only marked group of pure race is the gentle Guatemalan Maya, almost enslaved but still living the life of the sixteenth century in the uplands: when taken to work in the lowlands, he dies.

In Peru the natives are still a strong tough mountain people: Ecuador, Bolivia and Chile also have incorporated the Indian into the industrial life of the country; from the Argentine he has practically disappeared, the face of the land occupied by restless, industrial strangers, while he has no place in statistics or in calculations affecting the progress of the country. He is no more a factor than the North American Indian is a factor in the United States.

Is he to suffer a similar fate in Brazil? Not yet, for his numbers are large and he still occupies great tracts of the vast hinterlands. There is, too, a lively public sentiment on the subject of the Indian in Brazil, statesmen and writers frequently calling attention to the problem. Spaces in Brazil are so enormous that it will be many a generation before any question arises of intrusion upon Indian retreats, and perhaps by that time an extension of the methods of Rondon will have divested him of fear of civilization.

It cannot, however, be imagined that the native of Brazil will supply the labour needed to develop great interior regions; he is not willing to work at given tasks at appointed times and to maintain such work day by day. He is probably not physically fitted for such tasks. When, seduced by agents during rubber booms, he has been bribed into working at the systematic gathering of goma, he has failed and died in too many instances; only when his blood is mingled with that of another race, and the caboclo produced, is the child of the selvagem able to take his place in the industrial world.

With the suggestion that the Indian should be strengthened by admixtures of introduced Asiatics, on the score that the Oriental and the native of Brazil are already akin, I have scant patience. A tilt of the eyelids seen in some Central and South American natives has been the chief basis of a number of fantastic theories generally pre-supposing the passage of large numbers of Chinese immigrants by way of the Behring Strait; difficulties are brushed away with an easy hand by enthusiasts of this idea, but to ignore them is, as T. A. Joyce says, to ignore the value of scientific evidence. It is just as reasonable to suppose that China or Japan or both were colonized from South America as to insist on the reverse movement, but as a matter of fact the division is so extreme on the very points where resemblances should exist—in language roots, social customs, arts and food, and religion—that discussion of the question appears futile. It may be taken for granted that oriental immigration and mixing will not be accepted by Brazilians as the solution to the Indian problem; like many another Brazilian problem, it will be solved from within.

Education in Brazil for the masses of the people has been the subject of serious consideration and effort for the last fifty years. Government schools in the care of the separate States differ widely in varying latitudes, both in quantity and quality, and problems depend largely upon the origin of the population. The Italian immigrants of São Paulo are obviously not in the same class as pupils as the negroes of Bahia State or the three-quarter Indians of Amazonas, nor can States with few exports and small revenues spend a corresponding amount on education with rich and expanding regions.

São Paulo is in the matter of public schools, as in commerce, the leader State; she is a wealthy State, and she has not hesitated to spend enormous sums on all kinds of public works, whether roads, water-supply, railways, drainage—or school buildings and service. The Director of Public Instruction, Dr. João Chrisostomo, in speeches and writings shows that he has a very clear idea of the object of modern schooling, to train a healthy mind in a healthy body. Medical and dental attendance upon the children is regularly carried out in the Paulista schools, teachers are trained in an excellently equipped and managed Normal School, and buildings have been multiplied until there is today a school for every fourteen hundred of the inhabitants of São Paulo state. The task of educating the children of the working population is a more difficult one in the agricultural districts, but every good coffee fazenda has its school. São Paulo has made special efforts to bring new immigrants into touch with Brazilian conditions by establishing a series of night schools where Portuguese is taught, together with Brazilian history and geography; the writer once visited a school of this kind and saw Italians, Syrians, Greeks and a Japanese, all adults, learning earnestly in the same room.

Not all of the Brazilian States have as much money to spare as São Paulo, but the framework, and much of the real building and equipment, of a satisfactory public school system exists in every section of the country. Feminine professional education has made a certain start, and the writer has rarely seen a more promising, and handsome, group of young women than the students of a normal school in Pará. Many Brazilian cities take pride in their professional and technical colleges, some of very old foundation, as that of the School of Law of Pernambuco, the School of Medicine of Bahia, the Polytechnic School of Rio de Janeiro, and the School of Law of São Paulo.