CONTACTS WITH INDIANS

Iriri River Expedition, 1961. John Hemming was on the first exploration of a totally unknown part of central Brazil, between the Cachimbo hills and the source of the Iriri river. For five months eleven men cut deep into the forest, surveyed and collected and made dugout canoes, carring their food or living off the land. The Brazilian mapping agency IBGE sent three of its surveyors and gave permission to name newly discovered rivers or other features. The expedition was cut short when the then unknown and uncontacted Panará people laid an ambush on its main trail and killed the leader, Hemming's Oxford friend Richard Mason. They carried his embalmed body out, for eventual burial in Rio de Janeiro. The other Englishman on the expedition was Kit Lambert, who later became the impresario of the pop group The Who.

Visits to 45 indigenous peoples, 1971-72. John Hemming visited or lived with Indians in all parts of Brazil, probably seeing more tribes than any other non-Brazilian. He was with four peoples seen at the time of their first contact: Asurini, Parakanã (in Pará), Suruí (Rondônia) and Galera Nambikwara (Mato Grosso). During part of this time, he was on a 4-man international team invited by the Brazilian Indian service to report on the treatment of indigenous peoples.

Indianists (sertanistas). During the above and subsequent visits to Brazil, Hemming travelled with or met the seven foremost Indian explorers: Chico Meirelles and his son Apoena, Antonio Cotrim, Gilberto Pinto, Sydney Possuelo and the legendary Villas Boas brothers Orlando and Cláudio. He was the only foreigner invited to attend both the latter’s kuarup funerary ceremonies by the Xingu Indians: Cláudio’s in 1998 and Orlando’s in 2003.

BOOKS

A trilogy on the history of Brazil’s indigenous peoples from 1500 to the present:

Red Gold. The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians (685 pages: revised Papermac, London, 1996. First published 1978). This covers the period from the arrival of the first Portuguese in 1500 to the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1760.

Amazon Frontier. The Defeat of the Brazilian Indians (618 pages, revised Papermac, 1995; first published 1987). This book covers the period 1760-1910, including the post-Jesuit ‘Directorate’, the great Cabanagem rebellion, and the Amazon rubber boom.

Die If You Must. Brazilian Indians in the Twentieth Century (855 pages, Pan Macmillan, 2003). This volume starts with Rondon’s creation of the enlightened Indian Service, and covers the Indians’ near-extinction, explorations that led to contact with many tribes, and the political efforts (largely by themselves) that led to their partial revival.

My other books concerned with indigenous peoples are: The Search for El Dorado (Michael Joseph, London, 1978; Phoenix Books, 2000), which deals with the exploration of northern Amazonia in the sixteenth century, and Tribes of the Amazon Basin in Brazil (co-author, Charles Knight, London, 1973), also many papers, articles, reviews and lectures, including the keynote speech at the first Conference on Isolated Peoples of all the Amazonian nations (Belém, Pará, 2005).

Awarded Comendador, Order of the Southern Cross (Ordem do Cruzeiro do Sul), Brazil. Served on the council of the Anglo-Brazilian Society for over forty years.

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