Awaiting Internet Access, Remote Brazilian Tribes Debate Its Promise, Peril
By Monte Reel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, July 6, 2007; A08
SANGRADOURO INDIAN RESERVE, Brazil -- When the sun sinks behind the palm
and mango trees, candlelight flickers throughout a tiny village of
thatched huts where about 100 Xavante Indians live.
The villagers here lack electricity but not technical ambition. Just
beyond the semicircle of huts sits a new one-room school building, and a
place inside has already been reserved for an eagerly anticipated local
milestone: the village's first computer.
In the past several months, an information technology boom has started
to spread through the Indian villages that dot Brazil's countryside,
from the Amazon rain forest to the Pantanal wetlands.
The federal government this year announced a new program to provide
satellite Internet access to 150 remote communities, in hopes that they
will be better equipped to protect themselves against illegal logging
and other threats to their culture. Industry giants such as Google and
Intel also have recently launched projects to provide high-tech
assistance in the area.
The race to wire remote communities is resulting in a new category of
discussion at tribal meetings.
"All of the Xavante villages in this reserve are in the middle of a
debate right now to decide whether they think Internet access will be a
good thing or a bad thing," said Romulo Tsereruo, 37, who teaches in the
school building here. "In this village, we've already decided: We want it."
First, electricity is on the way, part of another federal program called
Light for All. In the largest village inside this reserve, new
electrical cables already lie coiled on the ground, and most of the
villages scattered nearby expect to have electricity within months.
Tsereruo said he has had discussions with state officials to secure a
computer and with representatives of Brazil's Communications Ministry to
get a satellite Internet connection shortly thereafter.
To some here, the plan sounds like an example of misplaced priorities.
The village doesn't even have running water.
Alexandre Tsereptse, 74, is one of the skeptics. Tsereptse, the tribal
leader of a village of about 800 people on the reserve, was a teenager
when his village elders first made contact with Catholic missionaries.
They eventually provided the tribe's first access to computers and other
modern technology, just a short car ride away in the small towns of
eastern Mato Grosso state.
Even though there are computers at a nearby mission, Tsereptse said
bringing them into the village would only accelerate the erosion of
Xavante tradition.
"I don't think it's a good thing, because it's a threat to our culture,"
said Tsereptse, who carries a bow and arrow with him at all times as a
symbol of his position.
Some of the tribe's younger members have been trying to convince
Tsereptse that computers will have the exact opposite effect -- that
they can be tools to record and preserve Xavante folklore and
traditions, and to disseminate them all over the world.
"We're always looking for ways to improve our quality of life while
protecting our culture," said Bartolomeu Patira Prenhopa, 37, who was
born in the village and educated at a university in Campinas as a
biochemist. "The main benefit is that it could be a way to record our
history."
Prenhopa said the generation of Xavante that came before him learned
Portuguese as a way to work with -- and protect themselves from -- a
Brazilian government that had become an inextricable presence in their
lives. The computer is the next step, he said.
The government's stated objective is to encourage tribes to report any
illegal logging or ranching they might witness, and to help better
coordinate efforts to preserve the wild areas in a country that loses
thousands of square miles of forest each year to development, mostly
logging and farming.
It's a strategy that Chief Almir Narayamoga Surui, leader of a
1,200-member Amazonian tribe in Rondonia, has been advocating in recent
months while appealing for international help from nongovernmental
organizations and corporations.
Surui, whose Catholic education first exposed him to computers in 1994,
said he is convinced that computer technology is the most powerful tool
available to protect tribes like his that are looking to protect
themselves from illegal loggers. Though his community received
electricity just this year, he has already secured laptops for his
tribe, provided by the nonprofit Amazon Conservation Team, based in
Arlington, Va.
"The use of computers helps us manage any funds we receive as support,
to create new projects and to record memoirs," Surui, 32, said in an
e-mail. "Using the Internet, we can enter into contact with the world,
learning about what is happening and distributing our news to others.
When we have any problems with invasions from loggers, hunters or
miners, we can denounce them in a quicker way."
Surui, along with representatives from the Amazon Conservation Team,
visited Google officials in California in May. The company agreed to
work with third-party satellite data providers to create high-resolution
images of the tribe's area on Google Earth, the satellite mapping
service. Working with the tribe, the company will annotate the images of
Surui territory on the Google Earth Web site, giving viewers a more
comprehensive view of the land and potential threats.
Other companies have also recently launched programs in the Amazon,
including Intel, which last year worked with Brazilian government
officials to install wireless broadband to Parintins, an Amazon River
city reachable only by small airplane or boat.
Even with the support of the government and businesses, it is likely to
be years before Internet connections -- or even electricity -- reach all
of the villages that want them. But the mere possibility of computers
coming to the villages has had an impact on life and language.
The Xavante language, for example, already has a word for computer:
romnurinhepetse dzá. The word for a computer mouse is rure.
"The Internet is just Internet," Prenhopa said. "We don't have our own
word for that yet."
