A Survival researcher recorded this interview with Kamairu Awá, a young Awá man. He describes an encounter with some uncontacted Awá, whose whereabouts are still unknown. An estimated 60 – 100 Awá still live isolated in the pockets of forest that remain in Maranhao state.

‘We [Kamairu and his brother in law, Mihatya] went into the forest to hunt and fish. Mihatya, who was fishing, was suddenly hit by an arrow. I, Kamairu, was hunting with a dog. I was running after a paca (a large rodent) and it leapt into the stream and we tried to kill it. At the same time that we were trying to kill the paca, we were shot at. When Mihatya was shot by the arrow he shouted and at that same moment I saw the couple. We took off our clothes so we were naked, so we could make contact with them. We shouted at them, but they didn’t hear us as they were running off. We saw a young Indian woman with a new skirt made of tucum (palm fibre). She was very pretty and young.

‘We wanted to talk to them and see whether we could bring them to our village. But they didn’t wait for anything and ran off. We never saw them again. After this we saw traces of them, footsteps along the stream and in the forest as they were hunting, but we never saw them again.’

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 9th, 2007 at 8:05 am and is filed under Stories & Lives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.