David Good’s parents come from different countries – hardly unusual in the US where he was raised. But the 25-year-old’s family is far from ordinary – while his father is American, his mother is a tribeswoman living in a remote part of the Amazon. Two decades after she left, David realised he had to find her.
After three days on the Orinoco River, David Good felt sick.
He had been eaten alive by the relentless biting gnats, he was tired and thirsty. The air was dank and humid. Fierce rays of sunlight bounced off the surface of the piranha-filled river as the 40-horsepower motor puttered and the launch pushed further upriver, deeper into the Amazon.
His stomach was a knot of apprehension – he had not slept the previous night at all.
He was not a natural traveller or explorer. The lawns and parks of eastern Pennsylvania were his habitat and this trip to the Venezuelan Amazon – in July 2011 – was his first outside the US since early childhood.
And yet – as everyone kept telling him – things were going well. Normally, travellers heading to the Orinoco headwaters had to stop at the Guajaribo Rapids, unload all their goods and haul them overland, before pulling the boats past the treacherous rocks by rope.
But it was raining heavily, off and on, and the river was higher than it had been for years. So Jacinto, a local indigenous man in charge of the tiller, was able to shoot the rapids, fiercely opening and closing the throttle, and steering the aluminium launch left and right of the rocks.
A few hours later, the boat turned a corner and suddenly shouts could be heard from the riverside. It could only be members of the Yanomami tribe – no white people lived so far upriver.
“They started screaming ‘Motor! Motor!’ because it’s a big event – they don’t hear motors too often,” says David. He expected to see them with bows and arrows, but they had come unarmed. Word had gone ahead and the little boat was expected.
“I saw children and men and women on the riverbank just waiting for us to arrive. The women were all topless, the men had shirts and shorts on.”
They had come from the village of Hasupuweteri. As David disembarked they began speaking rapidly in the Yanomami language and prodding him.
“I was just completely mobbed – all the women and the children gathered around me. I had so many hands all over me, pulling my ear, touching my nose, touching my hair,” he recalls. At 5’5″ (1.6m) David was used to being the smallest in a group, but he found himself nervously standing above the Yanomami, who are one of the world’s shortest ethnic groups.
It was not the first time the people of Hasupuweteri had encountered nabuh – white people. But the nabuh they had met before had been missionaries, medics and anthropologists.
They knew that David was different – he was not looking to save their souls or their lives or ask strange questions. He was looking for his mother.
The Yanomami live in 200-250 villages in an area of 60,000 square miles (96,500 square kilometres) of jungle, sprawling across the Venezuela-Brazil border.
This is the region where the English adventurer Sir Walter Raleigh believed he would discover the untold riches of El Dorado – he launched two expeditions up the Orinoco in 1595 and 1616.
But in the 20th Century it was the Yanomami themselves who excited the imagination of scientists, journalists and artists from the developed world.
The Yanomami are a diverse group. They vary from relatively Westernised communities living close to church missions to villages which have no regular, direct contact with the outside world – although they will trade goods with villages that do.
Village life centres around a shapono – a large oval or round dwelling made out of wood. The entire village lives under the thatched roof of the shapono, cooking at separate family hearths and sleeping in hammocks. It is an arena for the rituals of trade and shamanism, for public rants and fights.
In 1968, the US anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon published his bestseller Yanomamo: The Fierce People. He described the tribe as being prone to petty disputes – usually over women – which escalate into wars between villages. He painted a picture of a world where chronic warfare, gang rape and murder were all facts of life.
It was as a graduate student of Chagnon’s that David Good’s father, Kenneth Good, first travelled to the Amazon in 1975. He travelled up the Orinoco past the Guajaribo Rapids, just as his son did 36 years later. He made his home in a little hut a short distance from the Hasupuweteri.
The plan was to stay for 15 months of fieldwork, measuring the animal protein intake of all the village members. This was to give Chagnon the data he needed to show his many critics that inter-village warfare was not related to the scarcity of food but stemmed from the drive to maximise reproductive success.
Good dutifully weighed every spider monkey and armadillo hunted by the tribe. They laughed at this strange display. If he explained to them he wanted to know how heavy an animal was, they would ask why he didn’t just pick it up.
Towards the end of the 15 months, Good was becoming fluent in the Yanomami language, but he was also becoming dissatisfied with the narrow focus of his research brief.
“Measuring the animals and calculating the [protein] yields was insufficient,” he later wrote. “Food gathering and intake had to be placed in the cultural context.”
To get to know that context better he moved into the village shapono and observed as many of the daily rituals as he could. He went on treks, hunts and observed funeral rites. The Hasupuweteri called him shori – brother-in-law.
And he began to question the picture of the Yanomami that Chagnon had painted in his book.
“He thought that the Yanomami weren’t as fierce as they were represented to be,” says David Good. “And I think there’s some substance to that, because my father ended up living there 12 years, and I couldn’t imagine living 12 years with a savage, warlike, fierce people.
“So he became enamoured with the people. And he fell in love – he fell in love with my mum.”
One day in 1978, the headman of the Hasupuweteri presented Good with a proposition.
“‘Shori,’ he said, ‘you come here all the time to visit us and live with us… I’ve been thinking that you should have a wife. It isn’t good for you to live alone,'” wrote Good in his 1991 memoir, Into the Heart: An Amazonian Love Story.
At first Good refused, but over time he came around to the idea. “I found myself thinking that maybe being married down here wouldn’t be so horrendous after all: certainly it would be in accordance with their customs. In a way the idea even became attractive. After all, what better affirmation could there be of my integration with the Hasupuweteri?”
When he relented, the headman said, “Take Yarima. You like her. She’s your wife.”
Yarima, the headman’s younger sister, was a vivacious young girl whom Good did indeed like. But he was 36 and Yarima wasn’t older than 12.
There was no wedding ceremony and the match was not consummated – it was part of the Yanomami system of child betrothal, designed to shore up ties between families and prevent conflict. Yarima remained at her mother’s hearth in the shapono. She occasionally brought Good his food, and he spent more time with her than with the other children.
But with every trip he made upriver, Good and Yarima became closer, and the theoretical tie between them felt more real. The villagers began to treat them as a married couple, and he thought of her more and more when he was away from the Amazon.
Unlike doctors or psychologists, there is no fixed code of practice barring relationships between anthropologists and the subjects of their research. There is much debate about whether sex is ever permissible in the field, either for enjoyment or study.
In Kenneth Good’s case, it was not about research – he and Yarima developed a romantic attachment. She affectionately called him Big Forehead. He called her Bushika – Little One.
“Where do you draw the line – if there is one?” Good asks, in the documentary film Secrets of the Tribe. “Seeing as I have lived with them so long, that line fades away – there is no line.”
Age is unknown amongst the Yanomami since they have no counting system (they only have words for “one”, “two” and “many”). So in his memoir, Good is not specific about Yarima’s age when they first had sex – he wrote that she was “about 15”.
Yarima would have married another man if he had backed out of the betrothal. She had had her first period and so, in Yanomami culture, was of an age to settle with a husband and have a family.
“We’re always trying to judge from our own perspective – an ethnocentric view,” says David Good. “You have to keep in mind our ancestors didn’t have to go through the maturation of adolescence that we have to go through in the modern world. Girls became married and started having children after their first period.
“And I always tell people, my father married my mother, but my mother also married my father. You know, it was a mutual agreement between two people and it’s not like he snatched her away. This was a marriage based on love and romance and friendship.”
The reason David was mobbed when he got off the boat on the Orinoco river was that he was famous. His father was remembered by the older Hasupuweteri, while the younger ones had grown up with stories of how Yarima and Kenneth’s children had been raised in the world of the nabuh.
His mother, they told him, was at the village of Irokaiteri, 10 minutes further up the river. But he would not be permitted to complete the journey by boat – he was altogether too interesting.
Instead, he was taken to the village shapono. A young man called Mukashe was introduced to David as his half-brother. He ran off into the jungle to fetch their mother.
After 19 years, David would have to wait a few more hours to meet his mother.
David’s father married into an Amazonian tribe, but it was impossible for him to live in the Amazon indefinitely.
He could not hunt and live like a true Yanomami tribesman. He needed extra food and medicine and special permits to remain in the region. This meant he had to continue academic work. But getting grants for fieldwork was difficult. Moreover, whenever he temporarily left, to make contact with academics or raise funds, Yarima was left in danger in the male-dominated Yanomami society.
On one of his trips downriver, when he had been held up for several months, she had been gang-raped, abducted and badly assaulted – her ear was ripped.
This precipitated Yarima’s first contact with the modern world. Good took her to the town of Puerto Ayacucho, to get her ear attended to.
The short flight there was terrifying for Yarima – but the town itself was overwhelming. Upriver Yanomami pictured nabuhs living in villages much like their own, but with more nabuhs wearing their nabuh clothes. They had no idea that the forest ever came to an end, to be replaced by open spaces of cool hard ground and huge square houses.
“Every little aspect of this world was new and unique and strange to her,” says David Good. “When you turn on a car, it kind of looks like an animal with the headlights – I heard stories she would hide behind a bush.”
Another surprise awaited Yarima when she and Kenneth Good checked into a hotel – the mirror. She had never seen her full reflection before. “She freaked out,” says David. “She hid behind a bed and my dad had to cover the mirror with blankets, just so she wouldn’t be scared anymore.”
Yarima adapted to some things very quickly.
She grasped the idea of using clothes for decoration and she enjoyed shopping. After overcoming her initial fears, she loved travelling by car, motorbike and aeroplane. Wondrous machines like elevators, Good wrote in his memoir, she accepted as examples of nabuh magic.
But other things were more difficult for her to grasp.
In the Amazon, food takes time to hunt or grow. It is never wasted or refused. “‘Are you hungry?’ is a question without meaning,” wrote Good. “You might as well ask a person if he cared to breathe air.” So the experience of a supermarket, in which an almost limitless amount of food sat, ready-picked and plucked, or of restaurants, where one was presented with a choice of what to eat, made the world feel upside down.
Yarima also feared the police. When she left the jungle, in the mid-80s, upriver Yanomami had heard of the police, but they pictured them as being an especially fierce tribe who all lived in the same village. Myths abounded about what they might do if they caught you – a common belief was that they ate stray Yanomami tribespeople.
In Caracas, Yarima warily observed the policemen and policewomen with their guns. Whenever she saw them her eyes searched for their police children and police babies.
