The promised Guaraní blog

The Guaraní are an indigenous tribe that live in Argentina and Brazil and were, until recently, fairly untouched by Western Society. Although many members of the tribe were exposed to Western culture in Jesuit missions during the Spanish conquest, a large number of Guaraní lived and hunted in the forest around Iguaçu until the 1930s-1940s, when the Brazilian and Argentine governments declared these lands protected zones and moved the tribes several kilometers away to government designated reservations. Today, the Guaraní live in communities of a few hundred people on either side of the border and maintain a fairly simple lifestyle.

On our free day in Brazil, several of us went with Carlos, Andres, and Mauricio (see the blog on Brazil if you don’t remember who they are) to one of the reservations in Argentina, where we were guided by a Guaraní leader named Ricardo, who showed us their agricultural and trapping methods, and school system (small children are given a basic education and people ages 14-30 are trained in tourism). We also got to buy Guaraní handicrafts, which are largely animals and imitation weapons carved from wood on their land.

Interesting facts:

1.The Guaraní are free to follow their own law on their land, which includes punishing people for crimes according to tradition (usually, a person is enslaved to the family he or she harmed for a period of time determined by the severity of the crime).

2. Guaraní women reach the age of majority at 13 and men at the age of 18.

3. There is little ethnic mixing with the Guaraní because outsiders are not allowed to live with them and tribe members are not allowed to return and live with the tribe if they move away.

4. The Guaraní don’t believe in working (at least in Western style jobs). Before being moved to the reservations, they lived almost entirely off the land, picking fruits and vegetables that grew naturally and hunting animals. Now they plant a little and still hunt, and host curious tourists. But none of them have careers. To be honest, it kind of reminds me of the Garden of Eden…

5. According to my Spanish textbook, Guaraní is one of the most widely spoken native languages in the Americas. Ricardo told us that families speak Guaraní at home and learn Spanish (or Portuguese if they’re in Brazil) during their primary education. So for the first 5 years of their lives or so, they don’t speak any Spanish at all despite living in a Spanish-speaking country.

Visiting the Guaraní and learning a little about their way of life was probably the most interesting thing we did in Brazil. I really enjoyed hearing the children speak and sing in an indigenous language. Way cool.