Performing Dreams

Laura R Graham

Warodi was the eldest son of the formidable leader Apowê, the man responsible for the Xavante's first peaceful contacts with representatives of Brazilian national society in 1946. In the late 1970s Warodi led the Xavante of Pimentel Barbosa in an impressive battle to reclaim lands that had been illegally swept from their jurisdiction. As the community's representative, he made multiple arduous trips to the capital, Brasilia, to negotiate with officials of the government Indian agency, Fundaçào Nacional do Indio (FUNAI). When these negotiations proved futile, the Xavante of Pimentel Barbosa attacked and burned ranches in the area. Warodi then summoned representatives and leaders from the other Xavante reserves; together these men cut down a line of trees through a forested area to demarcate the reserve's contested border according to Xavante claims. That gathering constituted the first politically coordinated action of the different Xavante reserves and cemented Warodi's reputation as a bold political actor. Thus began a unique celebration that was itself a performance of Warodi's dream. That morning Warodi sat among the elders of Pimentel Barbosa as he had sat among the ancestors of his dream. He taught the creators' songs and shared their thoughts with the living in the same way that, in the dream, the creators had shared their thoughts with him. As Warodi recounted his vision, he and the others made plans for the dream performance, a performance that would include the entire community. These plans merged into Warodi's dream narrative, blurring the distinction between the present and the time of the mythic creators who had appeared to Warodi. Down to the last detail the elders designed their celebration to represent the dream activities as Warodi reported them. They discussed their body paint, for example, as the ancestors had done. They chose designs to replicate those that the immortals wore in the dream. With these designs, as Warodi's brother [Sibupa] pointed out, the performers would be the immortals themselves. The elders then summoned three of the community's young men. With body paint and buriti palm fiber robes they transformed the three into the creator figures who had appeared in Warodi's dream as birds. Two of the young men represented the parinai'a creators. The elders blackened their eyes with charcoal, then encircled them with red urucum. With painted eyes, woven fiber robes, and headdresses, these two appeared as jabirú storks. This form, of all the transformations that the parinai'a underwent when making the creation, is the one Xavante associate with the creators' incarnation in the present time parinai'a is the name of a wasp's nest, one of the creators' metamorphoses). To the oiled body of the third young man the elders applied just a bit of red paint, making him appear as the creator he represented. Outfitted in a palm-fiber robe, he too appeared in the form of a bird, as Warodi had envisioned him in his dream.

Performing Dreams

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