* Illustration: Evah Fan * Wuta is practically naked, except for the red cotton breechcloth strung around his waist and the yellow beaded necklaces that drape his muscular torso. In his hands, though, he's holding something that places him firmly in the 21st century: a new gray Garmin GPS device.
A member of the Trio tribe, he's leading me through the rain forest near his village in southern Suriname — a two-hour Cessna flight from the closest road. At the foot of a large tree that dangles a cascade of liana vines, Wuta points his GPS toward the sky: no signal. He fiddles with a button and a few minutes later gets a reading. He relays the coordinates to a fellow Trio cartographer beside him, who dutifully jots them down. Wuta then tramps on, demonstrating how he and other tribesmen have charted, by foot and canoe, some 20 million acres of land here at Amazonia's northern fringe.
To avoid getting steamrollered by developers, ranchers, loggers, miners, oilmen, and biopirates, tribes across the Amazon Basin have begun acquiring high tech tools to defend themselves. Much of the help in this effort has come from the Amazon Conservation Team, a Virginia environmental and cultural preservation organization, which provided equipment, cartographic expertise, and financial assistance. Now dozens of men like Wuta are walking the forests, mapping their lands with the aid of portable GPS devices.
Of course, just because the tribes have mapped the lands doesn't mean they control all the legal rights to them. But it's a step in that direction. Suriname now uses maps generated by the Trio and other groups as official government documents. In Ecuador, the Shuar tribe, long embroiled in a struggle with American oil companies, was recently granted title to its communal lands, as mapped by GPS. The massive sandals-on-the-ground charting campaign and delineation of once imprecise boundaries have also given the tribes greater confidence in asserting their interests — in some instances, natives have driven out illegal miners and have established settlements and guard posts on their borders.
In addition to GPS mapping, tribes are using Google Earth as a tool for territorial vigilance. The app's satellite imagery can identify threats — an encroaching soy farm, say, or a river stained by the runoff from a gold mine. A few tribes in Brazil with Internet access are marking the coordinates of surreptitious activity they see in the images, then investigating on foot or passing the information to government enforcers.
For Wuta, the global positioning device he cradles is a handheld life insurance policy. "I make maps because I don't want the companies to come — when they come, maybe the water will be dirty," he says as we walk back from the forest, across a grassy airstrip that was cleared 40 years ago by American evangelicals, the first outsiders to want a piece of the land and its people.
Ultimately, though, this advanced technology may just help the Indians turn on the forest to enrich themselves. (And who can blame them, really?) Carrying a carved wooden cane and wearing slacks, a plaid shirt, and a Casio watch, the Trio's chief hints at this uncertain future when I ask whether his newfound territorial security makes him more likely to get into the business of extracting natural resources. Education and technology, he says, have helped his tribe make more-responsible decisions. He then adds, "The maps have helped us realize our assets."
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