We are the Indians

Cirilo has a problem. "I am going to tell you something very very secret. I don't know what to do. I am in love with Susana, and Ara as well." A standard teenage dilemma? Perhaps, but Cirilo is no standard teenager. He is an aboriginal tribesman. Ara is his heavily pregnant wife and - threatened by poverty - they will soon be forced to journey to an exploitative tea estate to earn money for food.

 

As Cirilo's friend Marcelo points out, they may be Mbya Indians, but "they don't eat people". When Ara asks for relationship advice from her mother she is given the timeless advice "to try to live the good life." For her, like for so many, however, "the good life" is an easy ideal threatened by the realities of alcoholism, adultery, poverty and exploitation. But surely this is nothing the indomitable Mbya humour cannot surmount.

 

But chiefs Agustin and Juan have a bigger problem to grapple with - redefining and protecting the Mbya identity into modern day Argentina. Have the Whites "stolen everything" or are the Mbya merely "lazy"? Can the authorities be made to recognise the rights of the tribe or - with their "past forever slipping away" - must the Mbya succumb to a "white nothingness"?