When We Sold God’s Eye by Alex Cuadros is an unsentimental, vital report of how ‘civilised’ society disrupts Indigenous life
Around the 1980s a new story entered the cosmology of the Cinta Larga, an Indigenous people living in the west of the Amazon rainforest. It told how Ngurá, the creator, had asked the people of Earth, ‘Who wants to be civilised?’ Who wants the comforts of the modern world? The creator pulled out his penis and the price of such privilege became clear. The white man got on his knees and sucked the supernatural member; the Cinta Larga refused. ‘And so the Cinta Larga were left to make their own arrows, baskets, hammocks, necklaces,’ Alex Cuadros, Bloomberg’s former correspondent in Brazil, writes in this work of reportage. The tale was meant as a warning, a warning that the community itself failed to heed.
This new piece of mythology emerged at a time when the Indigenous group had only made contact with the outside world for a matter of decades, a period during which they were successfully defending their vast territory in the Amazon. But schisms in the villages were beginning to form: there were those who wished to remain with the old ways; those who saw the exploitation of their land, in the fashion of the white loggers and diamond miners, as an opportunity to benefit the whole community; and those who saw it as a means of personal enrichment. Those who favoured profiting from the forest (though first the Cinta Larga had to learn such concepts as profit, money, personal property) argued that now that the outside world was making inroads into Indigenous territory, killing them with guns and disease, the only choice they had was between exploiting the land themselves, or being exploited as people. Cuadros’s narrative, based on six years of interviews, is laid out unsentimentally, with none of the rose tint that recent artworld forays into Indigenous representation carry. (Indeed, the question of agency lies at the heart of the book: environmental and Indigenous protection laws forbade the mine they illegally built, even if by the Indians themselves, an enterprise that beyond their own territory would have been perfectly within the law.) He portrays his subjects – wide-boy Oita, the more sensitive Pio, the resilient Maria Beleza – as rounded individuals trying to navigate this new world of commerce, capitalism, temptation and laws. But this is no mere Rousseauean paradise lost, and Cuadros never shies from personal failings, domestic violence and petty jealousies: the brutality and hardship of the forest are portrayed unvarnished.
Two great massacres bookend the story: the killing of half a dozen Cinta Larga in 1963 by white invaders to their land – their first contact with the outside world – and their killing of 29 diamond prospectors in 2004. Along the way, we see Oita, Pio and others spark a diamond rush, attracting thousands camping out along the interstate highway; creating a trade network that stretched from one of the wildest regions in the world to New York, Antwerp and London; entangling politicians, cops, fortune seekers, Israeli businessmen and Hezbollah-linked associates. (For diamonds, this art critic couldn’t help but substitute artworks by Indigenous artists, similarly traded in the galleries of Jardins, Chelsea or Mayfair). The Cinta Larga men got rich, got poor; got through wives, cars, houses; found Christianity, bought out brothels; got arrested, got killed. Their wider community got fat on a Western diet, learned to like football and logged onto Facebook; yet the women also found an independence unknown in the previous traditional life; a few went to college and found work as nurses and teachers.
While the central narrative to Cuadros’s story concentrates on environmental crime, it is the question of healthcare that perhaps best sums up the rock and hard place between which the Cinta Larga find themselves: ‘Isolation had once been the foundation of their wellbeing,’ Cuadros writes. ‘Now they were not isolated enough to avoid diseases, but too isolated to receive care.’ Time and again, Cuadros’s characters find themselves torn between the traditional way of life, an identity they could never lose beneath their Western clothes, and ‘civilised’ society, with its extractivist tendencies and the shiny diamond of capitalist promise. How this contradiction will resolve itself, Cuadros leaves forcefully, dauntingly, open.
When We Sold God’s Eye: Diamonds, Murder, and a Clash of Worlds in the Amazon by Alex Cuadros. Grand Central Publishing, $32 (hardcover)
From the March 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
