Tambura’s Song Teaches Amondawa Lifeways in the Amazon and Beyond

“Music paints a portrait,” Tambura Amondawa says.

For the Amondawa Indigenous “river people” of Brazil, their songs “take shape by writing, like poetry.” The storytelling in these songs recounts a bittersweet experience, encompassing their loss of land, people, and forest due to commercial greed, diseases brought by outsiders, and steadily rising temperatures. But the songs are also full of pride and resilience, evoked by the Amazon rainforest, a wellspring of vitality and tradition for the Amondawa people.

Tambura is a teacher in his village, and he also uses these songs and demonstrations to teach non-Indigenous Brazilian children about his cultural traditions. He invites classes to visit the Amondawa living on the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau Indigenous Territory in the state of Rondônia, closer to Bolivia than any major Brazilian city. His community lives amid humid forest undergrowth and the coveted, pink-tinged rubber trees, as well as prized mahogany and cherry, which companies have fought to deforest for quick profits. The forest territory of the Indigenous people, demarcated in 1991, is surrounded completely by land stripped for farming.

Outside a rectangular maloca—a large communal Indigenous house with a sharply angled roof thatched by palm leaves—Tambura waits for his visiting class to arrive. He wears a headdress of yellow and orange macaw feathers, and his chest is painted with a large black X, like an open-winged bird, in jenipapo fruit dye. In Amondawa tradition, the feathers provide spiritual protection, while the body paint is generally worn in battle.

On this day, however, Tambura’s goal is performance, not war. During the “One Day in the Village” trip he established with surrounding non-Indigenous school communities, he reveals the craftsmanship of Amondawa bows and arrows and sings songs. As he sings, he plucks the bowstring to act out scenes of hunting in the undergrowth or strategies to defend the village against invaders.

Tambura grew into these songs as a child taught by his grandfather, who remembers when the Amondawa were first contacted by Western and Brazilian anthropologists in 1986. It wasn’t until Tambura started teaching that the music’s importance struck him.

“I asked my grandfather to sing his song slowly, because the person listening will usually be a little confused,” he explains in Brazilian Portuguese through a translator. “When he sang very slowly, as is done in my language, what he sang made sense. Then I started to like it. I wrote it on paper to always remember it to this day.”

From this documentation, Tambura saw a need for his cultural traditions to be passed down. “I had to improve myself more and more to teach in the village, because the idea of my course was always to give back to the community.”

At the 2024 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, highlighting Indigenous Voices of the Americas, Tambura and his son-in-law Wauto Am Oro Waram sang one of Tambura’s grandfather’s songs on the wide, dimly lit stage of the Rasmuson Theater in the National Museum of the American Indian. While both Tambura and Wauto Am speak Portuguese, they switched to Amondawa for the song, one of the few sung narratives they could perform without accompaniment from a village of people. Traditionally, large dances accompany the songs, and Tambura hopes that the next time he visits, he can bring other members of his village and invite the audience to join in.

They processed back and forth barefoot on the stage, singing Tambura’s grandfather’s description of their first meeting with non-Indigenous people. The song depicts the curving river that leads to the village and the sound of Western boats bumping against the shores. As Tambura’s grandfather strode through the dense undergrowth of the rainforest, he heard, but did not understand, the conversations of Western researchers cutting their way through the forest. His song demonstrates this through interjections of made-up words meant to mimic what the unfamiliar languages first sounded like to the Amondawa people. The result is an unintelligible conversation mid-song that echoes eerily through the theater. Despite the enclosing threat of outside influences, the song ends with the reflection that a new day will come and life will still continue. The refrain is simple but poignant: Go on, sunrise, go on. Even post-contact, the Amondawa will strive to see dawn after dawn.

In addition to his performance, Tambura and Wauto Am gave demonstrations in their Amondawa Arts tent on the National Mall to speak with visitors through presenter and translator Amanda Villa, a Brazilian anthropologist. Across their table rested jars of urucum (annatto seed) paint in brilliant shades of red alongside light arrows and bows with carefully strapped feathers. These interactive objects invited questions and a chance to engage with the artists.

For Tambura, spreading knowledge among non-Indigenous communities is key to combatting negative stereotypes about Indigenous people and promote cross-cultural respect. In Brazil, some think of Indigenous people as “isolated,” he says. At the same time, members of some other Indigenous groups he speaks with see non-Indigenous people as the enemy. Tambura’s educational mission is to form a partnership in which “they [the non-Indigenous] recognize that Indigenous people are an essential point in defending the forest and that the forest means life for everyone.”

Back in the Amazon, Tambura witnesses what people living in the cities might miss. “We had freedom,” he says, recalling the days before the Amondawa tribe was restricted to a fixed territory. As a result of deforestation, he notices marked changes in the wildlife. Fish are more skittish, and hummingbirds and owls appear at the wrong times of year.

“The forest is responsible for informing me. That’s why I always say that the hummingbird gives the signal in sign language. I want people to learn that the forest communicates through signals, through bees, for example, with the Indigenous people.” He describes a bee landing on his arm, not just to gather sweat from his skin, but also, in a sense, to tell him about the effects of climate change in their forest.

On a global scale, the Amazon rainforest is like the earth’s lungs, storing over 150 billion tons of carbon, and has so much mass—60 percent of the forests on the planet—that it produces its own rain. The Amondawa and other Indigenous groups in the Amazon rainforest care for the headwaters of rivers and streams, keeping them clean and free of debris. This in turn benefits non-Indigenous people, like the livestock farmers or the city residents whose water supply depends on those rivers.

“We want to show them, but they don’t see what they don’t want to see,” he remarks about encroaching environmental issues. “They think it has nothing to do with them.” In Brazilian classrooms, school subjects are taught separately. In Tambura’s classroom, “there is no such separation. We don’t say, ‘today we are going to study geography. Today we will study mathematics.’ Everything is connected.”

Preserving land for Indigenous groups often results in less deforestation, contributing to overall environmental benefits. The complex physical and spiritual ecosystem of plants, animals, minerals, and medicines in the Amazon cannot be replicated, and its impact worldwide proves Tambura’s reminder: we are not so disconnected after all.

Despite the significance of Amondawa wisdom, as a fledgling teacher, Tambura struggled to make his traditions appealing to the younger generation. Non-Indigenous children found his lessons boring. On top of that, he was leading the class alone, unable to encourage the Amondawa youth in his community to help him with educational demonstrations.

“When I started to become a teacher, our young people were very shy,” Tambura says. “People didn’t pay attention to painting [or] appreciate it culturally, and when I joined, I had a lot of challenges.”

Seeing the younger generation on their smartphones, Tambura decided to turn to the internet to spread his culture and fight misinformation about the Amondawa. He doesn’t call his people on the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau land “isolated,” a Western idea for Indigenous groups, because the Amondawa do collaborate with other groups in their area, and they are integral to the wider world through the natural environment. Instead of being seen as disconnected or uneducated, Tambura wants to show the world that not only are his traditions worth saving, but the Amondawa are also self-sustaining and rich in artistic ability.

Along with Wauto Am, who is a photographer, they started the Instagram channel Povos.Amondawa (“Amondawa People”), where they share photographs, videos, and information about their community. The page is filled with Wauto Am’s snapshots, some in vibrant color and others composed in black and white. Tambura chose social media as an educational tool because information “would get out quickly, and there, one could see it, and it stayed.”

The positive feedback they have received online strengthens the self-esteem of the younger Amondawa members. Tambura says that after they established an online presence, many of the youth voluntarily visited non-Indigenous schools to teach other young people about their culture.

In 2023, he won an Inter-American Foundation development grant to support the Associação do Povo Indígena Amondawa (Association of the Amondawa Indigenous People). The funding helped spread awareness for the younger generation of non-Indigenous people about managing natural resources and understanding the roles of Indigenous groups. “Today we don’t even need to insist that people visit the village, and they want to know even more,” Tambura reports.

On an open patch of green grass between the tree-shaded sections of the National Mall, Tambura squatted beside a small child and helped them pull back the bowstring, then released it to let a mock arrow fly. The arrow soared only a few feet before lodging in the thick grass, but the children watching shouted excitedly, ready to take their turn as bow and arrow “hunters.” Tambura fell naturally into his familiar role of schoolteacher, grinning proudly when the next child stepped up and asked for a turn, gripping the bow.

He hopes that the discussions he had and the demonstrations he offered at the Folklife Festival spread a “good message” about Indigenous groups living in the Amazon—“a language of clarity for the people who visited our tent.”

Eowyn Stewart is a writing intern at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. She recently graduated with an English major and a minor in art history, and she is interested in creative writing and anthropology.