Return of the Captured Spirits

Welcoming the Ancestors Back to an Amazonian Village

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  • The Journey
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  • 2015 Team Bios
  • Sacred Cavern

Helping the Captured Spirits Come Home

The Project

In January 2012, for the first time, the Wauja saw films made of their ancestors nearly a century ago  [more]

The Project The Project

The Journey

With no roads leading from outside the Park to the Wauja village, the only access is by light plane or boat [more]

The Journey The Journey

About the Wauja

The Wauja are an Arawak-speaking people living in several communities in the Upper Xingu region of the… [more]

About the Wauja About the Wauja

2015 Team Bios

Emilienne Ireland is an anthropologist based in Washington, D.C., and has worked with the Wauja since… [more]

2015 Team Bios 2015 Team Bios

Events

Emilienne Ireland's lecture will be video-recorded and provided to all Indiegogo and Kickstarter backers [more]

Events Events

Thanks to Our Backers!

The Wauja filmmakers shot a wide array of material, far greater in scope than we had expected [more]

Thanks to Our Backers! Thanks to Our Backers!

Kamukuaka, the Sacred Cavern

When we originally planned the project, we had hoped to include a visit to Kamukuaka, a sacred cavern,… [more]

Kamukuaka, the Sacred Cavern Kamukuaka, the Sacred Cavern

Recent Posts

  • Catch the Wauja on PBS
  • How the Project Went in Brazil
  • First Photos From Piyulaga
  • Arrival and First Films
  • Common Dreams Features RCS

Return of the Captured Spirits

Wauja children watching the arrival of visitors
 
Arriving in the Wauja Village
Three young Wauja children watch excitedly as the Return of the Captured Spirits team arrives in the main Wauja village of Piyulaga in January 2012 with their laptops, projector, video equipment, and other gear to show the historical movies and shoot the new RCS video.  more  [Photo credit: Mori Rothman]
In 1924, an expedition visited the Wauja, a remote rainforest community in Central Brazil, and made the first movies of these people. This precious footage was deposited at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, where it remained, unseen by the Wauja or their descendants, for nearly a century. Thanks to digital technology, it is now possible to bring copies of these precious and rare films to the Xingu. more

 
Preserving Traditions While Learning New Skills
Young men play ceremonial flutes, accompanied by female dancers. The ceremony was recorded in the Wauja village of Piyulaga, an indigenous community of Arawak-speakers located in the Xingu Indigenous Park in Northern Mato Grosso, Brazil. Note the young Wauja filmmaker using digital technology to record the dancers. The Wauja currently have three communities, located in the Amazonian rainforest, on the Batovi and von den Steinen rivers. Raw footage provided by anthropologist and filmmaker Marcelo Fortaleza Flores.

 
Preserving Connections with the Past
Anthropologist Emi Ireland recalls a conversation with some members of the Wauja indigenous community in Central Brazil, when they first realized that she lived in a large city, surrounded by people who were complete strangers to her.

Return of the Captured Spirits Movie Trailer

Presentation at NMNH on May 31st

RCS Project leader Emi Ireland spoke at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) on Thursday, May 31st.

She discussed what she learned from the Wauja during the Return of the Captured Spirits project this spring, and met afterwards with RCS backers to give them a personal update on the project.

One of the backers who lives in the D.C. area brought his video camera, so we plan to make the lecture available to ALL backers soon. Thanks again to all project backers for your support!

Empowering Native Videographers

For the first time in any film project done in their community, the Wauja, an Arawak-speaking people from the Amazonian rainforest of Brazil, will be full creative partners, and will receive digital copies of all footage to use in this project and others they may do in the future. The Wauja have been inspired by neighboring indigenous groups who are producing award-winning filmmakers through the path-breaking work of Video nas Aldeias (Video in the Villages)

This year, a feature-length film collaboratively produced by indigenous and non-indigenous filmmakers Takumã Kuikuro, Carlos Fausto, and Leo Sette won Special Jury Prize and Best Film Editing at the Gramado Film Festival, Brazil’s largest. The Wauja, who have been making documentaries in their community for several years, now want to compete at film festivals and distribute their own films to a worldwide audience.

For more information, please contact our production team. Thank you for your interest!

About the Documentary

Visual Repatriation

The first phase of the RCS project in early 2012 successfully documented reactions to the images of Wauja ancestors in both the 1924 Rondon films and the 1941-48 Roncador-Xingu films. In the next phase, the plan is to show the 1964 ethnographic films of Harald Schultz, which are likely to contain rare, perhaps unique, images of close family members of living Wauja. MORE

Documenting Oral History

The Wauja take pride in performing time-honored stories from their own large body of oral literature, and they also have a keen interest in their cultural history. Learned men and women of chiefly descent can trace their ancestors back as many as six generations. For these reasons, this RCS documentation project is of utmost interest to Wauja elders and youth alike. MORE

Aspirations and Successes

In addition to documenting their concerns, the Wauja also documented their successes and their hopes for the future. They proudly made videos of their ceremonial dances, and of their parents telling stories at home. They made astonishing videos of groups of men calling birds and monkeys by imitating the calls of the various species. The animals approached the men in response. MORE

Neighbors at Peace

Imagine that your community and a neighboring community had been at war a half century ago. Then, imagine what it would take for those two communities to sit down together to look at archival films of life in their region, share memories of common ancestors, and allow their children to interact peacefully with one another. In early 2012, that is exactly what happened in Amazonia. MORE

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