In 1937, Brazilian farmer Carlos Valero and his wife and three children were canoeing down a river near the Venezuelan border to his brother-in-law's farm in a forest clearing. Suddenly they were attacked by the Yanomami Indians, and their oldest child Helena, who was 11 or 12 at the time, was wounded. The adults grabbed the younger children and ran, leaving the wounded girl behind, intending to come back for her later. The Indians kidnapped her. Helena Valero grew up among the various bands of Yanomamo, learned their language and adopted their culture, got married (becoming the fifth wife of a chief), had two children; when her first husband was killed, she remarried and had two more children. When her second husband became a wanted man, her family escaped to the white society. The year was 1956. Helena Valero found her parents and brothers, but as she and her husband had no property and no useful occupation, her family sank into poverty; her oldest son helped out shoppers at a market, who gave him tips, off which their family lived. In 1963-1964 she dictated her story to an Italian anthropologist, who published it in 1965. A Web search for her name shows that afterwards she moved back to the jungle.
This book confirms the customary notions of stone age life in the Amazon rainforest. Curare-tipped arrows, shamans who ingest psychoactive substances; the spirit of the sun, of bats, of white men; anacondas, crocodiles, whose short tongues are explained in a Kiplinguesque myth of the origin of fire, jaguars. The Yanomami are (were?) a very violent people; a band could raid another band, kill all the men they could find and seize all the women; this is how Helena Valero passed from one band to another at least twice. There was controversy about anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, who studied the Yanomami and wrote a book about them called The Yanomamo: Fierce People; an activist journalist accused Chagnon of both instigating violence among the Yanomani and falsifying the reports about it in order to create supporting data for his weird sociobiological theories; however, other anthropologists seem to have refuted the journalist's allegations. I read neither Chagnon's book nor the journalist's, just the Internet reviews, but Helena Valero's book, which describes events long before the Chagnon expeditions, seems to show that the Yanomami were in fact a fierce people.
A cliche of science fiction (in fact, of other genres of fiction as well) is a child of one culture being adopted into another culture, and after reaching adulthood going back to his native people and bringing them the knowledge of his adoptive people - Moses, Mowgli and many others. I read this book because I was wondering if these stories have any relevance to reality as experienced by Helena Valero. They do not; unlike Mowgli and his brothers, Helena Valero was always considered a foreign woman ("Napagnuma" in the Yanomami language) by her captors; having been a big child when captured, she never forgot Spanish and Portuguese and continued saying Roman Catholic prayers. Nor did the white society, except for the Italian anthropologist, care much about her experiences. I am sure that there have been many Indian children captured by whites who eventually came back to their own peoples, such as Jemmy Button, but they never left any accounts of their captivity that I am aware of.
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