A Prophet in Two Kinds of Record

Kamiko survives in two archives that do not agree, and the disagreement is instructive. The first is official: reports by Brazilian provincial officers, missionaries and traders in the 1850s and afterwards, describing crowds, alarm, and a threat to order. Those documents are precise about dates and places and unreliable about everything else, because the men writing them wanted the gatherings suppressed and a rebellion justified an expedition where a religious festival did not. The second is Baniwa oral history, collected by anthropologists more than a century later, in which Kamiko is a figure of established authority whose deeds have been shaped by long telling and who is understood within a Baniwa account of prophets and of the world. Neither record is a transcript.

Robin Wright's ethnohistorical work reads them against each other, and the result is a reasonably firm outline with a soft interior: the dates, the locations and the official reaction are secure, the content of the preaching is reported consistently enough to be trusted in outline, and the interior life of the movement is not recoverable. That is a fair description of what can be known about most nineteenth century Amazonian religious leaders, and it is why so few of them can be written about at all.