New Venezuela Reserve Offers Sanctuary to Endangered Primitive Tribes : Environment: Indigenous people face Western disease, cultural destruction. If the plan works, it could also save a chunk of virgin rain forest.

As the loin-clothed Yanomami Indian shows a rare foreign visitor his monkey skins, feathers and other hunting trophies, his broad face flushes with pride.

But behind him, in a hammock of tree bark, his infant son’s face flushes with fever. His wife coughs weakly as she breast-feeds the child.

Disease and the tin can, the universal telltales of Western culture’s encroachment, are evident even here, in this tiny thatch village deep within southern Venezuela’s virgin rain forest.

It is one of the New World’s last enclaves of primitive life, where for thousands of years the Yanomami and other tribes have planted their crops of bananas, tubers and tobacco and hunted monkeys, tapirs and fowl with bows and arrows longer than they are tall.

In a bid to preserve that existence, the government has declared 32,000 square miles of southern jungle a biosphere reserve, off-limits to most forms of agricultural or industrial development. Within it, a nucleus of 1,800 square miles was made a national park. Two other parks already exist in the reserve.

Authorities hope the protective measures will help break the tragic pattern of disease, death and cultural disintegration that has ravaged indigenous populations since Columbus’ ships reached the Americas 500 years ago.

At the same time, a healthy chunk of rain forest will be saved.

Decreed in August by President Carlos Andres Perez, the reserve’s creation is drawing high praise from naturalists and anthropologists worldwide.

But they say success depends on how it is managed.

Examples of poor management abound. Right across the border from the reserve, in neighboring Brazil, a gold rush brought a hoard of poor miners into the jungle, devastating the Yanomami villages there.

About 12,000 to 14,000 Yanomamis live in Venezuela. Up to 8,000 more live in Brazil, where naturalists are lobbying for another reserve.

Perez said the government wants to keep the area as untainted as possible. “That’s the basic idea, not to permit the (ecological) system to be changed,” he said.

“A primary purpose of the reserve will be to learn about the Indians’ traditional ways,” he added.

Few wildlife reserves have human beings among the resident fauna. Pedro Garcia, head of Amazon affairs for the Ministry of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources, says this involves “a very different concept.”

“Any decision regarding the use of resources has to be closely tied to the interests of this territory’s ancestral inhabitants,” he said. “They must participate in this process.”

Garcia’s office will serve as secretariat for the reserve’s management board. Its members have not yet been named, but by law must include representatives from government, the Roman Catholic Church and principal Indian tribes, the Yanomami and the Ye’Kwana.

However, in a classic example of the chasm between the cultures, Western experts say they cannot even explain to the Yanomami in their native tongue what a reserve or national park is.

“There’s no way to say it,” said anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon of UC Santa Barbara.

Chagnon, an American who has studied the tribe for 27 years, served as interpreter for foreigners who made a brief visit by helicopter to Ashidowa-Teri.

To illustrate his point, he asked a group of men in the village if they knew where Venezuela is. “Don’t know,” they answered in their language.

Chagnon said that, according to the villagers, the helicopter visit was the first by people outside their tribe.

He asked them if they wanted to have more visits from foreigners. “Yes!” they shouted enthusiastically.

“They’re thinking of the trade goods foreigners will bring,” Chagnon said, not of the devastation that might accompany them.

Chagnon and Venezuelan naturalist Charles Brewer-Carias are directing a wide-ranging study of the rain forest as a human habitat, supported by the private Foundation for Peasant and Indian Families of Venezuela.

They are lobbying for a variety of measures they say are essential for the Indians’ survival, including a halt to the spread of religious missions and military outposts, a ban on trading in shotguns and establishment of a basic health care and immunization service.

Catholic missionaries were the first to enter the area and long have been a voice for the Indians’ interests. But Chagnon contends they are encouraging Indians to move out of their villages to live at missions, where their cultural identity is weakened and disease is rampant.

Military posts are being established to discourage incursions by Brazilian gold prospectors. That should help protect the Indians, but the soldiers, too, are bringing in disease, Chagnon said.

He said some Indians are obtaining shotguns and using them not for hunting, but in deadly raids on other villages.

Health care, especially immunization, is needed to protect the Indians from the already rapid spread of tuberculosis, measles, hepatitis and other killer diseases. A volunteer program using young Venezuelan doctors is supplying inoculations and medical care for some villages, but the doctors admit there are many areas they can’t reach.

Ashidowa-Teri is in one such area. Near a small branch of the upper Siapa River, itself a tributary of the upper Orinoco River, the village is about 620 miles south-southeast of Caracas.

It is “virtually unexplored territory, one of the most pristine portions of the tropical forest left,” Chagnon said.

But the Indians trade among themselves, and contact between villages is common. It is that contact that has brought the white man’s illnesses to places where he hasn’t yet shown his face.

Carlos Botto, a Venzuelan expert in tropical diseases, said after a quick survey of Ashidowa-Teri that he found “a situation similar to what we find all across the upper Orinoco”--hepatitis, malaria, river blindness and intestinal and respiratory disorders.

“That’s one of the problems of contact,” he said. “These people are very susceptible to these diseases.”