A Different People : Feared Tribe a Gentle One, Says O.C. Filmmaker

Hours after the jet helicopter delivered her expedition into a settlement deep within the Amazon jungle, Leslie Baer-Brown fell victim to uncontrollable fear.

She had come to study the Yanomami, an indigenous South American people once reported to be fiercely violent murderers, primitives who gang-raped women for fun. This particular Venezuelan Yanomami village, Ashetoeateri, about which she was making a documentary had previously never been contacted by outsiders.

Bear-Brown, who lives in the suburban comfort of Laguna Hills, knew she had no way to call out or escape the remote rain forest enclave, some 1,000 miles inside Venezuela. The helicopter was not due to return for a week.

“The very first night, I had a panic attack,” said Baer-Brown, who made the trek last September. “I was lying in my hammock, listening to the Yanomami talk, and I thought, ‘I don’t know (what they’re talking about), I don’t know if they’re planning to kill us, or use us in a sacrifice, or what.’ I began shaking all over. I thought, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ ”

In fact, Baer-Brown’s terror quickly subsided as she found the Yanomami to be gentle and caring. The video she wrote and co-produced about them, to be screened tonight in Santa Monica in an event sponsored by the Los Angeles Rainforest Project, took top prize last month at Colorado’s U.S. Environmental Film Festival. She wasn’t seeking kudos, however.

“Yanomami: Keepers of the Flame” is about a people who live much as they have for some six millennia, their culture and way of life little changed, Baer-Brown said.

Their tenuous existence, however, has been threatened by exploitation of the rain forest, particularly by tens of thousands of Brazilian gold miners who have brought with them diseases that have already wiped out scores of Yanomami. Baer-Brown hopes her film sends an urgent call for help.

“Something began with Columbus’ voyage 500 years ago--it was the beginning of a whole reign of genocide” of indigenous cultures. “Our film is about breaking that cycle of genocide.”

Baer-Brown’s first in-depth exposure to the Yanomami came through musician Michael Stuart Ani, whom she interviewed when she was host of “EarthWatch,” a nationally syndicated, weekly environmental radio show produced by Cal Poly Pomona, where she works in public relations.

Ani, a Los Angeles resident, has lived with Yanomami--but not the Ashetoeateri villagers--intermittently over the past six years. He became one of the culture’s most ardent advocates, while indulging his adventurer’s spirit and befriending several villagers.

Baer-Brown, 33, has been interested in Native American culture since childhood and is herself an advocate for various issues and people in need. In 1990, she and husband Alfred Brown, who composed the documentary’s score, recorded a song they wrote and performed about Los Angeles’ Skid Row homeless, to whom they donated proceeds from sales of the tape.

Taken with Ani’s passionate concern and the plight of the Yanomami, she wrote about both last year in an article for The Times. But that wasn’t enough.

“I’ve been involved in a lot of causes, but none caught my imagination like this,” said Baer-Brown. She soon heard that Ani was organizing another rain forest expedition with, among others, UC Santa Barbara anthropologist Napoleon A. Chagnon, who has lived with the Yanomami off and on for 30 years and wrote a book entitled “Yanomamo, The Fierce People.” She decided to join the 16 others making the weeklong expedition.

Baer-Brown, who majored in technical writing and journalism as an undergrad at Cal State Fullerton, had no filmmaking experience and never intended to write a documentary, planning instead to write about the trip for a magazine. She had a hunch that video footage would be valuable, however, so, along with a stash of reporters pads, she took a camera and a cameraman, neighbor Lee Raab.

Others, including Chagnon, have made films about the Yanomami, who have no written language, no system of numbers beyond one, two, and more than two, and practice spiritual ways that date back thousands of years. But Baer-Brown’s film beat out some 130 U.S. Environmental Film Festival entries, including heavyweights from National Geographic’s “Explorer” TV series and cable’s Discovery Channel.

“People are slowly beginning to understand that we have to save the rain forest--nothing else will matter if we can’t breathe--and one way to do that is to save the indigenous people who live there,” said festival film coordinator Jeanne Sauer. Baer-Brown’s documentary “successfully delivered this message.”

The one-hour documentary, produced with labor and equipment donated mostly by Cal Poly Pomona, lacks the slick presentation of some other productions. But it captures the startling innocence of a people who, according to Baer-Brown, have never seen anyone other than fellow Yanomami, let alone a video camera, at which they stare blankly.

“They don’t have a sense of privacy or a social code against staring, so I’d wake up and there would be five Yanomami smiling at me,” Baer-Brown said in a recent interview.

Raab’s camera frames scenes of daily life in Ashetoeateri--from sacred rituals involving inhalation of psychotropic substances to plantain gathering to simplistic dance celebrations--a small, thatched-roof village where many men wear no clothes and bare-chested women pierce sticks through their lips, noses and corners of their mouths for adornment.

Despite various anthropologists’ earlier reports of incredible brutality among some Yanomami, other researchers, including Baer-Brown, have formed a different picture after spending time in their midst.

“They were constantly caring for me,” said the outgoing, loquacious woman who communicated with the Yanomami by “smiling, touching and sharing food.”

Certainly, the trip had its hardships, including incessant heat, the threat of malaria--which some expedition members contracted--and marauding vampire bats. The toughest part about bathing in the river, she said, was futilely attempting to dodge “big bugs that land on you.”

“I came home with 20 wasp bites. They make you bleed. You can’t get them off you,” she said. But the Yanomami’s warmth and nonstop hospitality helped make up for it all.

More than just a document of their day-to-day life, the film focuses on the Yanomami’s threatened survival.

When gold was discovered in the Amazon rain forest in 1987, prospectors poured into Brazilian Yanomami territory, poisoning water sources with mercury used in mining, shooting Yanomami who were protecting their villages, and spreading such diseases as measles, tuberculosis and smallpox, virtually annihilating Yanomami of northern Brazil.

Although population estimates vary widely, Baer-Brown said that of some 20,000 Yanomami alive in 1987, about 14,000 remain, most living in Venezuela within a biosphere reserve. It is an area encompassing more than 45,000 square miles of rain forest that the government has declared off-limits to most agricultural or industrial development.

Still, Yanomami continue to die at a devastating rate. Disease continues to spread while resources to enforce the biosphere’s borders are scarce. Medical care is provided, but with only five doctors working in an area roughly the size of Louisiana, they can’t reach all Yanomami villages or begin to fill every need, Baer-Brown said.

Ani, featured frequently in the film, has been one of many trying to raise money to bolster medical care for the Yanomami through the Amazonia Foundation he founded. Tonight’s screening will benefit the nonprofit foundation.

His driving mission, however, and the main message of the film, is to involve the Yanomami in any survival project so that the process jibes with their way of doing things, Baer-Brown said. For instance, in addition to the infusion of advanced medicines, Ani would like to see the tribe’s medicine men taking part, using their own remedies and ancient spiritual beliefs intrinsic to every facet of their culture.

“If we march in there with our needles and white pills that mean nothing to them and which they can’t re-create, we begin to destroy their culture and we make them consumers, reliant on us,” she said.

“But it’s more than just the Yanomami at stake,” said Baer-Brown, drawing an analogy to the threatened northern spotted owl. The owl is a top predator whose decimation sends a signal that “the whole ecosystem beneath it is falling apart,” she said.

“If the (Yanomami) culture is wiped off the face of the earth, it will indicate that the rest of us are not far behind. We are at the eve of their destruction, but we are also at the eve of our own.”

“Yanomami: Keepers of the Flame” screens tonight at 7:30 the Loews Hotel, 1700 Ocean Ave., Santa Monica. The evening’s program, with environmental speakers, entertainment by the Eagle Spirit Dancers, New Age musicians Strunz and Farah , runs from 7 to 10 p.m. Tickets: $20; $10 for students. Proceeds benefit the Amazonia Foundation. Information: (310) 458-2068 or (714) 869-3342.