Indigenous Olympics

This week, about 1,000 athletes from over 40 Brazilian tribes are competing in Indigenous Peoples' Games VII.

They're billed as the world's largest events for Indian tribes.

Among the sports: dart-blowing, spear-throwing, archery, canoe-rowing, and footraces in which runners carry 200-pound tree trunks on their shoulders.

The photo that leads this post shows a torch-bearer at the Games' opening ceremony.

Sports Illustrated apparently was too busy clucking about the all the fights that have been breaking out at basketball and football games to cover the Brazilian Indians.

Luckily for us, the Wall Street Journal dispatched Matt Moffett to Porto Seguro, Brazil, to report on the biggest thing in Olympic sports since Athens.

Here's his front page story from this past Tuesday's paper.

At This Olympics, They Throw Spears And Blow Darts

Brazil's Indians Compete In Traditional Games; Winning Isn't Everything

Rony Paresi, chief of the Paresi Indians, wore his ceremonial headdress of macaw feathers.

At his side, a Paresi brave grimaced behind streaks of war paint.

The battle they both were girding for was taking place on an athletic field.

When the chief tossed a squishy ball, made of tree resin, the brave hit the dirt in a spread-eagle dive.

Then, scuttling along on all fours, the Indian butted the ball with his head toward his opponent's territory, in a practice drill for the sport known as Xikunahity.

In this game of "head soccer," touching the ball with feet or hands is prohibited.

The Indians say the game was shown to them long ago by a mystic from the heavens.

This week, about 1,000 athletes from more than 40 Brazilian tribes are competing in the Indigenous Peoples' Games VII. (Tournament organizers use Super Bowl-like Roman numerals, and Super Bowl-like promotion, such as billing the games as the world's largest sporting events for Indian tribes.)

Among the sports: archery, dart-blowing, spear-throwing, canoe-rowing and footraces in which the runners carry 200-pound tree trunks on their shoulders.

The Indians may boast cultural riches, but they don't have the budget of the Athens games.

Yesterday, on what was supposed to have been the first full day of competition, a fierce rainstorm forced athletes to evacuate the olympic village, several rows of palm-roofed huts located on a reserve of the Pataxo tribe.

The Indians were moved to a convention center and competitions were canceled. Organizers were hoping to get back on track today.

There are also special exhibition sports unlikely to be broadcast on ESPN.

In tihimore, another Paresi game, contestants bowl, using ears of corn as pins and a quince as the ball.

In apanare, a Xavante contest, bowmen loft arrows into the sky and braves try to snatch them before they hit the ground.

The crowds can be rowdy.

During the third Indian olympics, some women from the Xikrin tribe threw sand in the faces of their braves after they lost a tug of war to a rival tribe.

That's the same treatment that Xikrin hunters get when they fail to kill anything for dinner.

In the days leading up to the games, Indian athletes were busy with last-minute training.

Some Kayapo practiced ronkra, which is a kind of field hockey.

Braves use a heavy wooden stick, without the curved tip, to swat a puck carved out of a coconut.

Some of the athletes' mannerisms had a familiar look.

Outside the Karaja tribe's hut, after a burly wrestler scored a takedown, he twirled around with his arms extended like an eagle's - reminiscent of the end-zone antics of National Football League stars.

The games have flourished at a time when Brazilian Indians are enjoying a renaissance.

For most of five centuries after the arrival of Portuguese mariners, Indians had been victims of disease, poverty and violent land battles with whites.

By the 1970s, the Brazilian Indian population had declined to roughly 150,000, from at least several million before Portugal colonized the area.

But Brazil's indigenous population has recently been growing at about twice the rate of the population as a whole and now numbers about 400,000.

The Indians' comeback has been helped by the government policy of settling indigenous people on vast land reserves, covering about 12% of Brazil's national territory.

Brazil's 1988 Constitution put greater emphasis on demarcating and guaranteeing the integrity of Indian lands.

For many of the athletes, taking first place isn't the point of the games.

"We are not strong sportsmen, but we participate as a celebration of being alive," says Celso Suruí, who helped lead the Suruí tribesman on a three-day trek by truck and bus here to the host city of Porto Seguro, which was the site of the first recorded landing of Portuguese sailors, in 1500.

Long isolated from non-Indians, the Suruí made their first contact with whites in the 1960s - and were decimated by flu and the measles.

With the tribe more secure on its reservation, the Suruí population is growing again.

The games opened officially Sunday night with an extravagant ceremony in the Pataxo soccer stadium.

The commemoration started with a chant by a wizened shaman and a child.

Next came a procession of more than 40 Indian tribes, starting with the host Pataxo, who were decked out in grass skirts and armadillo-claw necklaces.

The parade included the Bororo, with jaguar-spot tattoos on their jaws and chests, the Irantxe, who played flutes as they marched, and the Awa Guaja, a tiny tribe discovered only about 20 years ago that sent just four athletes to the games.

After all the tribes had filed onto the field, a Kayapo leader lighted a 40-foot torch.

Then, archers unleashed a flight of flaming arrows, igniting a spectacular fireworks display.

For some native athletes, the facilities are the most exotic part of the game.

Some swimmers have never been in a man-made pool before.

A veteran of the games, Reginaldo Bakairi, the chief of the Bakairi tribe, recalls,

"We were strong when we won the tug of war on land, but in the pool we seemed weak because we could not swim fast without a current propelling us."

Brazil's first indigenous olympics took place in the central city of Goiania in 1996, and was promoted by then-Sports Minister Edson Arantes do Nascimento, better known to soccer fans as Pele.

Some 400 athletes from 29 tribes participated.

Athletes were long on enthusiasm but short on experience.

During a sprinting competition, a Kanela Indian, who didn't understand the Portuguese-speaking field judge, surged ahead of the other runners - and then ducked under the tape at the finish line and kept right on running.

When the public-address announcer called on winners of track and field events to come to a podium to pick up their medals, none of the triumphant athletes answered the call at first.

They had already left the arena to enjoy the talk and singing at a tribal banquet.

"The indigenous athlete cares about sharing fellowship with his brothers - not collecting pieces of metal," says Bekwaj Kayapo, a leader of the Kayapo tribe.

Due to organizational difficulties, the second Indigenous Games wasn't held until 1999, three years later.

But the competition has been held on schedule, every year since, and in a different city.

Putting the event together is almost an Olympian feat in its own right.

Encounters between Indian groups largely cut off from the rest of the world have often produced surprising revelations.

Three years ago, the reclusive Enawene-Nawe Indians found that they played the same kind of head soccer as the Paresi, even though the two tribes live at some distance from each other.

For Severo Kanela, a leader of the isolated Kanela tribe, the payoff of the four-day trip to Porto Seguro for this year's games is economic development.

The Kanela are farmers who are using the games to try to diversify into commerce.

They have brought baskets and weavings to sell to other Indians and tourists.