Disappearing World

The Cuiva Indians are nomadic hunters who once roamed the plains that sweep from Andes eastwards to the Orinoco river. With only bows and arrows to protect themselves, they face extinction at the hands of the cattle ranchers and well-armed colonists desperate for land.

At first sight, the peaceful Embera people of Colombia live what seems an idyllic life. Four centuries ago, the Spaniards went to Colombia for gold - and found that the Indians wouldn't work for them. In the clashes that followed, many Embera were massacred, and the invaders were forced to import slaves from Africa. Those former slaves, or libres, remain poor and largely without rights themselves, yet they have pushed the Embera into the remote jungle headwaters - while, as if to seal their fate, the Colombian government drives the last section of the Pan-American highway straight across the territory. The Embera tell how they want both legal rights over the land they now inhabit and protection from the physical attacks of the libres with whom they trade. This film shows them in their plight, caught between the government's bulldozers and the libres' banknotes.

This film contrasts the belief systems and ways of life of the Maku and Barasana Colombian Indians with those of the Protestant and Catholic missionaries who, in competing to convert the Indians to Christianity, threaten to consume their ancient culture. The Protestants, North American Fundamentalists from the Summer Institute of Linguistics, are said to have used their organization as a cover in order to be allowed to work with the Indians, because open Protestant missionary activity would not have been acceptable to the authorities.