Indigenous Peoples and Conservation Organizations

CHAPTER 5
Holding On to the Land: The Long
Journey of the Sirionó Indians of
Eastern Lowland Bolivia
Wendy R. Townsend 1
I. Introduction
Centuries after the Spanish Conquest the Sirionó
Indians still roamed freely in small nomadic
bands over a vast area of eastern lowland
Bolivia. The rubber boom sparked by two world
wars and then the establishment of large cattle
ranches in northeastern Bolivia brought that idyll
to an end and brought the Sirionó to the edge of
extinction. Many were settled as captive workers
on large ranches or in government training
schools that were actually forced labor camps
(Holmberg 1969).
One tiny door remained ajar, and even this led to
a kind of imprisonment. Thomas Anderson, a
missionary from the Four Square Gospel Church
in California, was among the first outsiders to put
down roots in the area. In the early 1930s, he
had established a mission at a spot chosen by a
Sirionó group, a place they called Ibiato, or High
Hill, which lies about 55 kilometers due east of
Trinidad, the capital of Beni State. Alan
Holmberg, an anthropologist who described his
travels with a nomadic band in the 1940s, dismissed
this missionary effort as marginal, little
suspecting that within two generations it would
be the center of what remained of an entire people.
The missionary’s son, Jack Anderson,
became fluent in the Sirionó language and began
to wage campaigns of recruitment. He gathered
small bands from the forest, brought others from
forced labor on ranches, and settled them all in
Ibiato. Following the centuries-old Jesuit system
of the reducción, or reduction (a South American
Indian settlement directed by Jesuit missionaries),
Anderson put the Sirionó to work for the
mission three days a week (CIDDEBENI 1996).
For the Sirionó, gaining possession of even this
small foothold has been precarious. It has been a
struggle not only to claim the land but to determine
how it will be used. Thomas Anderson