The survival skills of Helena Valero

Anthropology has been bad at capturing the living conditions of women. A kidnapped woman who returned to civilization was the exception.

Helena Valero with three of her children, her ex-husband Akawe and her father. From Ettore Biocca’s Yanoama - The Story of Helena Valero, a Girl Kidnapped by Amazonian Indians, 1996

One of the most important anthropologists of the 20th century was a dirt-poor mestizo woman called Helena Valero. After having read the one and only book in English about her, I'm convinced of that. Her insights into a primitive society is worth more than that of the vast majority of anthropologists, for one simple reason: Helena was there for real, as a member of those societies. She didn't only study stone age life. She lived it. For two decades, she lived among the Yanomamö horticulturalists of the Amazonas, after having been kidnapped at the age of 11, in 1937.

When Helena managed to escape the Yanomamö after 19 years¹ with her four half-Yanomamö sons, she was cast into poverty. South America in 1956 was not rich and no one wanted to give Helena any favorable treatment: She had to fend for herself like all other single mothers.

That was, I believe, one of the worst mistakes of the history of anthropology. Helena Valero should have been swiftly employed as an expert at the most prestigious universities and be made to answer questions, teach language and comment on anthropological findings, every working day from 9 to 5 for the rest of her life. Because she knew what almost no anthropologist knows: How to make it in primitive society as a woman.

Compared to Napoleon Chagnon's account of the Yanomamö, Helena Valero's testimony reveals an even more violent and chaotic environment. That is not strange: Per definition, the tribes Napoleon Chagnon visited could not be uncontacted tribes. Why did Napoleon Chagnon succeed so well in befriending Yanomamö villagers? Ultimately, it was because they became acquainted enough with modern society to highly appreciate a person from the modern world who came with trade goods. In the beginning of his first book about the Yanomamö, Napoleon Chagnon tells that in 1964, when he first came to study the Yanomamö, he did not intend to stay for long. He changed his mind when he met the Yanomamö, because he encountered the opportunity to study a civilization process when it happened.²  

Helena Valero didn't study a civilization process. She studied life, as it might have been since the beginning of time. Napoleon Chagnon could study the Yanomamö from the 1960s to the 1990s because they were comparatively peaceful by then. Helena Valero was kidnapped by the Yanomamö in the 1930s because they were so warlike by then. Anthropologists don't go to places that are too dangerous. But only dangerous people attack white men and kidnap their daughters. That way, Helena Valero's perspective is something unusual and thereby very valuable. 

While I read the book about Helena Valero, my impression was: No one told me this was a thriller. Reading her story gave the same uneasy feeling as reading one of the very numerous novels about the underworld of gangsters that exist in the Western world. It was the same kind of imminent danger, brutality, shifting alliances and emotionality that are characteristic of today's outlaws (yet another example of basic human social structure, which I wrote about here). 

How to survive 

I have obtained little information about Helena's first 11 years. Maybe she didn't want to compromise the privacy of her parents, who were still alive in 1965, when the book was first published. She should have been born around 1926. Her father was a miner deep in the Amazonas. Her mother was a native American from the Rio Tiqué area. Helena had several siblings. One sister died. That is more or less all we get to know. 

Helena survived two decades among the Yanomamö for a simple reason: She possessed outstanding survival skills. That way, Helena Valero can be seen as a model for our ancestresses: If Helena survived substantial hardship and several assassination attempts in a primitive environment, chances are that some successful women in prehistory were like Helena. Napoleon Chagnon found out that about five percent of Yanomamö women died at the hands of humans, compared to 30 percent of men³. A figure that might have been higher in the very rough pre-contact environment a generation before Chagnon's research.

The first attempt on Helena's life came when she was a young teenager, still unmarried. She had already been kidnapped three times. First from the group that kidnapped her from her mestizo family. Then from that group into another group and then into a third group called the Shamatari. She was kidnapped together with a number of other women. Those women disliked how their kidnappers treated Helena better than them: The kidnappers gave Helena better food because they believed that she was unused to the rough roots they ate. Once Helena found a toad on a trail. The women present killed it and drained it from blood. One woman, a kidnapped woman who often complained that Helena was treated better than the other kidnapped women, made a package of the eggs from the toad and told Helena that they were for eating. Back in the village, Helena put the package with toad eggs on the fire. Two little girls ate of the eggs and one of them died.

The mother of the dead girl urged the men to kill Helena. But Helena also had friends who defended her. Especially a woman whose son she took care of constantly. In the middle of the night that woman told Helena to run away and come back later, when people had calmed down and didn't want to kill her anymore. Helena did come back after a few days, because of the overhanging threat from the jaguar. Shortly after she came back she was shot in the thigh with a poisoned arrow while fetching firewood in the forest. She pulled out the arrow and filled the wound with mud in order to avoid leaving a trail of blood and escaped into the forest again. The poison made her dizzy and altered her vision of colors, but she remained conscious. After a couple of days she returned to the village, again for fear of the jaguar, and got a little time to heal her wound before being urged to escape permanently: Her friends had understood that the relatives of the dead girl planned to kill her at the time of the mortuary ceremony when they were pounding the dead girl's bones in order to eat them.

Helena spent seven months alone in the rainforest. She built a hut and managed to keep the fire alive for some time. After the fire went out she only ate fruits and ants, because she was unable to start a new fire. She chose the kinds of fruit that monkeys had eaten and dropped and avoided the fruits the monkeys didn't eat. 

After seven months alone she encountered a small group of Yanomamö: Four men and three women with children. She spied on them for days and concluded that only one of them had the typical haircut of the Shamatari, the village she came from. She took some body paint from their camp when they were away, because she thought being painted like them would make her seem more human. Then she presented herself to them. At first they claimed she was a ghost, but one of the women argued that a ghost would never speak their language so badly. The man with the Shamatari haircut wanted to take Helena back to the people who wanted to kill her, but the others insisted that he was outnumbered. 

Helena came to follow the men and women to their village, the Namoeteri. The Namoeteri was a coalition of several smaller villages that had joined forces for better military strength. Obviously, there were pitfalls among them too. One day Helena went with some children to fetch water. They met a group of returning hunters on the path. One of the hunters was Fusiwe, the headman of the village and behind them followed a huge dog. The children said “Here comes that bad dog” and Helena exclaimed “dirty, bad” and threw herself in the water. A woman had heard her, and she went to the mother of Fusiwe and claimed that Helena had called Fusiwe dirty and bad and that she had said that she didn't want to be his wife because he had too many women already. Fusiwe's mother urged him to kill Helena instantly. Helena knew nothing about that, until Fusiwe pointed an arrow in her direction. Startled, she jumped through the roof of the house and over the palisade and ran away. Fusiwe shot two poisoned arrows, but none of them hit her. 

Helena stayed away for about a week. During that week dramatic things happened. The village had visitors from another village. Those visitors went home in peace after a good feast. But soon after, Fusiwe got suspicious. Where was Helena? The guests might have taken her with them, he suspected. And then he must be justified to pursue his guests and steal their women in revenge, he reasoned. So that is what he did. Afterwards, he realized that he had made enemies of his friends and got mad at Helena for having caused him to do such a stupid thing.

Helena only managed to hide in the forest for a week. Then she was discovered by some men of the village. They brought her back and she was subject to a kind of spontaneous trial. Fusiwe said that it was her fault that he had gone away and stolen women from his allies. Several others contradicted him. Fusiwe's mother, who had urged her son to kill Helena a week ago, now urged him not to kill her. Fusiwe's father argued that Fusiwe hadn't stolen the women because of Helena but because he wanted to. A young man called Rashawe held a small speech on the good reasons not to kill Helena. Fusiwe took his advice and decided that he wouldn't kill Helena, but to instead make her his fifth wife.

Fusiwe the one-man-show

Of all stories of Helena Valero's life, this one must be the most absurd. Fusiwe first tried to kill Helena with poisoned arrows. When she escaped, he blamed her for causing him to take women from his allies and felt like killing her again. And after that Fusiwe and Helena became happily married. 

Fusiwe could thank his family and friends for the good advice not to kill Helena. She became a loyal wife. He told her about Yanomamö mythology and she told him some things about the ways of white people. Helena became the favorite of Fusiwe's oldest wife. The oldest wife appointed Helena work leader of the other three wives. They were not always nice to Helena and urged their husband to beat her because she didn't make machetes and cooking pots for them. Being a white person, she surely knew how to make such things, they reasoned, so if she didn't it was because she didn't want to. Fusiwe didn't complain at her that way, but he also didn't defend her against the accusations. 

Helena had two sons by Fusiwe. She found herself so much at ease that she stopped making plans to escape back to the world of white people. Indeed, there were some lows. Once Fusiwe broke her arm. Someone had caught a crocodile and her toddler son took a piece of meat. A dog snatched the meat from the toddler's hand. The dog choked on a bone and died instantly. Helena felt a sharp pain in her upper arm and found that Fusiwe had hit her with a thick branch. He liked that dog a lot and thought it was Helenas fault that it died, because she didn't watch her child carefully enough. The other women found that Helena's arm was broken and she had to spend a week just lying down with her arm tied to a stick. She refused to eat and said she would rather die if Fusiwe treated her that badly. When Fusiwe came to talk to her, she told him that those who strike others should have their arms broken to know what pain is and that she would run away from him if she were able to stand on her legs. That, apparently, was what Yanomamö wives told their husbands in order to protest. Not “I should divorce you” but “I should run away from you”.

Helena's arm healed and Fusiwe never hit her again. Still, their comparatively good years couldn't last forever. There was a reason why Fusiwe had five wives when most men had only one: He was an unusual hothead. His discussions with Helena on cultural practices and differences indicate that he was in no way stupid. He was also considered a very good practitioner of shamanism. But he was a one-man-show. He made decisions based on his spontaneous feelings and those decisions were not always very good. 

The decline of Fusiwe began when he was urged by a group of men of another tribe, the Shamatari, to kill their leader, Rohariwe. Rohariwe was the same person who once defended Helena when the poisoned girl's relatives wanted to kill her. He had now become murderous and killed both women and old people of his own tribe for no apparent reason. His brothers urged Fusiwe to kill him, because, they said, he had blown poison on Fusiwe's brother and killed him too. Fusiwe took on the challenge. He invited a group of men from the tribe, ostensibly for friendly trade, and he and other men of his group killed both Rohariwe and his son (a child) and several other men.

After that, many of Fusiwe's tribesmen were angry because Fusiwe had made enemies of former friends. The large conglomerate of tribes that Fusiwe led went separate ways: The Patanaweteri (who became Napoleon Chagnon's hosts a generation later) went to a spot near the great river and the Gnaminaweteri went to their old garden. The Pishaanseteri went their way. Only about 30 men stayed with Fusiwe. 

Fusiwe had become a successful man with five wives much through being brave and ruthless (although he also inherited his leadership position from his father). Now this attitude had led him into an impasse. His group moved closer to the Shamatari in order to show that he was not afraid of them. 

After several months, some former alliance members, the Patanaweteri, came and suggested that the group should unite again because they had so many enemies. The former allies decided to hold a feast together. In the evening the children started to play, throwing embers at each other. Fusiwe's father shouted: “Look, these children are playing; let no one of you men get in between them. When they start these games and grown-ups also join in, it ends in a fight.”

Fusiwe didn't listen to such wise words. He told Helena to take the cooking pot off the embers. His oldest wife urged him not to join the children's game, but he listened to no one. When people saw Fusiwe-the-headman throwing embers, other people joined. They threw heavy pieces of wood and it looked like a rain of fire in the heavy darkness. Fusiwe was hit by a sharp piece of coal right beside his eye. The blood flowed and he decided that it was time to kill his former allies with arrows. He was in a rage and called out the others by name (a grave insult among Yanomamö, who only had first names). The others didn't answer his provocation but left instead. 

In the morning, everyone had come back to the village. But Fusiwe realized that he would not be the leader of a coalition anymore. He took his small group of followers and went to a group called the Teteheiteri, who were relatives of his oldest wife. Fusiwe's group worked very hard to plant a new garden and built a new permanent house next to it. Helena had another son by Fusiwe. A great epidemic hit and many people died. One of the dead was Fusiwe's oldest wife, who always liked Helena a lot. Helena took care of the woman's young son and breastfed him alongside her own son.

When talking about this period, Helena describes Fusiwe as a good man. He was very generous and gave everything he had away, either to his family members or to visitors. He did quite a bit of parenting and told the children how to behave when visiting others. He hunted birds and gave the children the colorful feathers to play with. 

However, Fusiwe had made too many enemies and was too fierce and proud to make peace with them. Some of his former allies, the Pishaanseteri, stole all the tobacco from his small group's garden. Fusiwe declared his intention to kill one of them in retaliation. He was warned by an uncle of the consequences: Making mortal enemies that way would put his sons in great danger. The uncle himself had seen his children go hungry when his group had to flee for fear of revenge. Fusiwe did nothing, but some time later the garden got vandalized again. This time one young wife called Tokoma persistently urged Fusiwe to kill the perpetrators. Helena and another wife, a woman from Aramamisiteri who just like Helena lacked relatives, did the opposite and urged him not to kill. 

Fusiwe seems to have known that killing a Pishaanseteri man for revenge was a stupid thing to do. But he also seems to have lacked a plan for doing otherwise. On one occasion, Fusiwe shot an arrow into Tokoma's leg because he felt provoked by her urging him to kill. “You have a big mouth for talking and you will be the cause of my death”, he told her. She managed to pull out the hooked arrow and her leg got very swollen, but she recovered. 

Fusiwe located the Pishaanseteri and promised to kill the first man he encountered. That man turned out to be an old friend of his, a young man who had brought Fusiwe's family a lot of game in the hope of marrying some daughter that any of the wives would give birth to. The young man had parted with Fusiwe in grief when the group split. Nonetheless, Fusiwe chose to kill his former friend, because he happened to be the first Pishaanseteri he saw.

The dead young man was a brother of Rashawe, the headman of the Pishaanseteri. Rashawe was the man who once defended Helena when Fusiwe blamed her for having caused him to abduct women. During that time Rashawe and Fusiwe had been very good friends. Their relationship had deteriorated when Rashawe's group split from Fusiwe's group and now they were mortal enemies: Fusiwe knew that killing the brother of an important man like Rashawe was more or less the same thing as suicide. Fusiwe spoke about his own inevitable death with his family members. One of the last things he did in life was attending his and Helena's youngest son, who was ill. Shortly after he was mortally wounded in a well-planned ambush. Before he died, he told Helena to escape with their sons, as their enemies would seek out and kill them for revenge.

Refugees

After Fusiwe died, Tokoma, the wife who had urged Fusiwe to kill and whom he shot in the leg with an arrow, was called to paint his dead body, for no woman was such a good painter as Tokoma.

Two of the four widows of Fusiwe had relatives to go back to. Two of them didn't: Helena and the wife of Aramamisiteri origin. Their status as single women proved to be a problem. When the men hunted they scarcely gave Helena any meat for her children. A younger brother of Fusiwe tried to convince Helena to stay with him, but she wasn't impressed by him. Neither was she afraid when he threatened to shoot her if she refused to be his wife. 

Some time after Fusiwe's death a few different tribes had gathered together. Some brothers of Fusiwe made a plan: To kill Helena and the Aramamisiteri woman at the mortuary ceremony when people were eating the ashes of Fusiwe's bones. The reasoning went that since their enemies were likely to attack, those enemies would capture the two women and then they would have sons with the enemies and those sons would be enemies too. For that reason, Fusiwe's brothers thought it was better to get rid of those women. Apparently they felt that their group's load of women compared to men had become too high, so the brothers thought they should get rid of women they couldn’t defend anyway.

Everyone present wasn't equally fond of that logic. A headman of a visiting group heard and agreed with the brothers when they revealed their plan, but thought it was an unpleasant idea. So the visiting headman sent some women to warn Helena and the Aramamisiteri wife. The latter was more eager to escape than Helena. Since her children with Fusiwe were daughters, they were in no danger from the enemies. Helena, however, was less certain of what to do, since the people who killed Fusiwe wanted to kill her sons too. If she stayed, she was in grave danger, but if she went away, her sons were in danger. The Aramamisiteri woman, however, knew what she wanted. She grabbed Helena's youngest son and refused to let go of him and walked farther away. At one occasion, Helena changed direction back where they came from only with the older son because she thought Fusiwe's relatives loved him the most and would take good care of him. But the boy started to complain that he missed his brother, so they caught up with the Aramamisiteri woman again. 

Helena knew that the Aramamisiteri woman took her towards the Pishaanseteri, the people who had killed Fusiwe. She knew that it was a very dangerous place for her sons, because the Pishaanseteri were likely to want to kill them so they wouldn't grow up and take revenge. When Helena told the Aramamisiteri woman that they were heading toward the enemy village she said that they would only pass by on the way to a village where she had relatives. Helena planned to stay hidden outside. However, her hiding place was revealed, probably by her Aramamisiteri companion, who intended to stay among the Pishaanseteri: Within only a few days there, she had joined a man from the village. Helena, however, refused every attempt from men in the enemy village to become her husband.

Rashawe, the headman, met Helena when she entered the village and told her that although he was expected to kill her sons, he didn't want to do it. He promised to protect them. Some time later the Namoeteri, the group Fusiwe had led before he died, raided the village and killed a young man. The young man's father wanted to take revenge through killing Helena's sons. Rashawe defended the children. 

But as usual, the protection of a headman only meant so much. After two men had an argument over whether to decapitate her oldest son or not, Helena realized that it was time to escape. She had previously got an offer of guidance from an old woman who came from a far-off tribe near the Orinoco River. White people sometimes passed her village, the woman said. That time, Helena lived with Fusiwe and didn't want to escape. Now she happened to meet the same woman and her son again and the offer seemed a lot more tempting. Akawe, the son of the old woman, put signs on the path to indicate which was the right one. 

Life with the madman 

The escape was dramatic. Once Helena built a bridge from lianas to cross a river with her children - she was more afraid of men who might be pursuing them than of the dangerous animals in the water. But Helena and her two sons arrived safely among the tribe of the old woman who had guided her, a tribe called the Punabueteri. There Helena immediately became a wife of Akawe. Akawe had a rather unpleasant way of proposing: He threatened to kill Helena if she didn't comply. The part of the book about Helena's time with Akawe is much shorter than the part about her time with Fusiwe, although Helena had two children with both and thereby should have spent more or less as much time with both of them. Probably because Fusiwe was a much more interesting person. While Fusiwe was a colorful guy, Akawe was a classical madman: He even had a psychotic episode. But most of all, he desired new young women very much and he was prepared to kill to get them. In general, Akawe held few qualms over killing. He was something of a contract killer who killed when asked to in exchange for the promise of a woman. 

Akawe had a wife who didn't like to live with him. She first went to live with her parents and later she eloped with a young man to a distant village. The men in that village didn't allow the young man to have that wife for himself and raped her. After a few days the headman intervened and gave him the woman back and told him to go away. The young man knew no places to go where people were not friends with Akawe, so the couple went back to Akawe's group. Akawe beat both of them very heavily on the head with a club. The man almost died: The other men placed a container under his hammock to capture all the blood that ran from his head. His life was saved by men who told Akawe that it wasn't fair game to hit someone three times without taking a blow oneself. However, Akawe said that he didn't want the woman anymore and the couple actually seems to have survived. Such was the price for divorce and remarriage. 

Akawe hoped much for a young girl that had been promised to him. But that young girl fled with a young man. Hearing about that made Akawe want to kill Helena, because she was old and should be the one to flee, in his opinion (by that time, Helena must have been in her twenties). Akawe painted himself black in preparation for killing and Helena had to escape with her two youngest children. For a few days she had to avoid Akawe by hiding in the forest during daytime. When he saw her again, he blamed her for scaring away the young women that he was entitled to. He pursued and felled Helena, but she got a stranglehold on him. The onlookers cheered on her. 

After that, Akawe beat Helena less, but he also withheld food from her and her children, saying that she could go out in the forest and kill a wild boar by herself. Helena tried to escape from Akawe to another village, but he pursued her. She then hoped to escape to the world of white men. Akawe wanted to escape too: He had made a contract killing too many and realized that he lived dangerously. 

Helena managed to get back her older sons from groups that had abducted and raised them. She freed her oldest son, who was about ten years old by then, by opening a hole through the palisade in the middle of the night and sneaking in. 

This was in 1956⁴. After some time among the whites, Helena managed to shake off Akawe, who went to another Yanomamö group. Helena was then about 30 years old. She had lived with the Yanomamö for 19 years. When she arrived in the world of the white man, she got rid of one problem: People wanting to kill her and her children. Instead, she got a new problem: To feed her children and pay for their education. She didn't get a job that paid enough to buy food for the entire family and many times lived quite miserably. 

She wasn't alone in that. Many people lived miserably in South America in the 1950s. Also one of Helena's brothers, who had never been kidnapped by Indians, had a very difficult time finding a job. Still, the neglect of Helena Valero was one of the most embarrassing mistakes of 20th century anthropology. Ettore Biocca, the Italian anthropologist who wrote down her story, was rather alone in realizing the value of asking Helena Valero about things before visiting the Yanomamö. Every anthropologist should have done that. When Napoleon Chagnon first encountered the Yanomamö, he spent half a year conscientiously writing down false information: His informants tricked him and said obscene words in Yanomamö instead of the real names of people.⁵ A supervisor like Helena Valero could have helped him avoid that mistake at once. Apparently she was very perceptive of what happened around her. She should have been asked about every birth and every death she witnessed. Every marriage, every elopement. Every question anthropologists had about the customs and circumstances of the Yanomamö should have been posed to her. When she died, a goldmine of information died with her. 

I don't know when Helena Valero died. In the preface it is said that she returned to the Yanomamö again after a decade or so among the whites. Then she should have been about 40 years old and no longer an object to take possession of for the most aggressive men. The edition of her book from 1996 says that she was alive by that time, but crippled from blindness. She lived among the Yanomamö, near a mission station, and one of her sons stayed nearby and raised a family of his own. 

Why did Helena succeed?

Helena Valero gained a deeper insight into Yanomamö society than almost any other outsider. Not in order to gather material to publish, but in order to survive together with her children. And her survival in itself is of great interest to anthropology. Although her switching between an uncontacted tribe in the rainforest and modern Western society is more or less unique, her status as a kidnap victim is not. She was kidnapped together with other females several times and once she even had a native colleague while escaping from a mortal threat. The properties that made Helena a survivor are likely to have made countless of our ancestresses and their children survivors as well.

Why did Helena Valero survive? As far as I can see, she survived because she was intelligent, perceptive, friendly and physically strong. She had some luck. But she also made a great number of small decisions that improved her chances. She calculated risks carefully and could act very quickly when she felt that one risk clearly superseded another. 

But intelligence alone couldn't save Helena. She also survived due to her friendliness and conscience. Wherever Helena went, she got female allies who warned her when they knew she was in danger. Wherever she went, there were always people who liked her. It seems that people liked her because she was helpful and a good worker. On at least two occasions it is mentioned that she took care of other people's children and even breastfed a dead woman's child. That way, there was always someone who was eager that she would survive. As Helena's testimony indicates, being friendly was not the only successful strategy. Scaring people with violence and unpredictability, like Akawe, also worked for some, especially those who happened to be big and strong men. Nonetheless, gaining allies through friendliness and conscientiousness, like Helena, was a working strategy for those who didn't happen to be formidable males.

I think the life of Helena Valero gives a hint to the answer of one old question: Why are women more or less as intelligent than men? Why has nature wasted high intellectual capacities on females, now that their reproductive success is rather even anyway? Why aren't their brains economized versions of those of men, now that their bodies are? 

The story of Helena Valero indicates that females evolved to be more or less as intelligent as men because they had many important decisions to make. The scarcest resource among the Yanomamö wasn't food. It was protection. Women as well as men had to calculate carefully where they and their children were best protected. Things changed rapidly: A stupid decision from a hot-tempered headman could make former allies bitter enemies in one evening. Helena used all the up-to-date information she had to calculate where she and her children would be well received. That is exactly what other Yanomamö women needed to do as well in order to maximize the chances for themselves and their children. And that activity requires a lot of intellectual resources.

Helena's story shows one thing very clearly: Oppression and agency are two different things. Yanomamö women obviously were oppressed: If a man thought his wife said the wrong things, he could shoot an arrow into her thigh. Nonetheless, what she said mattered to him. Helena lived in a world filled with poisoned arrows held by others than herself. She couldn't choose the father of her children. But she could state her disillusionment when he treated her badly. And when such subtle methods didn't help, she could plot how to escape from a husband she didn't like.

Helena tells about other women doing the same. One young woman was the second wife of a lame man, injured by an arrow a long time ago. She escaped to another village with another man with her small daughter by the lame man. The co-villagers failed to retrieve the woman, but they got hold of the little girl. They hoped the woman would go back to her daughter, but she didn't: Apparently, it wasn't worth it. And the woman who fled from Akawe got a bad wound on her head and a wounded new husband. But provided that they both survived without severe brain damage, their calculation might have paid off: Living with Akawe actually seems to have been miserable.

Now that I have been praising Helena Valero's outstanding survival skills: Did she do anything that was less likely to gain her in the basic human social structure where she spent two decades? I can think of one thing that the native Yanomamö women might have done better than her: Teaming up with men. Helena Valero turned down every proposal of marriage she got. She might have had good reasons, but the only men she was ever intimate with, according to her own story, were two men who credibly threatened to kill her if she did otherwise. On several occasions she showed a high degree of sexual morality. She accused her Aramamisiteri co-widow of bad morality because she found a new man among the enemies of her dead husband so quickly. It might be that Helena's high levels of morality or disinterest in men gave her a certain disadvantage: Since she didn't voluntarily seek or accept the protection of any man, she ended up with the men who forced protection on her, until she fled to the whites and was old enough to be left alone when she returned to the Yanomamö again. It might be that in a violent society, a certain degree of promiscuity serves to keep women away from the worst men. 

I didn't read Helena Valero's story until now, because the book was difficult to get hold of. In accordance with the principle of the sour grapes I assumed that a very important book can't become forgotten to the degree that it can only be bought as loose copies on the second-hand market. Now I know that it can. I urge anyone who has the opportunity to buy a copy and save it and I really hope that this book is in line for digitalization. There is a big hole in the knowledge of the female side of primitive life. Helena Valero's story patches that hole like no other book.

1. The 1996 edition of Ettore Biocca's The Story of Helena Valero, a Girl Kidnapped by Amazonian Indians by is a bit bad with numbers. The foreword by Jacques Lizot says that Helena Valero was kidnapped in 1932. The first page of the book then says that it was in 1937.

2. Napoleon Chagnon, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes - the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists, 2015, 2 percent of e-book

3. Napoleon Chagnon, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes - the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists, 2015, 42 percent of e-book

4. Jacques Lizot says so in the introduction of the 1996 edition of Yanoama - The Story of Helena Valero, a Girl Kidnapped by Amazonian Indians by Ettore Biocca

5. Napoleon Chagnon, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes - the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists, 2015, 12 percent of e-book