When your country's population is 14...

THERE is often talk of a nation getting behind its sports people as they march into international competition, but when the national team in question comprises almost half the population, the support becomes a little more personal.

Whatever the sport, and whatever the event, the weight of a nation’s pride momentarily rests on the shoulders of the national team. If they are triumphant, the nation rejoices, welcomes the team home, adores them from afar and then watches them disappear from the radar as they return to some well-earned privacy.

If they lose, the team merely slinks home, conscious they have already drifted out of the public eye as their compatriots grumble briefly at a poor return for their emotional investment.

That’s fine either way if you’re a sportsman on an 11 or 15-man team representing a nation of millions, but you would imagine the homecoming reception was a little more engaged when the Avá Canoeiro people from the Table Mountain range of Brazil came home from last week’s Indigenous Nations’ Games.

The six-person team of the Avá Canoeiro was the smallest of the 60 different aboriginal Indian groups which descended on the Beach of the Gracious One, in Palmas, in the Tocantins region of north-eastern Brazil for the sixth sporting gathering of Brazil’s indigenous peoples. And they came from a nation of just 14 people.

But that was the beauty of an event whose motto is “the important thing is not to compete but to celebrate”. As the games opened, its chief organiser Carlos Terena, described what brings such a diversity of cultures under one umbrella movement.

“The aboriginal culture values celebrating variety,” he said. “Its parties are glad manifestations of the love of life and of nature. They have the spirituality with the elements of nature - trees, birds, animals, rivers, lakes, bushes - the largeness of life.”

The games, Terena said, were borne as part of a response to a negative image of Brazil’s aboriginal peoples and a call from many activists that the government formulate a coherent social policy towards its indigenous population.

For years, they had suffered from a perception among the rest of Brazilian society that the Indians lived in constant depression. Little was known of their art, dances, music and traditional sports.

The idea for an Indigenous Nations’ Games came in the early 1980s, but it was not until 1986 and the appointment of a certain Pele as Brazil’s Minister of Sport, that momentum started to gather. Pele ordered a budget to be drawn up, a venue to be found and a format to be developed.

The dream became reality in October 1996, in Goiânia, central Brazil, with the first Indigenous Nations’ Games; 25 different ethnic groups sent teams with 400 athletes participating.

There were some initial problems. In the women’s speed race, a 100 metres sprint event, one of the competitors did not understand the rules which were given in Portuguese, ducked under the finishing rope and carried on running. In another instance, the winners had had no knowledge of the awards ceremonies and didn’t turn up at the Olympic-style podium to receive their medals. Eventually they were rounded up and directed to the podium. Unfortunately, the competitors’ bus arrived at the same time and the medallists climbed aboard instead of collecting their gongs.

This year, the Jogos Povos Indigenas, to give it its Portuguese title, was a lot more polished, with more than 1100 aboriginals, boosted by the first appearances of indigenous nations from Canada and Guyana, competing in events such as the bow and arrow, spear throwing, log carrying and target shooting with blowpipes.

Terena says the Games do not seek to promote the “sport of high income”, or to “identify and form great champions”. What is more important is the fortification of the indigenous peoples’ cultural identity, a celebration of their confraternity, the gaining of respect from non-indigenous society and, above all, recouping “the self-esteem of the Man Indian”. Daniel Wide Brace was one such example of the Man Indian in all his glory. He became bow and arrow champion, beating 13 other Indians to the prize having excelled at hitting the tucunaré fish over the two rounds.

The team of the Gavião Kikatejê, meanwhile, showed innovative tactics to win the corrida com tora, or log race, which involves two teams of men carrying a 150 kilo lump of tree at great speed along a set course.

The three-man teams carry the logs in rotation, switching to stronger shoulders as one man tires. This traditionally saw the entire team running round in anticipation of the switch, but the gavião technique was to spread its team at strategic points around the course inside the Palmas bull-ring.

Now that’s a real case of taking the weight off your shoulders.