Once upon a time, the Yawanawá people used to plant in order to eat the following year, the field (roça) would yield from one year to the next. We would plant corn one year to eat it the next; it takes a year to grow. That’s what our people did, not like the people of Iri. So you would plant your field and then move on to another place where there was fruit or something else to eat, until that corn matured, along with some fields of bananas.
But the field of the Iri people would yield in two or three months. A lot was adopted from the Iri people, like corn that was ready to eat in three months. All of that came from the Iri. The Iri people made things easier for humans. Only the Iri people performed this kind of miracle.
Our history tells that the Iri were a tribe who lived far away, very far. But we could hear them speaking, it sounded as though they were right next to us. Only we couldn’t speak back to them, our voices wouldn’t reach. But the language was the same, we understood everything they said. When someone tried to find them, they would follow the voice of the Iri people, which sounded so close, but no one ever managed to reach them, because along the way, they’d run out of food and die. That happened for many years.
But the Yawanawá people really wanted to meet the Iri people, so they did the following: in the first year, they opened a large trail and stored a lot of food. The next year, they kept opening the trail toward those voices and stored even more food. There was no mistake, because the voice was so clear, it made the path easier. In the third year, they reached the Iri people. The people arriving didn’t know how they would be received, whether they would be attacked or not.