In early April of 2004, federal agents in Brazil’s northwestern state of Rondônia recovered the decomposing bodies of 29 diamond prospectors in the dense thickets of the Amazon jungle. The men had been dredging for diamonds on the territory of the Cinta Larga people when a small band of Cinta Larga rallied to ward off the prospectors. What began as a peaceful attempt to end the illegal activity—“All the warriors knew they weren’t to hurt or kill anyone,” one of the Cinta Larga would later recall—ended in a bloodbath that put the Cinta Larga, many of whom had never had contact with mainstream society until as recently as the 1960s, under the country’s and the world’s scrutinizing gaze.

This wasn’t their first time in the spotlight. Four decades earlier, a dozen of their own were massacred by white men looking for rubber. Now the Cinta Larga stood accused, and the bloody commodity in question—diamonds, not rubber—had been made accessible in part by the Cinta Larga themselves.

In When We Sold God’s Eye, Alex Cuadros traces the lineage of the Cinta Larga’s remarkable journey: that of a tribe forcibly brought into Brazil and modernity only to fall prey to the predatory violence of capitalism. Cuadros’s clear-eyed narrative centers on a group of Cinta Larga individuals whose lives are transformed by contact with mainstream Brazilian society, taking into account the ambiguity with which the Brazilian state and foreign actors have treated the Cinta Larga (alternately as monsters, children, and business partners). Over 40 years, the decisions made by Cuadros’s protagonists and the way their trajectories subsequently diverged provide the ingredients for a familiar history of dispossession, but one that makes the reader wonder whether dispossession is the right word to describe the experience of the Cinta Larga. Were the Cinta Larga complicit in their own evolution from uncontacted tribe to savvy diamond-selling businesspeople—or did they ever really have another other choice?

As Brazil rapidly modernized during the early and mid-20th century, its government sought to appropriate the Amazon rainforest as “a land without people for people without land.” But the forests were far from unoccupied; they were populated by approximately half the country’s Indigenous people, many of whom had been uncontacted until the government desired their land.

In 1967, a public prosecutor published a damning report on the atrocities committed by the Brazilian government’s Indigenous Protection Service (SPI), an agency established in 1910 and led by a military officer named Cândido Rondon. Rondon believed that the nation’s Indigenous people “belonged to a primitive stage of human evolution” that would benefit from exposure to Western civilization. Though well intentioned in theory—the SPI championed integration rather than extermination, which had previously been the expectation—the reality of what SPI agents did to Indigenous communities was bleak and brutal.

The SPI’s interactions with the Cinta Larga, in which hired gunmen shot children in front of their mothers and macheted one woman in half, was by far the most horrific case. “In cosmopolitan Rio de Janeiro, it was hard for middle-class readers to believe such horrors were possible,” Cuadros writes. The subsequent outcry led the government to dissolve the SPI and create the National Foundation of the Indian (Funai), which held that the protection of Indigenous peoples began with their integration into the state.

The organization’s curious blend of selfless and self-serving motives attracted idealists like Francisco “Chico” Meirelles, whose job was to “pacify” the natives with the intent of bringing them into the Brazilian economy. His primary tactic involved setting up a camp near Indigenous territories and luring the native people with Western goods such as cookware and sugar. Once gifts were exchanged, the logic went, further engagement would follow, though precedents with groups such as the Xavante, the Kaingang, the Xokleng, and the Nambikwara showed that integration often further enriched white men while leaving tribes susceptible to disease, dispossession, and death.

By the time Chico’s son, Apoena Meirelles, set up such a camp on the western edge of Cinta Larga territory in 1969, the government agents in Funai were not the only ones seeking something on Indigenous land. Cuadros’s book begins with Funai and other non-native interests meeting the Cinta Larga for the first time. Driving along the BR-364 highway into the Amazonian heartlands, diamond prospectors arrived at the Roosevelt River in search of jewels that could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. They didn’t think much at the time about the people who were already there. One day, a young Cinta Larga boy named Roberto Carlos, out fishing with his cousin, spotted a diver wearing a rubber suit and a copper helmet. Soon another boy, Pio, saw the same—and was even asked to crank the crew’s oxygen tank while one of the white men dashed away to pee. Later, when an intrepid Cinta Larga teenager named Oita met a group of prospectors led by a man known as Raul the Spaniard, he accepted their cooking oil and utensils and persuaded several other Cinta Larga to do the same. Soon the boys were learning Portuguese words and helping sieve gravel from the riverbed. “I didn’t know what a diamond was,” Oita told Cuadros decades later. “I didn’t know what money was. I didn’t understand anything.”

The boys’ involvement with the prospectors came to a head when they brought two of the foreigners to a Cinta Larga feast. The following day, scores of the Cinta Larga woke up unwell. They felt hot. They started vomiting. And then dying. In a delirious stretch of days, the bodies of brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers were left to decompose in their hammocks; the air saturated with the stench of death. Cinta Larga lore would later claim that the foreigners had poisoned their food. The child survivors of this tragedy—among them Pio, Pichuvy, Tataré, Oita, Roberto Carlos, and Maria Beleza, several of the characters whose stories When We Sold God’s Eye tells—ventured out for help. Some returned to Raul the Spaniard’s camp to find that Apoena had transformed it into a Funai post, designed as a “model village where future waves of Cinta Larga could become agricultural workers.”

Roosevelt Village became a makeshift home that would be transformed in the following decades into a permanent settlement for the Cinta Larga—and a place where they would become inadvertent initiates into Western society. Tapir and wild pig were quickly replaced by salted rice and beans. Maria—who for a time was trapped in an abusive relationship with a Funai worker turned bandit—was baptized and joined an evangelical church. The boys learned the value of wage labor and the untapped resources of their land; a Funai agent told Pio that the value of the mahogany trees on Cinta Larga territory was akin to a jackpot. “Don’t let it go to waste,” he urged them. “Sell that stuff.” As the Cinta Larga integrated into mainstream society, they watched TV, rode in cars, and bought guns—yet they continued to live in poor-quality dwellings surrounded by trash. They contracted new diseases, but for those without access to a car, getting to the nearest health center required a five-day walk.