Wuta is practically naked except for the red cotton breechcloth strung around his waist and the yellow beaded necklaces that drape his muscular torso. In his hands, though, he's holding something that places him firmly in the 21st century: a new gray Garmin GPS device. η A member of the Trio tribe, he's leading me through the rain forest near his village in southern Suriname-a two-hour Cessna flight from the closest road. At the foot of a large tree that dangles a cascade of liana vines, Wuta points his GPS toward the sky: no signal. He fiddles with a button and a few minutes later gets a reading. He relays the coordinates to a fellow Trio cartographer beside him, who dutifully jots them down. Wuta then tramps on, demonstrating how he and other tribesmen have charted, by foot and canoe, some 20 million acres of land here at Amazonia's northern fringe.
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