A Surreal Sight in Rio

My wife and I are hosting some out-of-country friends of her this week. On Sunday, we took them down towards Copacabana beach to see the ocean. While walking down the 6 km beachfront road (which is closed to traffic for pedestrians on Sundays), we noticed a small crowd gathering. A bunch of people (tourists and cariocas) had gathered to watch what appeared to be some Brazilian Indians, wearing "traditional" clothing, playing some "traditional music".

The quotation marks are purposeful, though, and are what made the event surreal. The three men certainly may have been Brazilian indigenous people - they looked like they could be. However, their "traditional" clothing had nothing to do with Brazilian indigenous clothing. They were wearing the type of enormous headdresses (that looked like this) that you only find among indigenous peoples in the United States, and which in no way resemble Brazilian headdresses. In addition, they were also clad in nice, "traditional" handmade pants, which would be fine, except Brazil's indigenous people, when dressing traditionally, at best wear a loincloth or a gourd, given the heat in the tropics. They most certainly don't dress in the kind of pants North American Indians would wear while riding horses (among other reasons, because the horse never really became a major part of the indigenous lifestyle in Brazil).

And then there was the music. They had a semi-elaborate set-up that involved speakers playing pre-recorded music, and the three men playing what looked to be a type of Andean pan-flute over the soundtrack. Now, the pan-flute may have actually made its way into some indigenous groups in Brazil. I doubt it, given that most of the wind-instruments I've seen are more like recorders than pan-flutes, but I may just be uninformed. However, I know for CERTAIN that playing the main melody from Enigma's "Sadeness" and the famous line from "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" is certainly not a part of any Brazilian indigenous people's musical legacy or present practices. The tourists and Rio residents had gathered around in sizeable numbers (around 25-30), and I suspect the three men may have made some money on the day. (I also fear and suspect that some rather ignorant tourists were thinking they were seeing what "authentic Indian culture" looked like in Brazil, and while "authenticity" is always difficult, I think it's fair to say that this trio wasn't exactly demonstrating a majority of Brazilian indigenous culture's practices, past or present).

However, seeing three men who were probably native indigenous peoples to Brazil, dressed in clothing traditional to some groups of North American Indians, playing instruments that are probably from the Andes to music from (two very different) European composers, went beyond strange.