ABSTRACT
Eleven-year-old Helen Valero was abducted by Yanomamowarriors while working as a Christian missionary near the Amazon in 1937. During her years of captivity, she witnessed male raiders of rival tribal groups targeting infants and children, especially boys. On one such occasion, Valero recalls a woman’s pleas to save a male infant, “Don’t kill him, he’s your son. The mother was with you and she ran away when she was already pregnant with this child. He’s one of your sons!” The raider paused to weigh this possibility, then replied, “No, he’s [another group’s] child. It’s too long since she ran away from us” (Valero & Biocca, 1970, pp. 34-35). The man then seized the baby by his feet and bashed him against the rocks. Following her initial kidnapping, Valero was abducted once again by raiders from yet another village, where she was forced to marry and provide children for her new captors. Before she ultimately escaped, Valero witnessed frequent, violent intertribal raids in which men and
children were regularly murdered and women were kidnapped as a sexual commodity. For the traditional Yanomamo, whose huntergatherer lifestyle likely resembles that of ancestral humans, the appearance of a strange male signaled imminent and dire peril.
