During my first trip to the Alto Rio Negro Indians I couldn't get near Yanoama. For hundreds of miles, I couldn't pemout on the northern shore of this huge river, because my escorts had night raids. But I have had a way of studying groups of Tukano, Tarilina and Baniwa from the Alto Rio Negro. It was just on my first trip that, when I arrived at Taraqua on the Rio Uaupés, I knew that a student of that mission, Helena Valero, daughter of a Spanish and a woman from Rio Tiquié, was kidnapped by Yanoama along the Rio Dimiti. No one had heard from her. At my rhythm, I regretted that I could not gather information about human life that was taking place beyond the limit marked by the rivers' shores, in the tremendous forest, where there was certainly a culture that we had not known. I was persuaded - and the life of Valero with the Yanoama confirmed this - that there is a serious mistake when you consider the natives of the forest as primitive and evil savages, just because they are far away from the type of our culture; perhaps, for the same reason, Yanoama make the same mistake when, with the only word 'nape', they point to the white man, the stranger, the evil. I therefore considered the study of their organization and culture, of the highest scientific interest.