Upriver is as much a book about the ethnohistory of the Awajún, a people formerly known as Aguaruna, as it is a psychological perspective into how we all change over time both as societies and as individuals. In 1976, Michael F. Brown was a graduate student at the University of Michigan when he went to Amazonia in search of dissertation material. Beginning with romantic illusions of writing about magic and shamanism, he did not find warrior headshrinkers and sympathetic shamans willing to reveal their secrets. Instead, he found several groups of amiable Awajúns wearing Western clothes and attending missionary schools and Christian Sunday services. Though he earned a PhD in cultural anthropology with a dissertation titled “Magic and Meaning in the World of the Aguaruna Jívaro of Peru,” and continued his career in search of a broad range of related topics, culminating in his present position (president of the School for Advanced Research in New Mexico), he can now candidly tell readers that as a young scholar he mostly avoided anything he did not fully understand. This included the prevalent Awajún suicides and the Awajún’s fears of sorcery.As Brown was digitizing and typing his notes from long ago, he revisited his experience with insights garnered from a lifetime of research, resulting in Upriver, part memoir, part analysis of the present and near future for the Awajún people as they leave their Amazonian habitats to earn PhDs, win seats in political office, and utilize their warrior spirit to defend indigenous rights. In his words, “Upriver offers a portrait of a resourceful people fighting to sustain their place in a world largely indifferent to their fate. It also conveys affection for an intellectual tradition, arising from the ferment of the Enlightenment, that asks practitioners to see past their own habits of mind in search of the internal logics of other societies” (15).Part 1 (1976–78) focuses on his time among the Awajún, while the unfortunately much shorter part 2 covers 1980–2012, mainly dealing with Brown’s 2012 research trip to Peru’s Amazonia, where he interviewed still surviving Awajún. Many people he had met in the 1970s were dead, often victims of suicides or vendettas. Awajún people whom he newly met in 2012 live in cities. Of particular interest was Eduardo Nayap, born in the Alto Marañón village and educated by missionaries. Today, he holds a theology degree. After the tumultuous Baguazo of 2009, he ran for public office to demand respect for the rights of Awajún people. Newspaper profiles and television interviews made Eduardo Nayap the most familiar Awajún person to Peruvians, which together with his knowledge of Awajún traditions has helped him win 100 percent of votes in some of the local Awajún and Wampis village communities.Regarding widespread assumptions that indigenous spirituality is incompatible with the Christian Bible or that missionaries brought God to Amazonia, Nayap tells Brown that “there is no lie bigger than this. We lived with God. We had God. God was with us. Biblical language, themes of salvation, can be recontextualized so that indigenous people can be Christians without ceasing to be indigenous. I’m not going to transform myself into a white man to achieve eternal salvation” (254). Dina Ananco, a young San Marcos University graduate in Lima who became involved in indigenous rights while at the campus, discusses women’s rights and some of the reasons for Awajún women’s high suicide rate. According to Ananco, Brown tells us, Awajún women were valued only when they maintained their husbands’ good image. “We call this complementarity now, but I’m not so sure. . . . It is surprising and curious: The woman was given great importance and at the same time . . . nothing.” She sees change coming, though: “There are female leaders of indigenous groups here in Lima. They’re constantly battling for space. They are given responsibilities with the hope that they’ll fail” (258).The Awajún today are committed to defending their land and their right to govern themselves with Jivaroan determination. They oppose the Peruvian government and agencies, which intend to turn the Amazon into an immense industrial park. In Ananco’s formulation, “It’s not as if you can fight as a warrior now. You fight with your knowledge” (268).