Last year José Carlos Meirelles, who works for the Brazilian government agency set up to protect the country's indigenous populations, released photographs that captivated the public imagination. Taken from an airplane swooping over the Amazon jungle, the pictures showed a group of Indians--their faces streaked with war paint, their bows drawn with arrows--that were said to remain uncontacted by the outside world.
Meirelles said that he had released the photographs to protect the tribe's territory from the onslaught of prospectors and loggers and farmers. In pursuit of such bountiful land, settlers had denied there were any remaining uncontacted Indians, and had mounted a campaign to open these territories for commercial use.
A few days after the photographs were made public, reports in the media surfaced that seemed to confirm the settlers' contention: the images were labeled "fakes," and widely dismissed as part of a "hoax," a "fraud," and a "PR joke."
Yet this perception was deeply misleading, and has had severe repercussions for the Indians in the region. As I document in my new book "The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon," even today parts of the Amazon--a wilderness area virtually the size of the continental United States--remain unknown. The Brazilian government estimates that there are more than sixty tribes that are secluded in the jungle. John Hemming, the distinguished historian of Brazilian Indians, has said that these forests are almost "the only place on earth where indigenous people can survive in isolation from the rest of mankind."
The dispute over the photographs stemmed from confusion over the meaning of "uncontacted," as these groups are commonly designated. Though Meirelles had never said the tribe was unknown, many in the press had initially portrayed the group as such. In fact, like many of these tribes, the group's existence had had long been known about--its presence detected either by frontiersmen or by satellite imagery. Indeed, it is likely that many of these tribes have had some form of fleeting "contact" with outsiders over the years.
But that did not make the photographs "fakes" or a "hoax." The reason these tribes are classified as "uncontacted" is because they have retreated into the jungle and consciously avoided any interaction with settlers--an interaction that has frequently led to the extinction of Amazonian tribes.
In 2005, I visited the Kalapalo Indians in the southern basin of the Amazon. The tribe lived in the Xingu, which is part of Brazil's first Indian reservation. (It was created in 1961.) While the tribe had been contacted by the Brazilian government several decades earlier, its fate gives some sense of the threat to these indigenous communities.
While I was there, I spoke with a member of the tribe named Vanite, whose job was to guard one of the posts on the reservation. He told me that the other day an Indian had come to him and said, "Listen, Vanite. You must come with me down the river. The white people are building something in Afasukugu." The word "Afasukugu" meant "the place of the big cats"; at this site, the Kalapalos believe, the first humans were created. Vanite picked up a stick and drew a map on the mud floor. "Here is Afasukugu," he said. "It is by a waterfall."
Vanite paused for a moment, then continued with his story. "So I said, 'I will go with you to Afasukugu, but you are crazy. Nobody would build anything at the place of the jaguars.' But when I get there the waterfall is destroyed. They blew it up with thirty kilos of dynamite. The place was so beautiful, and now it is gone. And I ask a man working there, 'What are you doing?' He says, 'We are building a hydroelectric dam.' "
The dam was being built in the middle of a major river that ran through the Kalapalos' territory. Vanite, who was becoming more agitated, said, "A man from the [Brazilian] government comes to the Xingu and tells us, 'Do not worry. This dam will not hurt you.' And he offers each us of money. One of the chiefs from another tribe took the money, and the tribes are now fighting with each other. For me, the money means nothing. The river has been here for thousands of years. We don't live forever, but the river does. The god Taugi created the river. It gives us our food, our medicines. You see, we don't have a well. We drink water right from the river. How will we live without it?"
After Vanite finished his account, the chief of the Kalapalos, who was standing beside him, concluded, "If they succeed, the river will disappear and, with it, all our people."
Here's part of what I wrote in the "hoax" thread:
The original story was correct, Huffpo ran with it, and were right to do so. ... When a tribe hasn't been known about since 1910, and nobody has known for certain whether they still exist or not since that date, isn't it appropriate to call them uncontacted? There isn't a person alive today who has contacted the tribe. Nobody who knows anything about them other than the fact that they exist, and prior to the taking of the aerial photograph even that was in doubt. Probably little more than that was known about them even in 1910. If no-one had contacted you since 1910, wouldn't it be appropriate to call you uncontacted? Wouldn't you feel at least a little bit uncontacted?
The photo was taken in good faith, and the reports initially distributed with it were true. There was no hoax. There is no hoax. A hoax would be if those tribesmen were caucasians painted up and pretending to be tribesmen, If only it were possible to get people to read beyond the headline and ascertain the facts, they would know that there is no hoax here. ...
DOT-COM?
Yikes! I better quit shopping that, wowie.
Not everyone views the industrialized world as "progress".
I'd rather not introduce a tribe that has it's own culture, religion and way of life to some bullcrap homogenized Americanized lifestyle that we've succeeded at polluting the whole world with.
Hey, it worked great in the United States !!!!
No Indians. No problem.
Perhaps the rest of the world should step up and pay good money to see such things preserved. I'm sure Brazil would appreciate it.
After reading Charles C. Mann's book "1491" I am left with a desire to see the Amazonian basin developed using the age old permaculture that the original civilizations there had deleloped and utilized for thousands of years, producing food and the sustaining virtues of their civilization now gone,b but I hope not forgotten entirely.
Once we finally get to that place where we are gathering our resources and energy from space, instead of mining our natural treasures, we'll be astonished at how short-sighted we'd been.
This is exactly the kind of mindset I was trying to expose in my earlier post. We only think of new places, species, etc. in terms of consumption - of what need of ours they can fill. What right do we have to pillage space? Why don't we think in terms of consuming less or changing the way we understand and approach consumption rather than in terms of where we can look next to service our endless greed? I hope that if there is any intelligent life out there, they're smart enough to run like hell if they see us coming and take anything they value with them.
Unfortunately exploitation and destruction of the environment is built into DNA; other species do it too. The difference is that we humans have developed technologies which prevent the Malthusian population crashes those other niche-dominant species suffer. At least so far.
That's why "(we don't) think in terms of consuming less...". While it may be clear to any thinking person that our technologies are decimating the living world and that humans must become fewer that other species may thrive, the imperatives of DNA will ensure that there are too many selfish people who will refuse to participate in any effective solution.
So, eventually our technologies will kill us too. It is such a terrible shame that by the time that happens we will have hideously impoverished the web of life on this spectacularly beautiful planet.
The Hawaiians had approximately the same population as Hawai'i has now and lived in plenty for a thousand years until the Europeans came.
Your larger point was well illustrated. Clearly these people are not given much consideration in public works projects. I would be curious to know where or how they spend any money given to them. The modern way of life clearly demands that everybody participate. Dissenters be damned, even if they don't know that they are dissenting.
The media depiction of the "hoax" was certainly irresponsible and a good example of the sad state of journalism as practiced by the big companies. However I'm not convinced that the distinction between uncontacted and unknown and the cries of a fraudulent story had much to do with your story about the hydroelectric project. This doesn't mean that they are not connected, but I'd like to know more. I'm interested. Are you writing a larger piece on this?
WIKI Tasaday: "Elizalde claimed that among the 24 remaining Tasaday, there was no wife-sharing, adultery, or divorce. Their diet was claimed to be all forage, i.e., wild fruit, palm pith, forest yams, tadpoles, grubs, and roots. The calories in such a diet are less than the amount needed for survival, so they should have been paper thin. The apparent yams that they survive on were experiencing a shortage around the area where they lived. When dietitians and health advisors suggested further research, they were promptly banned from the Tasaday's home. An anthropologist reported seeing soldiers slipping cooked rice to the Tasaday, and he was banned as well." etc. etc. We don't need another Rainforest Schmainforest story straight off South Park.
Isn't that the whole point?