Anthropology: The sad truth about uncontacted tribes

BBC Future
Last Place on Earth
4 August 2014
Anthropology: The sad truth about uncontacted tribes
One of the world’s last isolated tribes has apparently emerged from the forest. Rachel Nuwer investigates whether there is anyone left who has never seen the outside world, and discovers that ‘first contacts’ are often cursed by death and disease.

On July 1, Funai, the Brazilian governmental agency in charge of indigenous Indian affairs, quietly posted a short press release on its website: two days earlier, they said, seven members of an isolated Indian tribe emerged from the Amazon and made peaceful contact with people in a village near the Peruvian border.

As the first official contact with such a tribe since 1996, the event was out of the ordinary. But the event itself could have been anticipated. For weeks, local villagers in Brazil’s Acre state had reported sightings of the tribesman, who supposedly came to steal crops, axes and machetes, and who “mimicked monkey cries” that frightened women and children.

The Indians’ decision to make contact was not driven by a desire for material goods, however, but by fear. With the help of translators who spoke a closely related indigenous Panoan language, the Acre Indians explained that “violent attacks” by outsiders had driven them from the forest. Later, details emerged that their elder relatives were massacred, and their houses set on fire. Illegal loggers and cocaine traffickers in Peru, where the Indians are thought to come from, are likely to blame, according to the Brazilian government. Indeed, Funai’s own nearby monitoring post was shut down in 2011 due to increasing escalations with drug traffickers.

After they decided the situation called for drastic measures, the Indians did not just stumble upon the Brazilian village by chance – they probably knew exactly where to go. “They know far more about the outside world than most people think,” says Fiona Watson, research director for the non-profit organisation Survival International. “They are experts at living in the forest and are well aware of the presence of outsiders.” ....

Much MORE at http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140804-sad-truth-of-uncontacted-tribes