Story of ‘Uncontacted Brazilian Tribe’ Not Entirely True

We got punked, along with the rest of the world. When the Brazilian media released photos of an ‘undiscovered native tribe’ in the Amazon, painted head-to-toe and pointing spears at the airplane that was flying overhead, people around the world were amazed. Now, it’s been revealed that, while this is indeed a real uncontacted tribe, the Brazilian government has known about them for decades – so they aren’t ‘newly discovered’.

It turns out that Carlos Meirelles, who works for the Brazilian Indian Protection Agency, Funai, intentionally flew over the area where the tribe is known to live in an attempt to get a photograph, so that he could both prove wrong those people who insist there are no more isolated tribes left in the world, and so he could call attention to the danger facing them in the form of outside contact. Ironically, flying over the tribe in an airplane and photographing them is, in itself, a form of outside contact.

From The Guardian:

In his first interviews since the disclosure of the tribe’s existence, Meirelles described how he found the group, detailed how they lived and how he planned the publicity to protect them and other tribes in similar danger of losing the habitat in which they have flourished for hundreds of years.

Meirelles admitted that the tribe was first known about almost a century ago and that the apparently chance encounter that produced the now famous images was no accident. ‘When we think we might have found an isolated tribe,’ he told al-Jazeera, ‘a sertanista like me walks in the forest for two or three years to gather evidence and we mark it in our [global positioning system]. We then map the territory the Indians occupy and we draw that protected territory without making contact with them. And finally we set up a small outpost where we can monitor their protection.’

Meirelles wanted proof that the tribes were flourishing, to confirm that the government policy of no contact and protection was working. The aim was partially to convince Peru’s president, Alan Garcia, that the tribe is real, since Garcia has stated in the past that he thinks uncontacted tribes along the Peru/Brazil border are ‘the creation of the imagination’ of environmentalists and anthropologists. Since the photos were released, Peru has begun to re-examine their logging policies – they had been cutting down trees dangerously close to the tribe’s home.

Hopefully all of this will preserve the areas of the Amazon where native tribes still live, so that, in the event that they did become aware of outside society, they would still have a choice as to whether they wanted to join it or continue living as they have been. Imagine how traumatic it would be for them to be forced into modern society due to logging.

Link [The Guardian]

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