Discovery Channel Magazine: The Modern Tribe

 Discovery Channel Magazine, February 2015

One day in 2008, a photograph began appearing on front pages and web sites around the world. Clearly taken from a plane, it showed members of a tribe in a forest clearing, aiming makeshift wooden weapons at the sky as if to scare off the aircraft. There was a thatched roof to one side of the picture, and three people: one with deep black skin, the other two – the ones bearing the weapons – apparently painted red. This, we learned, was an uncontacted tribe near the Peru-Brazil border: people who had never had any interaction with the outside world.

In the weeks that followed, it became clear that the photos had been planned and distributed by a man called Jose Carlos Meirelles, an expert on indigenous tribes employed by FUNAI, Brazil’s National Indian Foundation which protects the rights of people like this. He had planned the pictures in order to demonstrate to a cynical world that there are still tribes living – and thriving – in complete isolation; he did this in order to stop the steady encroachment of the Amazon that is gradually forcing these tribes into ever narrower pockets of land, and endangering them.

It seems strange, in our modern and connected world, to think of tribes like this unaware of the existence of the rest of us, or of anything at all to do with the outside world. But Piers Gibbon, in his book Tribes: Endangered Peoples of the World, says that in the 21^st century at least 150 million people belong to tribes, and that more than 100 indigenous tribes are thought to live in complete isolation from other people. Indeed, there may well be more than that: FUNAI in Brazil recognises at least 77 uncontacted tribes either within Brazil or the countries on its northwestern borders like Peru and Colombia. And West Papua, the Indonesian province formerly known as Irian Jaya, which takes up half of the island otherwise occupied by Papua New Guinea, has around 44 uncontacted groups.

And, indeed, they must remain uncontacted. FUNAI, or its predecessor the Indian Protection Service, used to make it a policy to contact isolated tribes in order to open up the Amazon basin; they used to employ specialist explorers, a dangerous profession if ever there was one, for the job. But the results were usually disastrous. “Contact with outsiders resulted in the deaths of thousands upon thousands of tribespeople throughout the region, who had no immunity to Western infectious diseases like flu, measles and the common cold,” writes Gibbon. “Peoples such as the Matis of Brazil, who were first contacted in 1978, suffered from epidemics and many died; in the 1980s it was reported that there were not enough healthy Matis to bury the tribe’s dead.” Earlier contact was worse still: it is thought that many tribes we today consider uncontacted are descendents of people who fled during the rubber boom in the Amazon from the late 19^th century to about 1912, during which indigenous people were massacred to forced into slavery. “Around 90 per cent of the indigenous population are thought to have died, and survivors fled deeper into the forest to escape the violence,” says Gibbon. “It is easy to understand why the people descended from these refugees might choose to reject contact with the outside world.”

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