Uncontacted tribe in Brazil ends its isolation
By Heather Pringle
In a terse, one-page announcement last week, Brazil’s Indian affairs department (FUNAI) let it be known that an isolated tribe in the Amazon region had just taken a momentous and potentially tragic step. Emerging from dense rainforest along the Upper Envira River in the state of Acre, Brazil, the group willingly approached a team of Brazilian government scientists on 29 June and made peaceful contact with the outside world.
The event—Brazil’s first official contact with an isolated tribe since 1996—was not entirely unexpected. Since early June, fearful villagers in the region had radioed Brazilian authorities at least twice about a group of some 35 tribal strangers who were raiding their crops and trying to make off with machetes and other tools. Recognizing the potential for trouble, FUNAI dispatched a team of specialists, including medical personnel and Brazilian anthropologist José Carlos Meirelles, an adviser on indigenous matters to the government of Acre.
FUNAI’s swift response is commendable, says anthropologist Kim Hill of Arizona State University, Tempe, who has conducted extensive fieldwork among Amazon rainforest tribes. Since 1987, the agency has maintained a no-contact policy, except in cases where a tribe’s survival was deemed to be in peril. That was probably the case here, Hill notes. “There was a serious threat of violence between two native populations, and the intervention should eliminate that,” he says. But Hill and others remain deeply concerned about the future of the newly contacted tribe as it encounters novel diseases and resource-hungry outsiders. As much as 60% of a newly contacted Nahua population in the Peruvian Amazon died between 1983 and 1985 from influenza, whooping cough, and other diseases caught from loggers, noted Beatriz Huertas Castillo, a private Peruvian scholar, in a 2004 report.
The massive Amazon rainforest holds the world’s largest concentration of isolated tribes—at least 70 in the Brazilian Amazon alone, according to FUNAI. Many, if not most, have had at least fleeting contact with the outside world, particularly during Brazil’s rubber boom in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when rubber tappers made a practice of rounding up and enslaving indigenous tribespeople. After that, many populations fled to remote Amazon headwaters and cut off all contact with outsiders.
It is not yet clear what prompted the tribe along the Upper Envira River to end its long seclusion. The FUNAI field team has yet to identify the tribe’s language, much less ask for its story, and has now requested the assistance of linguists.
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http://news.sciencemag.org/latin-america/2014/07/uncontacted-tribe-brazil-ends-its-isolation
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