Helping the hidden tribes of Amazonia (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Article published Jul 10, 2007
Brazil

Helping the hidden tribes of Amazonia
Some natives have no contact with outside

By Monte Reel
The Washington Post
Jul 10, 2007
http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070710/REPOSITORY/707100374/1013/NEWS03

At first, few believed the story that two brothers told about four unknown
Indians who suddenly appeared to them one afternoon on the outskirts of
their Brazilian village.

Like most Kayapo Indians, the brothers - named Bepro and Beprytire - live in
a government-demarcated reserve, wear modern clothing and get energy from
solar-powered generators. But the four unclothed visitors were a different
kind of Kayapo.

They spoke in an antiquated tongue that seemed a precursor to the language
spoken in the village, located in the Capoto-Jarina Indian Reserve in
central Brazil. The four men had come from a tribe that had remained in the
forest, the brothers said, untouched by the modern world.

Over the next seven days, the doubt expressed by the villagers evaporated
when they saw more than 60 of the Indians emerge from the forest, sleeping
in huts on the edge of the village.

Then as quickly as they had come, the Indians disappeared. They haven't been
seen since.
The Indians' brief appearance this spring was enough to put them in the
middle of a debate that is challenging governments throughout the Amazon
region: How should the rights and territories of isolated populations be
protected when the locations of those groups remain largely unknown?

In recent months, Brazil and Peru have set aside protected areas for
so-called uncontacted groups, which have never been spoken to and rarely -
if ever - glimpsed. Brazil is believed to have more uncontacted tribes than
any country in the world, and the government this year announced that as
many as 67 tribes could be living in complete isolation - considerably more
than the 40 estimated earlier.

Previously uncontacted tribes have been discovered periodically since deep
Amazon exploration began in the late 1800s. In the 1970s, for example, such
tribes as the Panara were found as construction crews built roads into the
forest, and periodic discoveries of small tribes continued in the following
decades.

Today, because the Amazon region is shrinking by thousands of square miles a
year, the chances of unintentional encounters involving such groups grow.
The issue has become a significant focus for the Federal Indian Bureau, or
Funai, the government agency that oversees indigenous groups.

Indigenous rights advocates have issued calls to protect largely unexplored
areas of the forest from logging and mining. But the renewed focus on
uncontacted groups has also sparked suspicions among skeptics, who believe
the groups could be more mythical than real and suspect the numbers are
exaggerated by special interest groups seeking to block exploration
projects.

"It is like the Loch Ness monster," said Cecilia Quiroz, legal counsel for
Perupetro, the Peruvian state agency in charge of doling out prospecting
rights to energy companies eager to explore the country's vast interior.
"Everyone seems to have seen or heard about uncontacted peoples, but there
is no evidence."

Megaron Txucarramae grew up in the village where the uncontacted Indians
approached the two brothers in late May. He was 2 years old when
anthropologists first made contact with his own branch of the Kayapo tribe
in the 1950s. He regularly heard his elders tell the story of how one part
of the tribe had fled the anthropologists' advances to remain alone in the
woods, never to be seen again.

Now Megaron is the regional representative for Funai in Colider, the nearest
city to Capoto and two nearby reserves. The land, set aside for the Indians
and protected from development, is a sprawling green expanse of dense
jungle. Together, the three Kayapo reservations in the area are roughly the
size of the Czech Republic.

When he heard of the isolated tribe's recent appearance, Megaron quickly
flew to the village of Kapot to collect evidence. He took a miniature tape
recorder with him, giving it to one of the brothers to slip into the pocket
of his shorts while he spoke to the Indians. Taking pictures, he concluded,
was out of the question.

"No one had a camera, and even if someone had had one, they were afraid of
machines," Megaron explained later. "If anyone pointed a camera at them,
the situation could have been very dangerous."

The group remained highly suspicious of the villagers, agreeing to talk only
with the two brothers whom they had initially approached. They accepted
bananas and cassava offered by the brothers but rejected rice because it
wasn't part of their traditional diet, Megaron said. One of the old men in
the group had a scar on his side, a wound that the villagers attributed to
a run-in with illegal loggers, who occasionally were involved in bloody
confrontations with Indians in the region in the 1990s.

"The man told Beprytire he had been hurt by a 'strong sound,' " Megaron
said. "So we are guessing that he had been shot."

Most of the Indians were unclothed, though some of the men wore penis
sheaths and most were partially covered by body paint. Some of the men also
had plates inserted in their lower lips, creating the decorative protrusions
seen in various Amazonian tribes.

Megaron closed the village to visitors - a lockdown that remains in force.
Officials were afraid that the previously uncontacted Indians could easily
become sick. As has been proved in the past when uncontacted tribes are
introduced to other populations and the microbes they carry, maladies as
simple as the common cold can be deadly. In the 1970s, 185 members of the
Panara tribe died within two years of discovery after contracting such
diseases as flu and chickenpox, leaving only 69 survivors.

Antonio Sergio Iole, head of health services for Funai in Colider, quickly
assembled a team of doctors and Kayapo assistants ready to travel to the
village on a moment's notice. The team immediately realized how many
difficult questions the tribe's appearance had raised.

"Even the simple things are complicated," said Iole, who said his team
remains on call to travel to the village should the tribe reappear. "How
should we act in the first moment we approach them? Would they accept
vaccine? Would they let us inspect their mouths? Listen to their hearts?
Would they allow a doctor to treat the women? How would they physically
react to treatment? Some vaccines have side effects - how would they
interpret a fever? And how would they react if we had to take someone away,
even if it was for their own good?"

After the tribe left the village, Iole - still in Colider - began to notice
that some other people around town were asking different questions:

Why couldn't anyone get a picture? Why was no one except the Kayapo allowed
into the village? How could a group of people remain uncontacted in the
21st century? Could someone be making this whole story up for some sort of
personal or political gain?

"I don't believe it - this is an area with lots of loggers and farmers who
are always going out into the forest, making studies," said Albeni de
Souza, 22, a university student who works in a hotel in Colider. "Even the
Indians from the tribes on reservations walk around the forest all the
time. Someone would have seen them before."

That kind of doubt spreads easily in towns such as Colider, where logging
companies and farmers have cleared most of the surrounding area and small
planes regularly fly overhead. From the air here, the land looks much like
the American Midwest - a patchwork of farms. The picture is much different
less than 250 miles away in Kapot - unreachable by car and boat - on the
edge of an Amazon forest that is almost as big as the continental United
States.

Several years ago, Brazil's government changed its policy regarding isolated
tribes: Instead of taking the initiative to try to contact them, it now aims
only to protect them. Contact is made only if the Indians themselves
initiate it or the tribe is in imminent danger.

Funai officials plan to fly over the forest in the coming weeks to try to
locate the area where the tribe is based, Megaron said. The plan after that
is to build a small field station in the forest - not to contact them but to
protect the area and make sure loggers and farmers do not come near them.

That plan, of course, would be unnecessary if the Indians chose to make
contact again.

"Everybody wants to see them, because we love to compare them with
ourselves," said Bepko, 26, a Kayapo who lives in the village of Kubenkokre
in a nearby reserve. "We just want to hear their stories and learn about
what their lives have been like."

According to the stealth tape recording made by the brothers, there is
evidence that at least some in the tribe would like to return.

Megaron said he was able to decipher the language sufficiently enough to
determine that a young member of the tribe was trying to convince his
elders that the contact was a good thing.

"The son told his father not to be afraid, that they would protect each
other," Megaron recounted.

It was later, Funai said, that a tribal leader emerged from the forest and
persuaded everyone to leave the village.

"They might have been scared of the sound of airplanes," said Luis Sampaio,
a biologist who for 12 years has worked with the Kayapo in the reserve,
which features a small landing strip. "Or they could have been scared by
the clothes they saw people wearing - we are not sure."

Megaron said they left without explanation or warning.

"Uncontacted Indians," he said, "don't say goodbye when they leave."