Hidden tribes of the Amazon
Nicolas Reynard
National Geographic Magazine
When Pedro Cabral, the Portuguese explorer, reached the coast of South America in 1500, the population of Indians in what is now Brazil was somewhere between one and eleven million. Five hundred years later, 300 000 have survived. War, slavery, famine and disease, all brought by the invaders, caused the toll. Today there are different threats for the Indians: farmers, gold diggers, poachers and various outsiders, fostering violence, destroying the traditional lifestyle and bringing diseases that may be quite harmless for westerners but for which the Indians have no antibodies.
More than one-tenth of the national territory is Indian land, protected by law, although the protection exists only on paper. For these ethnic groups, assimilation has often been disastrous, although some are willing to maintain quite regular contact with the outside or “modern” world. Brazil’s Amazon region is still home to around thirty groups of Indian who have had no contact with outsiders and live in remote areas. It is the last place in the world with tribes which have never had any contact with western civilization. And without this contact, they lead a peaceful existence, but for how long? The encroachment of the modern world is a real threat and their time is counted.
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While some programs have been set up to help protect the Indians from the ravages of progress, this is the age of globalization: a relentless war is being waged by lobby groups of all sorts, with total disregard for human rights. The natives live on lands coveted for oil, minerals and timber. And the ethnic groups themselves have local knowledge which has stirred up great interest; powerful pharmaceutical companies are now investigating traditional pharmacopoeia to find new compounds. There are also areas which would be ideal tourist resorts and potential owners are hoping to make profits. And the isolation of these tribal lands is a great attraction for drug traffickers.
The Brazilian government has an office for Brazilian Indian affairs (Funai) to protect the isolated tribes in the country. The department is run by a man named Sydney Possuelo who, in 2002, organized an expedition to map out the lands where the Flecheiros lived; this was a tribe which had had no contact with the outside world, living in the upper Amazon region of Vale do Javari near the borders with Peru and Colombia. These Indians have not yet been threatened by Brazilian society, but their lands must be protected and it is therefore essential to know what area they need to live in. Thirty-four men took part in the expedition: Funai staff, “caboclos” (jungle whites), and twenty Indians from three different tribes (Mati, Marubo and Kanamari). The Indians were a key part of the group, helping interpret signs found along the way, and all these clues provided us, gradually, with information on the customs and lifestyle of the Flecheiros.
I reported on the expedition, which lasted more than three months in the jungle, for National Geographic.
The hardest part for a photographer was that throughout the entire expedition I never saw the main subject: the Indians who had never been in contact with the outside world!
