Photo of Amazon Tribe Not a Hoax: world's last uncontacted tribe

Recent photos of an "uncontacted tribe" of Indians near the Brazil-Peru border have sparked media reports of a hoax, but the organization that released the images defends its claims and actions.

The photographs, which showed men painted red and black and aiming arrows skyward, were released in late May by Survival International, a London-based organization that advocates for tribal people worldwide. The release stated that "members of one of the world's last uncontacted tribes have been spotted and photographed from the air,"

“Sorry Charley”

Thanks for the update:

“They are the amazing pictures that were beamed around the globe: a handful of warriors from an ‘undiscovered tribe’ in the rainforest on the Brazilian-Peruvian border brandishing bows and arrows at the aircraft that photographed them.

Or so the story was told and sold. But it has now emerged that, far from being unknown, the tribe’s existence has been noted since 1910 and the mission to photograph them was undertaken in order to prove that ‘uncontacted’ tribes still existed in an area endangered by the menace of the logging industry.

The disclosures have been made by the man behind the pictures, José Carlos Meirelles, 61, one of the handful of sertanistas – experts on indigenous tribes – working for the Brazilian Indian Protection Agency, Funai, which is dedicated to searching out remote tribes and protecting them.

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.’

But in this case Meirelles appears, controversially, to have gone out to seek and find the uncontacted tribe in an area where it was known to be living.

According to his account, the Brazilian state of Acre offered him the use of an aircraft for three days. ‘I had years of GPS co-ordinates,’ he said. Meirelles had another clue to the tribe’s precise location. ‘A friend of mine sent me some Google Earth co-ordinates and maps that showed a strange clearing in the middle of the forest and asked me what that was,’ he said. ‘I saw the co-ordinates and realised that it was close to the area I had been exploring with my son – so I needed to fly over it.’

For two days, Meirelles says, he flew a 150km-radius route over the border region with Peru and saw huts that belonged to isolated tribes. But he did not see people. ‘When the women hear the plane above, they run into the forest, thinking it’s a big bird,’ he said. ‘This is such a remote area, planes don’t fly over it.’

What he was looking for was not only proof of life, but firm evidence that the tribes in this area were flourishing – proof in his view that the policy of no contact and protection was working. On the last day, with only a couple hours of flight time remaining, Meirelles spotted a large community.

‘When I saw them painted red, I was satisfied, I was happy,’ he said. ‘Because painted red means they are ready for war, which to me says they are happy and healthy defending their territory.’

Survival International, the organisation that released the pictures along with Funai, conceded yesterday that Funai had known about this nomadic tribe for around two decades. It defended the disturbance of the tribe saying that, since the images had been released, it had forced neighbouring Peru to re-examine its logging policy in the border area where the tribe lives, as a result of the international media attention. Activist and former Funai president Sydney Possuelo agreed that – amid threats to their environment and doubt over the existence of such tribes – it was necessary to publish them.

But the revelation that the existence of the tribe was already established will provoke awkward questions over why a decision was made to try to photograph them – a form of contact in itself – in order to make a political point.

Meirelles, one of only five or so genuine sertanistas, has no regrets, arguing that the pictures and video released to the world were powerful and indisputable evidence to those who say isolated tribes no longer exist. ‘Alan García [the President of Peru] declared recently that the isolated Indians were a creation in the imagination of environmentalists and anthropologists – now we have the pictures.’

But he is determined to keep the tribe’s location secret – even under torture, he says. ‘They can decide when they want contact, not me or anyone else.”

“On the other hand, if they truly are an “uncontacted” people, do you think the civilized world might, for once, do the right thing and leave them alone?”

Bit of a National Geographic Mindset. NGM teaches us that the “savage” peoples of the world should be kept in a state of savagery -— living in huts, dying young, having a generally brutal life -— so they can be (IMHO) studied and examined by enlighted ecotourist who love to regail from the safety of their Aspen homes their times among the savages.

“Shame,” they say, that said savages “have been now contaminated by Western society; but now, let’s go look at my blue period Picasso.”

Well, has anyone ASKED SAID SAVAGES? Why do savages, on contact, move to farms or towns, watch TV, and drink Coca-Cola? Why do their grand children buy a Toyota and work as accoutants?

Could it be because Western society and life is easier, better, and generally more pleasant — even western society of the third-world nature in little towns in Brazil/Peru? (No worse than America circa 1870, and, like us, on the way up.)

Said savages (and I am using the term “savages” for effect) have a right to self-determination.

They are not there for our study purposes.

If they don’t like Western society, they will stay where they are. If they do, well, more power to them.

Actually, leaving them alone would be the best thing. Contacting them will mean several things: first of all a total rollback of every single thing they have come to believe as fact, which would lead to the mother of all culture-shocks. More important than that, past contacts with other Amazonian 'lost tribes' has led to rapid decay of those societies, with particularly note of hits from disease and social vices (in one case most of the females being used as cheap prostitutes by local loggers who came across them, with payment being cigarettes and throw-away booze). These tribes have lived in a totally encapsulated environment for centuries, and sudden exposure to advanced civilization would just destroy them.

You mention that their life expectancy is 35 years or less by your estimation. Well, exposure to modern society would do nothing to improve that. It is not as if exposure would suddenly have them living in modern American suburbia with access to modern medicine, proper nutrition and healthcare, and a real outlook for the future. No, they would simply be another poor Indian outcrop living in the outskirts of some slum. Looking at life expectancies for poor people in the favelas of Brazil (and these guys would be so poor they would not even be staying in the slums ....they would be too expensive), there would be no measurable improvement in life. Also, talking about brutal existence in the jungle ...well, the slums of Latin America are harder than those of Africa. In the jungle the main worries are exposure to the elements (they have lived in the jungle long enough to take care of that), lack of food (not a problem in the amazon basin which has enough grain fruit and game), lack of water (again, not a problem in the Amazon), hostilities from other tribes (this is not the problem that movies make it to be ...the only place such conflicts were big was in Papua new guinea during the times of headhunting tribes, and even THAT was not as bad as most people believed. most battles were primarily ceremonial, with the real killing and head hunting only happening when decorum broke down and ceremonial wars could not suffice). Obviously there are predators (e.g Jaguars) and dangerous animals (e.g. several species of snake like the Fer de Lance, as well as other animals and insects that are not necessarily benevolent) but then again, it is not as if every day Jaguars take humans. Most predators avoid human settlements. Thus it is not as 'brutal' as some may make it to be.

Modern life, on the other hand, will be killer for them. Unless they have a standard of living that is very high (impossible for people with NO skill sets that are applicable to modern life, apart from women who have sexual organs, and men who can take up cheap labor as loggers at wages lower than the poorest man from a favela), that means that modern life would actually be worse than what they currently have in the jungle. The fact that the tribe is still thriving (and must have been in that general area for centuries) means that they are functioning alright. It may be a different lifestyle from ours, but they have been functioning. What does modern life have to offer them apart from disease, exploitation, and social ills? After all, it is not as if after their 'discovery' they will be given decent housing (it will not even be decent by Latin American standards) and running water.

If modern life meant that they would actually have a modern life, then I would be all for their introduction into our world. However, based on other 'discovered tribes' over the last 5 decades, all that will happen is a disease-shock, sexual and wage exploitation, and a level of poverty that is grueling even by South American standards. A good portion of them will die quickly due to disease-shock, and after the initial media publicity the rest will simply fade into the dregs of society.

Honestly, they should just be let to be. Bringing them into modern society will be the worst thing to happen to them.

Final thing ...you mention that the 'right thing to do is to invite them to join civilized society and to defend the human rights of individuals who wish to do so.' Please remember that they are not being discovered in some advanced Western capital where human rights are held in esteem and there is some sort of blanket that tries to take care of the most basic needs of even its poorest members of society. These guys are being discovered in the Amazon, and in Brazil if you are below a certain economic threshold it is really a dog-eat-dog world. They have NO skills whatsoever to cope with a modern society. There would be no one to 'defend their human rights,' and they would not be seen as individuals but rather as quirks (for the first couple of weeks) before being forgotten by the media, and a year or so later a portion of the tribe would be dead due to disease-shock, and the remnant either working as bottom-tier prostitutes or cheap-@$$ labor. That is the story of 'discovered tribes.'

The only option would be for the government to set 'ethnic centers' where tourists pay to come and see them living in their 'natural habitat,' which is basically another name for a zoo. That is the BEST CASE scenario for them.

Thus, unless Warren Buffet decides to put money aside for those people that will be used as a fund to take care of them in the modern world, those guys would be dead ducks amongst us. They would be as out of place here as we would be in their environment. No education, no money, no economic skill-sets in South America .....that equals an early death for the lucky ones, and a hard-as-nails life for the unlucky ones who don't get taken out by chickenpox (you should see what the relatively benign chickenpox does to an adult with zero immunity, and let us not get started on the flu, measles, whooping cough, the diptheria and cholera that run rounds amongst the poor of Brazil, and all sorts of other stuff that is anathema to the system of a tribe that has lived in an encapsulated micro-system for centuries).

A life hunting peccaries and birds, and eating berries and grubs, is better than living a level below the type of life to be found in a Brazilian slum.

Read my post 45.

As for savages moving to a Western form of life, you are not talking about savages. You are talking about the rural poor. In Africa and south America, the rural poor always move towards urban centers as they seek higher income as well as better access to goodies (e.g. electricity, tv, etc). Most do not get what they are looking for and end up in slums, but that does not stem the flow of people from the rural centers to urban loci.

However, those rural poor have the skill sets to at least survive. They have a modicum of education (even if it is simply being able to speak the general language and know that the bus fare is this-and-that amount of currency). Also, even though they are often exploited in terms of wages and the like, they are still street smart enough to put things together, live a frugal life, and even scrape enough to send home to educate their younger siblings.

However, the Amazon people are NOT the rural poor. They do not know anything about TVs. They have no CONCEPT of currency. If they drank coca-cola it would make them sick (you'd be surprised the things that made other 'discovered tribes' sick due to what their stomachs have been acclimatized to ...in the same way you drinking tap water in Mexico would drop you in your porcelain throne like a tackle from a 350 pounder). They have NO economical skill-set whatsoever apart from sex and cheap labor (again, based on what has happened to other tribes ....apparently a vagina for the women and two strong arms for the men, at below market prices, are viable economic options). Their living areas would actually be worse than a hut (at least there are no open sewer lines). And life expectancy is actually worse.

Comparing these true savages (and they are savages from our modern point of view) to the rural poor is not accurate.

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