The uncontacted tribe was contacted decades ago
About a month ago, there were some amazing photos released of an ‘uncontacted’ tribe in the Amazon rain forest shooting arrows at an aircraft, which got us really excited. But it’s now come out that the tribe’s existence has been known since 1910.
The said photos were the work of photographer José Carlos Meirelles, 61, an expert on indigenous tribes and he is working for the Brazilian Indian Protection Agency, Funai, released the photos as a publicity stunt to highlight the plight of indigenous people in the jungle.
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 GarcÃa [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.’
[via guardian]
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9:37 am on June 25th, 2008
This is not a revelation and there was no deception. There may have been some media misunderstanding, but from the moment the photos emerged, Survival International (the global movement for tribal peoples) and FUNAI (the Brazilian Government’s National Indian Foundation) have not said that the tribe was ‘unknown’ or ‘lost’. The tribe was and remains ‘uncontacted’: no outsider has been known to have any peaceful contact with its members.
This is true of about 100 tribes worldwide. Since the photographs were released, Peru has acknowledged the lands of uncontacted tribes on its side of the border, and sent a team to investigate the illegal logging that threatens their survival.
Find out more about the world’s uncontacted tribes at http://www.survival-international.org/uncontactedtribes and read Survival’s article on the supposed hoax at http://www.survival-international.org/news/3400
Matt
Survival International