The Unconquered
In Search of the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes
by Scott Wallace
Crown
Tribesmen covered in red and black vegetable dye aim their spears overhead and point at the sky. Their bewilderment is palpable, even from far above. They’ve never seen an airplane before.
This nameless tribe lives in the Amazon, along the Brazilian-Peruvian border. Its existence was only first confirmed to the world with photos taken by the Brazilian government in 2008 and again earlier this year.
Brazil’s slice of the Amazon rainforest is home to 26 such uncontacted tribes — more than any other place in the world. Another tribe, consisting of 200 people, was just added to the list in June, while leads for other possible groups are still being investigated.
Many of them have never been photographed, though aggressive loggers, ranchers and drug dealers threaten their lives — and explorers and government agencies seek to protect them and keep them unmolested by the outside world.
In 2002, National Geographic journalist Scott Wallace went on an expedition in the Amazon to locate one such uncontacted tribe and writes about the complex and arduous journey in his book “Unconquered.”
Along the way, he tells the story of the history of western Amazon: the deforestation and abuse, the conflict between the white man and the Indians, and the continuation of peoples who live isolated in this world of overexposure and hyper-connectivity.
“We can’t almost do anything anymore without it being stored in a computer somewhere, yet there are these people who live in a completely separate dimension that have never heard of Jesus Christ or Osama bin Laden,” Wallace told The Post. “It’s amazing.”
Given the history of pillaging and abuse — guns, theft and germs in the jungle — it’s amazing that authentic, isolated tribes still remain.
When the rubber boom hit in the 1800s, exports from the Amazon quadrupled each decade until the early 1900s. Deforestation coupled with colonization changed the Amazon dramatically.
The pace of destruction only increased after World War II, with the advent of the chainsaw. By the mid-1960s, Brazil’s military dictatorship opened up new roads and encouraged people to migrate to the region, offering up cheap 250-acre plots to ranchers.
Campaigns hyped the region with slogans, “A Land Without Men, For Men Without Land,” according to Monte Reel, author of the recent book “The Last of the Tribe.”
A million people moved into the area and deforestation hit unprecedented levels, with 20,000 miles cut each year by 1996.
“More of the Amazon basin had been leveled and burned in the past 50 years than in the previous five centuries combined, as ranchers, growers and timber barons threatened or bribed their way to industrial-scale devastation,” writes “Unconquered” author Wallace.
Violent clashes between the ranchers, loggers and the native tribes erupted. In fact, most of the isolated tribes that exist now are descendents of survivors of massacres or are the descendents of slaves brought in from Africa during the rubber boom.
Even explorers and advocates often did more harm than help when they made contact and spread disease. Every time a tribe made contact with outsiders, there was a 40% to 90% mortality rate in the months that followed.
The shock of the huge loss of human life unleashed “a chain of reactions of negative consequences that time and again led to the disappearance of tribes. The once-proud warrior who had made the road builders quake in their boots now staggered drunk along the Trans-Amazonian Highway’s dusty shoulders, begging for handouts,” writes Wallace.
To amend, the Brazilian government has set aside an area the size of New York state for uncontacted tribes so that the Indians could be saved from the industrialization of the area.
In addition, wilderness scout and leading isolated Indian authority Sydney Possuelo, on whose work the book “Unconquered” is based around, decided to introduce a “no- contact policy.”
“Once you make contact,” Possuelo said, “you begin the process of destroying their universe.”
At first the attitude to keep the indigenous population separate from society was seen as racist by advocates. Archeologists also wanted to study the tribes firsthand, seeing them as a treasure trove in the study of dialect and ancient customs. Explorers worked for the thrill of “first contact.” Even Possuelo directly encountered seven tribes before deciding it was wrong.
Now they take pains to locate isolated tribes through a combination of stealthy Indiana Jones-style detective work and satellite imagery.
“The work we are doing here is beautiful because they don’t even know we’re here to help them,” Possuelo told Wallace. “We have to respect their way of life. We’re not going to pursue them. The best thing we can do is to stay out of their lives.”
Wallace follows one such expedition with Possuelo as a guide to find an uncontracted tribe, called the Arrow People, whose language, ethnicity and religion are still unknown.
The arduous journey takes two weeks of river travel on the adjacent rivers Itaguai and Jutai and 20 days of bushwhacking.
All that was known of the tribe is that they are deft archers who use poison-tipped projectiles and were hostile to outsiders.
This is good news to Possuelo.
“I prefer them to be violent,” he explained to a reporter from Smithsonian magazine, “because it frightens off intruders.”
The expedition team found a discarded ceramic pot, abandoned fishing camps and primitive huts that all belonged to the Arrow People. But Possuelo was not interested in the archeological implications of these finds; instead, he wants to track where the tribe was so that he can see how they were living.
They came across fresh footprints — and then, most frighteningly, two large clay pots “brimming with curare, the dark poisonous goop that they apply to arrow tips.”
A hacked-off tree branch gave a sign: “Stay out. Go no further.” So Possuelo decided to do just that. They would not get any closer to the tribe.
But they had learned a lot about the Arrow People: They were masters of projectile technology, trekked seasonally through the jungle and cultivated banana, sugarcane and some types of cotton. Somehow along the way they’d even managed to obtain steel for arrow tips (likely through inter-tribal trading), the most technologically advanced aspect of their lives.
Still, Wallace and Possuelo had not been able to see the Arrow People face to face — and only caught a glimpse after chartering a plane.
“Dark figures scurried like ants between the huts, no doubt spooked by the appearance of this droning monster overhead,” Wallace writes. The figures on the ground appeared to halt their frantic scrambling. They stood motionless now, as though staring up at us in a trance.”
Possuelo was thrilled.
“They appeared to be thriving in every way,” Wallace writes. “For Possuelo, this is what victory looked like: the Arrow People, holding forth in the Parallel Realm. Uncontacted. Untamed. Unconquered.”
For Possuelo and company no tribe is too small to save. Take, for example, the story of the lone Indian man featured in the book “The Last of the Tribe” which came out last year.
In 1996, a tribe of one was discovered in the forest of southwestern Brazil.
“The man was a naked savage, they said, probably an Indian. But he didn’t appear to be part of any tribe. From what they could see, he lived all alone in a tiny thatched hut with no apparent ties to another human soul,” writes author Reel.
Some believed he was the last of a murdered tribe. Over the next decade, various isolated Indian advocates worked to prevent local ranchers from seizing his land.
Questions about capturing and contacting were made a hundred-fold more compelling — why save so much land for a man who might not survive the onslaught of loggers and who cannot reproduce?
In the end, the Brazilian government in 2006 decreed that “a single individual can be considered a ‘people’ if he is the only remnant of his culture and ethnic group.” Today, there is a 31-square-mile zone devoted to one man.
Author Reel puts it in perspective: “If the 31-square-mile area were populated at the same levels as the most crowded parts of Hong Kong, about 6.1 million people would live there. The Tanaru Indigenous Territory has a population of 1.”
But even with all the right people doing all the right things, sometimes tribes still disappear.
It’s been said that at least a tribe a year has vanished from the Amazon in the 20th century, some before their existence was ever documented. And with each tribe, goes their unique dialect. Rondonia, a northwest Brazilian state the size of Michigan, has greater language diversity than all of Europe with 30 indigenous languages and 10 isolates (languages that have no relation to each other), according to “The Last of the Tribe.”
The uncontacted tribe that made headlines this year after images of them pointing their spears to the airplanes overhead went viral, for instance, has gone missing– and this time it’s drug traffickers who are to blame.
In August, reports emerged that drug traffickers overran Brazilian guards posted to protect the land. In the area, police recovered a 40-pound bag of cocaine.
The Envira River, where the tribe made its home, seems to be an entry point in Brazil for Peruvian cocaine smugglers.
“All of the dwellings and crops are intact but the people aren’t there,” Wallace said. “The serious fear is that they’ve been wiped out.”