The threats facing indigenous tribes making first contact
Recent video shows Brazilian jungle tribe making first contact with the outside world. Serious questions are aised by this meeting.
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Plenty of things threaten members of a Brazilian tribe who recently made their first contact with the outside world, but nothing more so than the danger of disease, experts say.
Well-meaning outsiders and violent enemies can all carry deadly diseases, experts warn.
“Among the main threats to the well-being of these groups are illegal fishing, hunting, logging, mining, cattle ranching, missionary actions … and drug trafficking,” Fabricio Amorim of the Brazil Indian Affairs Department told a reporter from Today.az.
Native people living in isolation have developed no immunity to pathogens like influenza, measles and the common cold, and first contact with outsiders often has catastrophic results.
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There were an estimated six million to nine million native people living in the Amazon region before Europeans arrived in the 15th century.
A century later, after massive epidemics, that number had fallen to just one million.
Experts speculate the Brazilian band recently made contact with outsiders because they’re looking for ways to cope with massive changes in their lives.
“Something serious must have happened,” Jose Carlos Meirelles of Brazil’s Indian Affairs Department told Survival International, a human rights organization that campaigns for indigenous tribal people.
“It is not normal for such a large group of uncontacted Indians to approach in this way. This is a completely new and worrying situation, and we currently do not know what caused it.”
The tiny band that was captured on video this summer by Brazil’s National Indian Foundation is one of what’s believed to be up to 77 isolated tribes in the Amazon rainforests.
Worldwide, the number of tribes living totally apart from outsiders is pegged at around 100, with some in Papua New Guinea, India, Paraguay and Colombia.
The Brazilian Amazon tribe shown in the video are believed to be descendants of native people who fled European aggression centuries ago. Many took refuge in isolated jungle regions after the arrival of conquistadores from Spain and later arrivals from Portugal.
Indigenous people who didn’t retreat were often forced into slavery to work in gold and copper mines.
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