Sydney Possuelo labored as a Brazilian authorities sertanista, a authorities official tasked with searching for contact with uncontacted tribes. What he discovered led him to battle for his or her proper to land – and to be left alone.
“I bear in mind it effectively; my first encounter with uncontacted folks was in 1971. Our mission was to carry out Jaboti and Makurap tribal folks, enslaved within the rubber forests deep within the Amazon. I travelled alongside the Rio Branco so far as it was navigable, then walked alongside many trails till the Indigenous folks accompanying me out of the blue refused to proceed. That they had discovered indicators of the existence of the invisible ‘brabos’. Throughout us have been huts, shelters, mats, stays of fires, arrowheads, marked bushes, animal traps.
These have been indicators of life I recognised, practices I had discovered about through the years I lived with the Xingu peoples of Brazil. However one thing new caught my consideration: sharp bamboo stakes planted within the floor. A number of stakes, camouflaged by leaves — harmful weapons for the incautious. These have been the indicators of a individuals who have been resisting fiercely the advances of our society. They have been combating to maintain maintain of the land that had at all times been their dwelling.
In the course of the Nineteen Seventies, the army governments in Brazil began to develop a highway community that will lower by means of the Amazon, destroying the territories of the Indigenous folks. Till then, the world had been thought of unoccupied, empty. The Authorities known as in lots of sertanistas to contact the Indigenous individuals who lay in the way in which of the highway. I used to be considered one of them; I used to be despatched out to discover nearly unknown areas of forest, main expeditions with the goal of “pacifying” uncontacted tribes. Within the years that adopted, I stood alongside the folks as they fought at hydroelectric building websites, campaigned at oil-prospecting — all in protest in opposition to the stealing of their lands. I discovered to patch up Indigenous individuals who have been badly wounded from these conflicts. I discovered what measles meant to not too long ago contacted tribes — annihilation of their folks. And I witnessed folks shedding their identification, their languages and their land.
I started to grasp that contact with the surface world just isn’t within the curiosity of uncontacted tribes. I began to marvel, what kind of shambles are we creating? On the time, I genuinely believed that we have been saying, ‘come and share a world which is technologically extra superior!’ However all of it’s a lie. We’re invading their area. Our society is made for us, not for the tribal man. The white architect designed no area for the tribal man.
For when you make contact, you begin to destroy their universe. The Indigenous particular person can’t consider the delusions of our world. Once we present them our illusions, they see an enormous bazaar with a mass of shining tiles. ‘It is a fantastic world’, they are saying. ‘That is the place every part will likely be solved for me.’ It’s a deception. He loses the grace of a person who’s so built-in into his setting that he’s lovely and carries himself with delight.
And so I started to battle to alter long-held insurance policies to these of no contact; I started to influence these in energy that the state has an obligation to guard folks — remnants of societies that when numbered hundreds — who’re unable to defend themselves in opposition to a way more highly effective society.
My beliefs stay as sturdy right now. When a folks is remoted and at peace; when nothing threatens them, why do we have to contact them? Simply because we all know they exist? They fairly often make it clear that they search their isolation, so the primary proper of remoted peoples is to permit them to stay remoted. And the longer Indigenous teams can stay uncontacted, the extra time now we have to rethink the rights of Indigenous folks to well being, peace, freedom — in brief, the correct to happiness.
The societies which may create aeroplanes and rockets have to develop beliefs which actually respect uncontacted tribes. Will the world now accord the final remaining teams their proper to freedom? Can we forestall our huge paraphernalia of know-how — tractors, communication, transport — from wrecking their environments?
When there may be contact sooner or later, will we be extra brotherly, extra human, much less violent?”
This text first appeared in Survival’s guide ‘We’re One — a celebration of tribal peoples’, with further materials drawn from Sydney Possuelo’s interview with the late film-maker Adrian Cowell. Edited in 2022.
Sydney created a particular unit for uncontacted Indigenous peoples in FUNAI, the federal government’s Indigenous affairs division, and carried out a landmark coverage of not making contact with them.
