Sydney Possuelo labored as a Brazilian authorities sertanista, a authorities official tasked with in search of contact with uncontacted tribes. What he discovered led him to struggle for his or her proper to land – and to be left alone.
“I bear in mind it effectively; my first encounter with uncontacted individuals was in 1971. Our mission was to deliver out Jaboti and Makurap tribal individuals, 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 individuals accompanying me out of the blue refused to proceed. They’d discovered indicators of the existence of the invisible ‘brabos’. Throughout us had been huts, shelters, mats, stays of fires, arrowheads, marked timber, animal traps.
These had 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 had been the indicators of a individuals who had been resisting fiercely the advances of our society. They had been combating to maintain maintain of the land that had all the time been their residence.
Through the Seventies, the army governments in Brazil began to develop a highway community that might reduce by way of the Amazon, destroying the territories of the Indigenous individuals. 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 one in every of them; I used to be despatched out to discover nearly unknown areas of forest, main expeditions with the purpose of “pacifying” uncontacted tribes. Within the years that adopted, I stood alongside the individuals as they fought at hydroelectric development websites, campaigned at oil-prospecting — all in protest in opposition to the stealing of their lands. I discovered to patch up Indigenous individuals who had been badly wounded from these conflicts. I discovered what measles meant to lately contacted tribes — annihilation of their individuals. And I witnessed individuals dropping their identification, their languages and their land.
I started to grasp that contact with the surface world will not be 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 had been saying, ‘come and share a world which is technologically extra superior!’ However all of it’s a lie. We’re invading their house. Our society is made for us, not for the tribal man. The white architect designed no house for the tribal man.
For when you make contact, you begin to destroy their universe. The Indigenous individual can not consider the delusions of our world. After we present them our illusions, they see an enormous bazaar with a mass of shining tiles. ‘It is a great world’, they are saying. ‘That is the place every part shall 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 pleasure.
And so I started to struggle to vary long-held insurance policies to these of no contact; I started to steer these in energy that the state has an obligation to guard individuals — remnants of societies that after numbered hundreds — who’re unable to defend themselves in opposition to a way more highly effective society.
My beliefs stay as robust at present. When a individuals 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 we’ve got to rethink the rights of Indigenous individuals to well being, peace, freedom — briefly, the fitting to happiness.
The societies which might create aeroplanes and rockets must develop beliefs which really respect uncontacted tribes. Will the world now accord the final remaining teams their proper to freedom? Can we forestall our huge paraphernalia of expertise — 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 e-book ‘We’re One — a celebration of tribal peoples’, with extra 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 applied a landmark coverage of not making contact with them.
