Wyatt earp
Diamond Member
- Apr 21, 2012
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It sounds like the tribe wasnt the group with the moral issues.Survival
Uncontacted tribes: the threats
Uncontacted tribes are the most vulnerable peoples on earth. A vast array of powerful forces are ranged against them.
Cattle ranchers
Cattle ranching has destroyed nearly all the Akuntsu’s land.
Of all the tribal peoples wiped out for standing in the way of ‘progress’, few are as poignant as the Akuntsu. Their fate is all the more tragic for being so recent.
No-one speaks their language, so the precise details of what happened to them may never be known. But when agents of Brazil’s Indian affairs department FUNAI contacted them in 1995, they found that the cattle ranchers who had taken over the Indians’ land had massacred almost all the tribe, and bulldozed their houses to try to cover up the massacre.
The Akuntsu are a tiny Amazonian tribe of just five individuals. They are the last known survivors of their people and live in Rondônia state, western Brazil.
© Fiona Watson/Survival
Just five Akuntsu survive. One of the men, Pupak, has lead shot still buried in his back, and mimes the gunmen who pursued him on horseback. He and his small band of survivors now live alone in a fragment of forest – all that remains of their land, and their people.
Disease
Introduced diseases are the biggest killer of isolated tribal people, who have not developed immunity to viruses such as influenza, measles and chicken pox that most other societies have been in contact with for hundreds of years.
In Peru, more than 50% of the previously-uncontacted Nahua tribe were wiped out following oil exploration on their land in the early 1980s, and the same tragedy engulfed the Murunahua in the mid-1990s after being forcibly contacted by illegal mahogany loggers.
Jorge lost an eye during first contact
© Survival
One of the Murunahua survivors, Jorge, who lost an eye during first contact, told a Survival researcher, ‘The disease came when the loggers made contact with us, although we didn’t know what a cold was then. The disease killed us. Half of us died. My aunt died, my nephew died. Half of my people died.’
Missionaries
Christian missionaries, who have been making first contact with tribes for five hundred years, are still trying to do so today. Often believing that the tribes are ‘primitive’ and living pitiful lives ‘in the dark’, the missionaries’ ultimate aim is to convert them to Christianity – at whatever cost to the tribal peoples’ own health and wishes
They had contact with other tribes..
We are talking an isolated island.
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