Isolated in Amazon, Visible From the Air

From the NY Times:

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Aerial photographs of an isolated community of indigenous people in the Amazon basin, near the border shared by Brazil and Peru, were released this week to show that they exist but may be endangered by illegal logging.

One picture, taken by the Brazilian government, showed two men, painted red, brandishing bows and arrows at the camera-bearing plane flying low over the dense rain forest. In another picture, about 15 men, women and children who were not painted looked up from thatched huts.



Survival International, an organization based in London whose mission is to help tribal peoples to “defend their lives, protect their lands and determine their own futures,” said the pictures were taken as part of several flights over the thinly populated upper reaches of the Amazon, in Acre, a Brazilian state.

Some of the photographs are here.

The Brazilian government conducts such photographic operations to locate the scattered tribes and monitor their well-being. Anthropologists say the government’s practice in recent years has been to track these remote people by air or from boats, but to leave them alone.

In a statement on Thursday, Survival International quoted José Carlos dos Reis Meirelles, an official of Funai, the Indian affairs department of the Brazilian government, as saying, “We did the overflight to show their houses, to show they are there, to show they exist.”

The photographs were shot in late April and early May, but the government released them now because of growing concerns that disease and the spread of illegal logging threaten to destroy the tribe’s way of life.

Initial news reports and the statement from Survival International did not identify the tribe or give the exact location of the settlement, presumably to protect it from unwanted visits. But the reports described the people as members of one of South America’s few remaining indigenous tribes that had not had contact with the outside world.

But Robert L. Carneiro, an anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History who has made a career of studying indigenous people of the Amazon, questioned that claim after examining the photographs on Friday.

He noted that the men wore bamboo headpieces that looked like crowns, with strips of thinly cut bamboo around their waists.

He said that attire reminded him of the Amahuaca people he lived with and studied in the 1960s. Most of them live along the Amazon’s headwaters, in Peru, not far from Acre, Dr. Carneiro said. “I’m not saying these people in the pictures are Amahuaca, but they could be,” he said. “Or they are a closely related group.”