by Sophia Lowry
For hundreds of years the Amazon has been home to indigenous tribes. At one point in the 1500s, these tribes spread across South America, and it is mainly due to European foreigners that their population has depleted so drastically. Together with deforestation, forced contact with modern society has horrifically impacted indigenous people living in the Amazon. These isolated tribes have survived in the absence of “help” for decades, some thriving and others slowly dying off. History continues to show that interferences with these tribes only leaves their health, safety and population in a poorer state. However, drug traffickers, oil exploiters, and loggers continue to barrel through the Amazon, destroying their land and their people. The current world policy is to leave these tribes alone, but a new idea has been presented. Some believe that if those who wish to protect the tribes make contact with them first, we will be able to shield them against loggers and deforestation. With this, a question is raised; should we be focusing our efforts on protecting the land of South American indgenous people, or should we begin to approach them with benefits that would prevent potential long-term consequences?
Since 1492, there have been at least 100 million deaths resulting from imported diseases, yet people in our modern world continue to pursue tribes who have purposefully isolated themselves. In fact, in the 1980s and 1990s the official government policy was to lure out these tribes to settle them down and force them into “good, contemporary people”. Beginning in 1969 an organization named Survival International was founded to defend the lives of tribal people across the world, and is still one of the only organizations that advocates for them today. They believe that isolated tribes are viable as long as their lands are protected and the world acknowledges that it is not within our rights to invade their territories to make contact with them.
Opposing Survival International, and the popular view that the world should protect the land of native tribes, is the opinion that we should push to make contact with these tribes. Two anthropologists, Kim Hill and Robert Walker, best explain this controversial viewpoint with the idea that without safe, controlled contact, secluded indigenous people will inevitably be met with destruction by those who wish to build over their homes. As the official policy when it comes to isolated tribes is to leave them alone, very few people share Walker and Hill’s opinion. In 2015, Walker and Hill wrote an editorial proposing that the United Nations and the governments of Brazil and Peru should change their policy on uncontacted tribes and begin to seek them out with legal and medical aid. They even went so far as to claim that “leaving groups isolated, yet still exposed to dangerous and uncontrolled interactions with the outside world, is a violation of governmental responsibility.” This idea and proposal has been fiercely denounced by those who argue that this would present the opportunity for loggers to open up the Amazon for investment and space.
In their proposal mentioned above, Walker and Kim reason that “humans are social animals and isolation is an unnatural response to extreme fear. Government protection will allay that fear and these groups will immediately show desire for outside interaction.” This again demonstrates the idea that society knows better and needs to “save” those less fortunate, which can be named as egotistic. Past this, there is a myriad of evidence that shows that contact between our society, which carries age old diseases, and isolated indeginous people, who lack the antigens to fight against these diseases, leads to further population depletion of the tribes. Those against simply protecting the tribes believe that contacting them to secure their viability is different than exploiting their land, and argue that each time contact is made, political protection is increased rather than decreased. Although the latter statement may be true statistically, political involvement is increased only due to the angry flare that rises from the world each time forced contact is made.
The world needs to protect these people, and the best way to do this is by protecting their land against those who wish to build over it. Initiating contact with the rest of the world must be the choice of the uncontacted tribes, and when we make contact with them, we take away that choice. There is no way to know for sure how long these tribes wish to remain uncontacted or how much they are aware of the rest of the world, but it is not our decision to make. We cannot continue to invade their homes, no matter how beneficial our intentions may be. We need to first own and apologize for the fact that citizens of the world are the main contributors to the rapid decline of uncontacted tribe population, then we must strengthen the laws against deforestation in the Amazon and prohibit any more unwanted forced contact. Beyond this, we do not have any other rights in the lives of South American uncontacted tribes. We must bring the world to the attention of the dangers that these tribes face, and make it our duty to protect their land.
Bibliography
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