
http://www.guardianweekly.co.uk/?page=editorial&id=435&catID=4
David Hill is
a researcher and campaigner for Survival International, the
international movement supporting tribal peoples worldwide. Last year
he travelled to the Peruvian Amazon and spent months researching some
of the world’s last remaining uncontacted tribes. Peru is home to an
estimated 15 of these tribes and all of them are facing extinction as
oil companies and illegal loggers move in on the natural resources of
their habitat. Isolated Indians are especially vulnerable to any
contact because they have no immunity to outsiders’ diseases

Tomas, a Mastanahua man, in Puerto Paz. Photograph: David Hill/Survival
The most incredible part of my trip to Peru was meeting members of the
Mastanahua tribe. They were contacted for the first time by
missionaries only a few years ago and the rest of this tribe continues
to live in isolation. The Mastanahua live in the far reaches of the
Curanja River in the south-eastern Peruvian Amazon, near the border
with Brazil. It took me about five days to travel upriver in a small
canoe from Puerto Esperanza – one of the Peruvian Amazon’s remotest
towns – to reach their village.
When I arrived in the village with my guides, two of the Mastanahua
women were there and the man was away hunting. My guide called out
across the village, but the women didn’t want to come near us and
stayed in their hut. We sat down, made a fire and waited. At one point
my guide suggested that I go and stand in the middle of the clearing
with my hat off as a way of saying “Hello, this is who I am”.
After a few hours the man, carrying arrows on his back, returned. He
seemed happy to see me as he burst into the clearing, and presented me
with a turtle he had just caught. I felt lucky to be able to spend time
with him in this extraordinary place caught between two worlds. One of
my guides could understand the Mastanahua language and so I was able to
learn about the uncontacted members of the tribe.
A lot of the places I visited were extremely remote, and I spent a lot
of time travelling by canoe, stopping off for the night in indigenous
villages or camping on the banks of rivers or in palm-leaf huts. One
night, as I was trying to sleep on the riverbank, I could hear the
splash of caiman entering the river. Their eyes glowed red in my
torchlight. We had seen a jaguar crossing the river earlier in the day
and I was convinced it was lurking in the dense jungle, just metres
behind me.
On my journey to the upper reaches of the Piedras River I stayed in an
indigenous Yine village. Uncontacted tribes have been seen along this
river more often than anywhere else in the region, particularly the
Mashco-Piro tribe. On my first morning with the Yine I arranged a
meeting with the whole community and explained that I wanted to record
the testimonies of anyone who had seen the uncontacted tribes.
Rommel, one member of the village, had seen them and told me what he
witnessed. “They had arrows with them and they weren't wearing any
clothes. They had long hair down to their shoulders and they fastened
it around their foreheads. Their faces were painted red with achiote.
They were painted all over their bodies, too.”
It was in this Yine village that I tried the infamous
masato,
a fermented drink made from manioc. It was prepared by the women in a
massive vat and stirred with what looked like a canoe paddle. The first
time I tried it I was calling in on a small community of eight Yine
families early in the morning. The
masato was presented to me
in a plastic blue bowl. I sipped it and immediately realised I didn’t
like it, but knew it would be rude not to drink it so got through it as
quickly as I could. By the end of my trip, however, I had developed
quite a taste for it.
On the Yurua River I met people from the Murunahua tribe, discovered
for the first time in the mid-1990s by illegal loggers. The presence of
loggers in areas inhabited by uncontacted tribes is extremely
dangerous; in the Amazon, up to 90% of entire groups have been wiped
out by disease after first contact with outsiders. Jorge, one of the
surviving Murunahua, told me: “When the loggers made contact with us we
came out of the jungle. Then the disease came, although we didn't know
what a cold was then. Half of my people died. My aunt died. My nephew
died. The old people especially. When the old people came out of the
jungle they had no resistance to the disease."
Contact between outsiders and these remote tribes can bring about
violence. Loggers are often armed and isolated tribes usually carry
bows and arrows with them for hunting. There was one particularly
brutal encounter when illegal loggers came upon an uncontacted tribe –
probably the Mashco-Piro – just after I left one village on the Piedras
River. One logger and an unknown number of the tribe were killed.
The Peruvian government has created five reserves for the tribes, but
they don’t really mean anything in practice. The government is
promoting oil exploration in regions where the tribes live. The
president [Alan Garcia Perez] has even gone so far as to say that the
tribes don’t exist, although the evidence I gathered proves irrefutably
that they do.
While I was there I took care not to enter areas that might have
brought me into contact with the tribes. It’s clear that they don’t
want to be in touch with the outside world. When there are occasional
encounters between them and outsiders they tend to slip back into the
jungle. They are aware of an outside society and if they wanted to make
contact with it they would. But they should be given the time and space
to make that choice and not have it imposed on them by oil companies,
loggers or the government – all of whom are more interested in
exploiting the natural resources on their land than anything else.
Survival International wants to turn Peru’s tribes into an issue of
international concern. We’re using the material I gathered to lobby the
Peruvian government and companies, monitor the situation on the ground,
and encourage our supporters and members of the public to join our
campaign and stand up for the tribes’ rights. Our position is that the
Peruvian government should prohibit any form of natural resource
extraction on land inhabited by these tribes, and that it should remove
outsiders who have invaded their land. If that doesn’t happen, these
people will be wiped out.
• David Hill was interviewed by Ann Scholl. To read more about Peru's uncontacted tribes, visit the
Survival International website.
A Luta Continua...
Share life's special moments with Photo Gallery.
Windows Live Photo Gallery