- Argentina: The silent genocide of the Mbya Guarani

The Mbya Guarani are an ancient forest people with their roots in the Amazon. In Misiones, a province in the northeast of Argentina, they have 74 communities and a total population of approximately 3,000 people. Their culture is as rich as the biodiversity of the Paranaense forest that they have always used and protected.

Two of these communities, the Tekoa Yma and the Tekoa Kapi’i Yvate, summarize the Mbya Guarani’s fierce struggle to preserve their identity and continue living in the forest. Comprising some 20 families, their dealings with Western society only started to be important in 1995. As in many other Indigenous communities, their greatest bastions of independence and cultural safeguard are their women and the Opygua (priest) of the Tekoa Yma, Artemio Benitez. They continue to struggle to make their voluntary isolation from the yerua (white people) understood and respected. But the logging companies, the chainsaws and the Misiones Government’s lack of sensitivity continue to harass them.

At present they live within the Yabotí Biosphere Reserve, where they obtain their food, their medicinal plants and building materials from a mosaic of Paraense forest environments, covering 6,500 hectares. Unfortunately their territory coincides with the so-called “Plot 8” and “Plot 7” considered “private property” by their present holders, the Mocona Forestal S.A. company and Marta Harriet (see WRM Bulletin 86). The Mocona Company, with the approval of the Government, recently attempted to enclose them in 300 hectares, representing less than 5 per cent of the territory they presently use to live in. In some way, white people taking over as owners and as governors, have shrunk their territory and their forest in order to expand plantations and the good business of those who call themselves civilized.

Of the total area originally covered by the Mata Atlântica and Paranaense forests, only 5 per cent remains. This loss of biodiversity and continuity is particularly critical in environments where the Tekoa Yma and Tekoa Kapi’i Yvate are located. The lack of natural medicines and food caused by the frantic extraction of trees is threatening their health and their survival. This is of unusual gravity, not only in terms of human rights, but also in terms of demographic criticalness.

The Mbya communities of Tekoa Yma and Tokoa Kapi’i Yvate are the result of long processes of sedentary cycles, preceded by limited migration episodes. These movements have taken place throughout centuries. While the sub-tropical forest evolved, with its own fluctuations due to internal and external causes, one of its species, the Mbya, established successive transitory territories. If the resources available and their use established a good balance and the dreams of their leaders did not advise against it, they settled in the same place for a long time. If some crisis broke up this relationship, or dreams suggested a change, the community migrated, but only to settle with their sedentary features in another more appropriate place.

The life strategy of any group of hunters-gatherers with subsistence agriculture or a long food chain, has specificities that are not well understood by other human groups whose strategy, on the contrary, is based on agro-productive systems with a very short food chain.

In fact, when human populations invented agriculture some 5,000-10,000 years ago, they shortened the old, long food chains. They eliminated the living forms that existed on the soil and then planted, replacing forests or large ranges of pasture lands, by a single protected species. Shortening the food chains and the success of farming and animal husbandry fed the first urban revolution with their surplus, and from then on, massive growth of the human population.

For decades now in Misiones an unequal battle between these two life strategies has been taking place.

On the one hand are the Mbya communities, who are the longest standing inhabitants of the territory. Various communities, among them the Tekoa Yma and Tekoa Kapi’i Yvate, continue to preserve a long food chain strategy. They are hunters, gatherers and fisher-people, with a deliberately reduced practice of agriculture.

On the other hand are the white communities of European origin who very recently entered the Paranaense forest. These groups brought with them a short chain productive strategy, totally different from the one practiced by the Mbya. Instead of living in harmony with the forest, they needed deforested areas to grow their protected species.

The Mbya communities integrated the Paranaense forest over 3,000 years ago without developing the notion of private property adopted by the white population that entered more recently (sixteenth century and onwards). Objectively what happened was that their “total territory” was invaded as from the sixteenth century by white groups, mostly of European origin, who had totally different strategies for appropriating land and for production. This explains the rapid disappearance of the sub-tropical forest, the establishment of short chain agro-productive systems and the multiplication of permanent urban settlements.

While the white people were appropriating space “fixing” private property territories, the eviction of the Mbya generated their underprivileged incorporation into white settlements and fewer chances to live in a traditional way for those who still remain living in the Paranaense forest, such as Yaboti. In this environment, recognized by UNESCO as a Biosphere Reserve, legal and illegal ransacking of their resources continues. This has reduced local biodiversity seriously and in some cases, irreversibly, as it has reduced the Mbya’s possibilities of subsisting uniquely from the forest.

For many white people, the success of a culture is measured by grandiose buildings and objects that they produce, and the time they last. For nature, success is measured by the length of time a population, such as the Mbya, have lived in the forest without the forest or the Mbya themselves disappearing. There are peoples whose inheritance is almost immaterial, but this does not mean that they are “less evolved” or “less developed.” They are peoples and cultures that have achieved what many of our civilizations have attempted but not attained: to adapt to the environment and to themselves.

The Mbya communities of Tekoa Yma and Tekoa Kapi’i Yvate have the natural right to continue living where they are today for two fundamental reasons: firstly because the area they occupy is what a hunting, fishing, gathering people with small scale agriculture needs, and secondly because that area is part of the mobile territory that their forefathers have used for centuries.

The peoples who have the most right of “ownership” of the forest are those who have lived in the forest as part of it for centuries, without the need to become its owners.

By: Raul Montenegro, FUNAM, UN Global 500 Prize, taken from “El silencioso genocidio de los Mbya Guaraní en Argentina. (O la lucha de la cadenas alimentarias cortas contra las cadenas alimentarias largas)”, e-mail: montenegro@funam.org.ar , http://www.funam.org.ar . The complete article, resulting from the joint work of ENDEPA and FUNAM can be accessed –in Spanish- at: http://www.wrm.org.uy/paises/Argentina/Mbya.html

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- Brazil: Indigenous peoples in isolation and policies to defend and protect them

In the first place, it is important to clearly define what we are talking about when we refer to peoples or populations in “voluntary isolation.” This term and similar ones (such as “separate,” “isolated,” “autonomous”) attempt to describe “a situation or a historical context.” The background or basis they all have in common is that they seek to define peoples (ideally) or populations (perhaps closer to reality) that have little or no systematic contact with Western agents (in general commercial companies or missionaries). That is to say, they do not “depend” on our economic system to survive – and even less so on the symbolic system. In general such “autonomy” originates in the geographical context – and there are many peoples and human populations that could be included in the definition of “isolated” on the basis of a certain geographical niche that is inaccessible to systematic contact (populations of the Andes, the North Pole, Kalahari, the African or Asian deserts, the mountains of New Guinea, etc.). These peoples and populations have a residual contact with the dominating economy (and ideological system) and continue to maintain independent standards of survival with relation to the dominating economy in function of internal social and cultural resistance established voluntarily. However, what we have seen is that such autonomy can last while the niche they occupy is not the object of a (“capitalist”) valuation of the natural resources (or the symbolic ones, in the case of “strategic” territories for the Western powers).

However, this context does not apply to Indigenous Peoples or populations “in isolation” in the Amazon. In this context, when we define Indigenous Peoples and populations “in isolation” we are referring to peoples and populations who are closer to the state in which Christopher Columbus would have found them. They are not only in geographical isolation, but mainly, in historical isolation. This is the crucial difference in relation to the other peoples and populations “in voluntary isolation” on the planet. It is true that throughout this time (500 years!), they sought or took refuge in isolated regions, or rather, regions that were not coveted by the mercantile (or missionary) rage of our “expansion front”. In the Amazon (mainly the Brazilian Amazon but also in the Bolivian, Peruvian, Colombian, Venezuelan, Ecuadorian and Guyanese Amazon) we estimate that there are still dozens of Indigenous Peoples living almost in the same way as they lived five hundred, six hundred or a thousand years ago: garbed in their feather headdresses, or loincloths, surviving on hunting, fishing, gathering and small-scale agriculture with stone axes and fire, suffering from no virus diseases in a fully abundant environment. They may even know some of our instruments (iron instruments, glass bottles, plastic containers, etc.) that reach their hands by accident or because of previous contacts that were disastrous to them.

It should be emphasized that they remain in this state because, on the one hand, the conditions in the immediate surroundings of their habitat enable them to do so and also because these peoples aggressively produce and mark a distance (a frontier) with relation to us or to other already contacted Indigenous Peoples, seeking to maintain their living conditions through aggression and open (but disproportionate) conflict. However, not all of them have managed to maintain this distance.

It is a fact that today the majority of the isolated peoples in the Amazon are living in an extremely serious situation vis-à-vis the advance of predatory (logging and mining) frontiers towards the last virgin areas in the region. Harassed and attacked by these predatory expansion fronts (which very often have recourse to already contacted Indigenous Peoples and their enemies in the past), they have started to use fleeing strategies, decreasing the signs of their passage or changing their subsistence patterns – not opening clearings visible from planes, changing the form of their dwellings to camouflage them in the vegetation, moving more frequently and dispersing their population. Under these circumstances, many of these peoples – if not the majority – stop carrying out their rituals, radically change their subsistence routines and even those of procreation, by avoiding conception or even by aborting.

In Brazilian legislation (Law No. 6001 of 19/12/73) the denomination “isolated Indigenous Peoples” appears as a legal concept defining human populations with a pre-Columbus culture that have kept themselves geographically and socio-culturally at a distance from the Western population, which subsequently became the majority population in the country. This isolation is so strong that no knowledge exists of their demographic composition, just some traces of their existence and little or no indication of their material culture, customs or languages.

The physical, ethnical, linguistic, cultural and cosmological specificities of isolated Indigenous Peoples are an invaluable human heritage. Its diversity and existence are threatened every day by the actions of a segment of national society with the only objective of irrational exploitation and getting rich at the cost of the native populations and total degradation of the natural resources and biodiversity concentrated in their territories.

The frequency of records of isolated Indigenous Peoples is concentrated in remote territorial niches, many of these in strips along the frontiers of Amazon countries – demanding multi-national efforts. In South America, only Brazil has a specific coordination for matters concerning isolated peoples, the “Coordenação Geral de Índios Isolados – CGII” (General Coordination for Isolated Indigenous Peoples), linked to the official Indigenous body of the Brazilian Government, FUNAL. This department has records of 38 reports on isolated peoples in Brazilian territory. The resistance undertaken by these peoples is also seen in the protection of vast areas of Amazon ecosystems, as their physical and cultural reproduction is traditionally made possible by using natural resources in a way that is fully compatible with the conservation and protection of the ecosystems where they live.

The presence of Indigenous Peoples in isolation has been confirmed in various South American countries. In Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru and Venezuela, the existence of Indigenous Peoples living in the same conditions of social isolation and secrecy has been recorded, resisting penetration in their domains, frequently with violence. In any of these countries the situation is always the same: forced to migrate, deprived of their traditional territories, submitted to all sorts of tragedies during the successive cycles of expansion and appropriation of economic and social frontiers undertaken by national societies in Amazonian territory.

Colonizing actions and occupation of the Amazon territory for centuries have been based on predatory activities, disorderly extractivism and the exploitation of slave labour, promoting the drastic depopulation and extinction of innumerable Amerindian peoples. An unknown portion of Indigenous Peoples subsists under conditions of “isolation,” undertaking a bitter and silent struggle to survive the exterminating action of the enveloping society. Public ignorance of concrete data making their “social visibility” possible to civil society and an absolute absence of specific legislation guaranteeing State protection, safeguard and support, have maintained these peoples, and what is left of them, permanently exposed to extinction, promoting continued environmental dilapidation and degradation of their habitat.

The rhythm of extinction of peoples in isolation estimated in Brazilian ethnography, in accordance with the few researchers devoted to the issue, is enough to express the devastating genocide of the saga. The anthropologist, Darcy Ribeiro, exemplifies the dramatic depopulation that took place between 1900 and 1957 in his comprehensive work “Os Índios e a Civilização” (published by Cia. das Letras, 1996) stating that over this period of 57 years, 87 ethnic groups which had maintained themselves in isolation have disappeared. In spite of the fact that new peoples in isolation have been “discovered” in more recent decades, the proportion of extinguished peoples or peoples in permanent contact with national society is considerably greater, in a bitter statistic, a task still to be carried out. Statistics and demographic charts will never be able to express the human and cultural content of so much extinguished life, still taking place under indifference of civil society and the acquiescence of governments.

Therefore, Indigenous Peoples in isolation are seen as the last and least favoured pariahs, without a voice, without a physical presence, without any social or even human recognition, only and sporadically remembered by the isolated voices of more informed segments of society. This dramatic picture only goes to reaffirm the immense and urgent social responsibility corresponding to the national States in this process, as well as that of the diverse sectors of society committed to democracy, human rights, environmental conservation, and the cultural and immaterial heritage of humanity. It is the State’s duty to assign substantial efforts aimed at the protection of Indigenous peoples in isolation to satisfy their essential needs and implement public policies and legal measures that reaffirm their constitutional and ethnic rights and their specific and differentiated protection.

By: Gilberto Azanha, Centro de Trabalho Indigenista, e-mail: gilberto.azanha@trabalhoindigenista.org.br , and Sydney Possuelo, Coordenação de Índios Isolados of the Fundação Nacional do Índio (FUNAI).

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- Colombia: The Nukak, the last contacted nomadic people

The Nukak are a nomadic people from the Colombian Amazon, officially contacted in 1988. The present population is estimated at 390 people, distributed among 13 local groups, located in the inter-fluvial area between the Middle Guaviare and the High Inírida. Nukak as a tongue is understood by the Kakua or Bara from the Colombian Vaupes and both are classified as part of the Maku-Pinave linguistic family.

According to Nukak oral tradition, and ethnographic and linguistic information, they are a branch of the Kakua that emigrated to the North. One of the reasons for this displacement to their present territory was to evade the rubber merchants who used the indigenous peoples as slave labour at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, the Nukak’s sophisticated knowledge and management of the fauna and flora of the zone point to an earlier occupation.

In the twentieth century, the Nukak remained isolated from their native territorial neighbours and agents of national society for over 50 years, among other reasons because they were afraid of alleged cannibalism by white people and other natives. In 1965 a group from the western sector attempted to peacefully approach a peasant. Unfortunately this episode ended in a confrontation leading to the death of several Nukak and the capturing of a couple. Following this ill-fated event, they isolated themselves in the forest, but only eight years later, in 1974, the groups from the eastern sector established contacts with the North American missionaries from the New Tribes Mission. In 1982, the contacts were permanent and in 1985 they already had a work station inside the territory.

During the eighties, in the areas bordering the northwest frontier of the Nukak territory the rhythm of colonization increased due to the favourable price of the coca leaf. This illegal crop attracted waves of peasants, trades-people and adventurers, seeking an opportunity to improve their living conditions. Thus, encounters with the peasants became increasingly inevitable because of the overlapping of the areas that both groups occupied. In this context and following the kidnapping of a white child by a Nukak group in 1987, the first flu epidemic and the appearance for the first time of a group in Calamar – a peasant village in the Guaviare – in April that same year, all the local groups gradually started visiting the colonized areas.

During the first five years after mass contact, the Nukak lost close on 40 per cent of their population as a result of respiratory diseases that started as flu. The age groups showing the greatest number of deaths were those over forty and under five years of age, thus leaving a large number of orphans. In fact, close on 30 children and young people were adopted by the peasants and some women also married peasants. All this led to an interruption in the transmission of their technical and ritual knowledge and a loss of confidence in their Chamanic practices.

Relations with the peasants were established quite quickly by the groups in the western sector occupying the oldest and most densely settled area, while for the groups in the less settled eastern sector where they had the support of the missionaries, the process was slower. At the mission station the Nukak found medical care, they were supplied with metal tools and seeds and had interlocutors to get to know the world of the white people. This generated a centripetal effect and attenuated the motivation to migrate to settled areas. When the Missionaries’ work station was abandoned in 1996 for public policy motives, this accelerated the expansion of the effects of contacts among the western sector groups.

Institutional action initiated to care for the Nukak has mainly been concentrated on health matters, on guaranteeing legal recognition of their territory and on protecting their rights as Indigenous people. However the scope of these initiatives and legal actions has been limited, given the extension of the area they occupy, the mobility and dispersion of the population, discontinuity due to administrative problems characterized by a lack of consensus in defining the type of intervention and limitations on circulation in the area, imposed by the self-named Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – FARC). This organization is disputing control of the area with the paramilitary groups operating in the zone. Additionally the Nukak territory is surrounded by close on 15,000 peasants and located in one of the most dynamic agricultural frontiers of the Amazon.

Today, 16 years after the Colombian Government recognized the existence of the Nukak, they are now becoming sedentary and only one of the local groups in the eastern sector of the territory still maintains its nomadic treks through the forest in a permanent way. Most of them have built houses and have cultivated plots of land near the settled areas of their territory, mainly occupied by peasants who grow coca leaves. This activity is also a main source of employment for the male Nukak population and has contributed to displace activities such as hunting and gathering and has also facilitated the incorporation of agro-industrial food. Regarding health, the causes of morbidity have widened to include malnutrition and venereal diseases and the birth rate does not enable them to recover their population, as one out of two children dies before the age of five. It is also known that the groups in the western sector have problems with alcoholism, they have been involved in conflicts with firearms and at least three young men were involved with the FARC. Contrasting with this, recently celebrity magazines and programmes have devoted space to a Nukak top model, who probably had been adopted by the peasants.

In the meanwhile, institutional meetings still continue on the type of suitable intervention and the Nukak’s capacity to face changes or to manage the budget that the State annually assigns to the populations in the Indigenous reserves of Colombia (transfer resources). Although six years ago it was concluded that the management of such resources belonging to the Nukak warranted a consultation with all the leaders of the local groups and commissions were set up for this purpose, they did not have any continuity. Today these resources cover the budgetary validity of eight years (1996-2004) and amount to over 400 million pesos, which cannot be executed until the Nukak decide on what they want to invest in.

Getting to know the opinion of the Nukak regarding their learning to live with the peasants and in general with the white man’s world is a pressing task, as well as designing with them the strategies required to improve their living conditions. However, getting to know what the Nukak think or implementing any type of programme with them will not be feasible until there is the institutional will to consult them and respect their decisions. Also needed is the comprehension of the actors in the armed conflict to allow implementation of the actions all this requires. Paradoxically, this means to allow the Nukak to be contacted, that is to say, to establish a dialogue with them on their territory.

By: Dany Mahecha Rubio, e-mail: danyma@yahoo.com

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- Ecuador: The Huaorani People of the Amazonia, self-isolation and forced contact

Huaorani culture and society is shaped by their will to self-isolation. Very little is known about their past, except that they have for centuries constituted nomadic and autarkic enclaves fiercely refusing contact, trade and exchange with their powerful neighbours, be they indigenous or white-mestizo colonists. Ever since their tragic encounter with North American missionaries in 1956, the Huaorani have held a special place in journalistic and popular imagination as "Ecuador's last savages". Despite the "civilizing" efforts of missionaries, they have largely retained their distinctive way of understanding the world. Relations with outsiders, seen as murderous enemies, are fraught with hostility and fear; there seems to be little space for communication and exchange, other than complete avoidance or the threat to 'spear-kill'.

For the last sixty years, Huaorani history has unfolded in response to oil development, although it is only recently (in 1994) that oil has been commercially extracted from their land. In 1969, a decade after having "pacified" the Huaorani, the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) received government authorisation to create a protection zone around its mission. The 'Protectorate' (66,570 hectares, or 169,088 acres) represented one tenth of the traditional territory. By the early 1980s, five-sixth of the population had been called to live in the Protectorate. On April 1990, the Huaorani were granted the largest indigenous territory in Ecuador (679,130 hectares, or 1,098,000 acres). It is contiguous with the Yasuní National Park (982,300 hectares, or 2,495,000 acres), and includes the former Protectorate. The population (around 1,700) is now distributed in thirty or so semi-permanent settlements organised around a primary school, except for one, or possibly two, small groups that cling to autarky, and hide in the remote forested areas of the Pastaza province, along the international border separating Peru from Ecuador.

The non-contacted Huaorani, known as the Tagaeri and the Taromenani, comprise between thirty and eighty people. The Tagaeri used to live in the Tiputini region, which became the heart of the southern oil fields in the early 1980s. The Tagaeri decided to separate permanently from the main Huaorani population when the SIL mission caused a major population displacement by actively encouraging the eastern groups to come and live under SIL authority within the Protectorate. Relatives of the Tagaeri who now live in the Protectorate say that the latter’s decision was partly due to intra-tribal feuding (they did not want to live in the territory of their enemies), and partly to their straight refusal to integrate; they did not wish to receive "the benefits" of civilisation. In other words, it was their political decision to live in isolation.

During the next thirty years, many raiding and killing episodes marred the interactions between Tagaeri and outsiders. Famous for their fierceness, the Tagaeri have ‘spear killed’ oil workers, missionaries, and others whom they saw as intruders. Most famously, they killed an Archbishop from the Capuchin Mission and a Colombian nun from the Laurita mission in July 1987. And their people have been wounded and killed as well. In the early 1990s, various informants told me that military helicopters had thrown rockets on Tagaeri longhouses, and that Tagaeri dwellings had been burnt down by company security guards. There was once a plan to exterminate them all. And then the hope, especially amongst missionaries, that they would finally surrender and accept 'pacification'. Oil exploration in the block where the Archbishop and the nun had been found dead was suspended, and the government promised to grant protection to the non-contacted Huaorani who kept fleeing away from the blocks operated by PetroCanada, Texaco, PetroBras, Shell, and Elf Aquitaine. The implicit policy, though, was to push them further to the south, in the hope that they would cross the border with Peru, and cease to be a national problem.

We now know that there were other indigenous groups refusing contact on the Peruvian side, where oil extraction and colonization has been far more intensive than in Ecuador. They too have gradually come to take refuge in the border area, at the confluence of the Curaray and Tiguino Rivers. The Huaorani mentioned the Taromenani (literally the giant people living at the end of the path) to me several times, but the descriptions of these ‘similar but different’ people were so extraordinary that I assimilated them to the vast category of fantastic beings that are said to people the forest.

These non-contacted groups, whatever their provenance and trajectory, all live like refugees in their own lands, by choice. They no longer prepare clearings, but plant root crops and maize under the canopy to avoid being spotted by helicopters. They cook late at night, so that the smoke rising from their hearths does not give them away. They are on the move at all times, endlessly searching for quieter hunting spots, and better hiding places. According to my Huaorani friends, they hate the noise of machines and engines, and choose to flee to the same places where the monkeys and the peccaries flee.

These self-isolated groups have suffered a great deal because of the loss of their territories, the invasion of oil companies, and the continuous encroachment of poachers, loggers, drug traffickers, tourist companies, and other adventurers. They also fear the 'pacified', ‘Christian’ Huaorani, who dream to ‘civilize’ them. They too have become enemy outsiders. These fears are not unfounded. More than once, I heard young Huaorani men boast that they will attempt to pacify the Tagaeri. “Ingesting rice and sugar like us”, they told me, “the Tagaeri will become wholly tame and gentle, like toddlers”. Some added that this would greatly please ‘the company’ (the term they use to describe the vast and complex consortium of companies, subsidiaries, contractors, and subcontractors that work in partnership with PetroEcuador), which, in return, will behave generously towards them, by offering them all the cash and all the goods they ask for.

Non-contacted groups are not a threat to any one, except to intruders; they only want to be left alone. As I argued some years ago, we need to invent a new human right for all the groups still hiding in the Amazon forest: the right of no-contact.

In continuation, let me illustrate the predicament of these non-contacted groups, and the persecution to which they are subjected, with two stories.

The ultimate modern dream: film the first contact. In the Spring of 1995, I was contacted by a Californian TV company which was developing a new project entitled "The Tagaeri: the Last of the Free People." This series of three programmes proposed to ‘document’ the first contact between the Tagaeri and the 'botanist' Loren Miller (the man who patented the plant from which Northwest Amazon Indians make the hallucinogenic locally known as ayahuasca or yagé). According to the script, the first episode would show how Christian Huaorani contacted their savage brothers, and managed to convince them of the virtues of western civilization, with the help of the army. The second episode would focus on the encounter between the chief Tagae and Loren Miller, the former sharing his knowledge of medicinal plants with the latter. The third part would centre on the western botanist "telling the world of the great possibilities of scientific research and the potentialities of Tagaeri land for ecotourism”. The TV company, which was seeking the support of CNN and the National Geographic for this project, had to back off in the face of a wave of protests from the indigenous peoples organisations, COICA, and various other indigenous rights organisations. They graciously sent a message expressing their "agreement with the many enlightened individuals who expressed concern and disagreement with our project”. They added: “We ask that you respect the right of isolation, of privacy and of non-contact of the Tagaeri population of the Ecuadorian Amazon. The Tagaeri are a community that live with the natural jungle and they made the choice not to integrate the western civilization. Please respect their decision.” But the project was too tantalising, and, in the following years, various contacts were attempted by tourist companies and/ or TV crews. For instance, one Belgian tourist guide, a former mercenary in the French Legion, guided ‘survival expeditions’ in Tagaeri land. A British student expedition managed to provoke a group of non-contacted Indians (possibly Tagaeri). A member of the expedition got speared in the thigh; the whole episode got filmed, and was heroically shown on Channel 4 in 1997.

Christian Huaorani slaughter savage Huaorani. In May 2003, around 15 non-contacted Indians identified by the press as Taromenani were speared to death by nine Huaorani ‘warriors’. The army recovered twelve bodies (nine women and three children) from the raided longhouse. A spokesperson for the army declared that: “the patrol will not interfere with the customs or ancestral sanctioning procedures of the Huaorani, the armed forces are very respectful in this sense.” Everyone in Ecuador became an expert in ancestral customary law or Huaorani culture, and avidly debated the issue. Why they had done this, what it meant for the nation, what should be done about such fratricide, and so forth. The ‘Ecuadorian Network for Legal Anthropology’ was formed to analyse the Tagaeri-Taromenani-Huaorani conflict from a legal perspective, and propose a reform of the Ecuadorian judiciary system in a way that would accommodate different legal systems, including Huaorani revenge killing. The President of the tribal organisation (ONHAE) and other Huoarani representatives were eventually asked to comment on the slaughter. They emphasised the increased level of interference from illegal traders and loggers in Huaorani territory. On the 25th of June, the national press reported that ONHAE had decided to forgive the nine warriors, who had been involved in a killing raid for the first time, and had sworn to renounce violence and not seek revenge in case the Taromenani decided to strike back. Young Huaorani would phone me day and night during this stressful period to keep me informed of the developments. I kept asking them whether they (or any one else) had spoken to the warriors, but it seems that no one was interested in knowing what they had to say about the whole affair. Could they explain what had happened? Despite the distance, I could perceive some of the internal and external reasons that had pushed these men to kill. First the Babeiri had been in conflict with the Tagaeri for several decades. The hostilities were rekindled when PetroCanada relocated the former in the traditional territory of the latter, where they were confronted to all the ills of the frontier culture – alcohol, prostitution, dependency on alms, and so forth. Living along the oil road, the Babeiri were constantly solicited by loggers and traders of various sorts. The Babeiri raided the Tagaeri for a wife in 1993, as a result of which they lost a young man, wounded by retaliating Tagaeri. In November 2002, a logger’s boat overloaded with illegal timber collided with a Huaorani dug-out canoe. Several Huaorani were killed. All these factors somehow converged in giving the nine men the determination to carry out the raid. It was reported that the ‘warriors’ comprised the father of a woman killed in the November 2002 accident, and the brother and the brother-in-law of a man killed in the same accident. Without the personal accounts of the warriors themselves, all inference is open to debate. However, it is clear that there is a direct relation between increased extractive activities and the rise of violent conflict between ‘pacified’ and ‘non-contacted’ Huaorani. It would be wrong to blame violence simply on tribal vengeance and savagery, as so many Ecuadorian and other commentators have done.

By: Laura Rival, University of Oxford, e-mail: laura.rival@anthropology.oxford.ac.uk

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- Paraguay: The last Ayoreo in voluntary isolation

The Ayoreo live in a zone of their ancestral territory called Amotocodie. Modern maps show it as an extensive area of virgin forest with the geographic coordinates 21º 07’ S and 60º 08’W marking its centre, some 50 km to the south of Cerro Leon. They amount to some 50 people, subdivided into various groups. They approach but rarely, a watering place on some farm to drink water and perhaps a farm worker may have seen them from afar. Sometimes, white hunters find their trail in the forest or holes in trees where they have harvested honey. In 1998 a group of six warriors attacked a farm as a warning. On 3 March 2004, one of the groups comprising 17 people came into contact with the surrounding society and settled on the border of their ancestral habitat. The 2002 Indigenous Census of Paraguay does not record them because they cannot be interviewed, because they are invisible.

Throughout the last sixty years all the other members of their people, the Ayoreo from the Bolivian and Paraguayan Chaco, have been forcibly removed from their enormous habitat by missionaries and now survive precariously on the outskirts of modern society, slowly realising that they have been cheated, that they were deprived of the forest where they lived in harmony – and the forest has been deprived of them. The Ayoreo who still continue to live in the forest are some of the last hunters and gatherers of the Latin American continent who have not been contacted and who do not seek contact with modern and enveloping society.

They are nomads in their ancestral territory: they constantly walk through the still large extensions of untouched forest. Their walks are guided by an intimate knowledge of the places and the cycles of the Chaco’s fruits and resources. The most decisive resource is water, sometimes abundant in certain places and sometimes extremely scarce in others and depending on the seasons. Other resources are the flesh of animals: they know where to find turtles or wild pigs or armadillos or the flag bear; they know where they can find fruit such as the heart of palm. They know where to find honey. During the rainy season during their walks, they cultivate in appropriate areas. The forest provides everything. Wise self-control of demographic growth, together with constant migration guarantee the continuity of the world in which they live, preventing overuse, deterioration and depletion of their resources.

In this way, no signs of environmental deterioration are apparent as a consequence of their presence. Rather we must acknowledge the contrary: without them something would be lacking in the forest, something related with their vitality and the validity of what we call biodiversity. This suggests that basically, not only them, but all human beings could have had a function in the world’s ecosystems, just as every plant and animal has. Perhaps our absence, the fact that we have separated from this way of living harmoniously with the world, has made it weaker. We are missing from our ecosystems. Perhaps finally we humans are not the enemies of nature and the earth, but necessary…if we were to accomplish our function.

The forest Ayoreo still accomplish it. We know from the explanation of the groups or families that were removed or who left the forest to join our modern civilization in our times, in 1986, 1999, 2004, that they define it as a function of mutual protection: the forest protects us, we protect the forest. Humankind as protector of the earth.

Their way of cultivating the land during the rainy season is very expressive of their relationship with the forest and with nature: with the first rains they sow the seeds they have been storing of pumpkin, corn, water melon and beans in natural sandy clearings in the middle of the forest. They barely prepare the soil. Then they continue with their walking and let nature take over. They come back to harvest. According to their concept one has to intervene as little as possible in the workings of nature, just some minimum support, the support to allow it to do better what it does anyway.

They do not consider themselves to be the owners of the world like we modern people who have left our forests centuries or millennia ago, do. According to them, the world is not at the disposal of humans to do anything they want with. On the contrary, the Ayoreo, instead of placing themselves above the world, feel themselves to be a part of it, an integrating and necessary part. This is not only seen from their posture and attitude in their daily lives. This relationship with the world is also expressed in their social structure in a profoundly spiritual way: in parallel with family ties, the Ayoreo on birth and with their surname belong to one of seven “clans,” each clan including a part of all the phenomena existing in the world. For instance in this way an Ayoreo from the Etacore clan becomes a relative for example of the rattlesnake, of the water falling in a storm, of the rope, of the dry season, of the red colour of blood, of the moon when it can be seen during the daytime, of the totitabia bird, etc. All the Ayoreo as a whole are related to everything that exists in the world, and each one, according to his/her surname, lives with the mission of looking after his/her world phenomenon “relatives” in a very special way.

The way they live in harmony with the world is comparable to a couple living in harmony in the best sense: aware of diversity and its importance, conscious of mutual interdependency, knowing that one without the other could not be happy, would have no future, and could not live.

This is part of what the forest Ayoreo, with their cultural, spontaneous and natural way of being, contribute to the world of today: a different and diverse way of being, that not only sustains the environmental integrity of the Chaco forest where they live but also sustains a diverse conscience and presence that, without them, the world would be lacking today.

Presumably they are not aware of their importance to us. When we finally perceive it, we start understanding the significance of their existence, not only for themselves and their environmental habitat, but also for us and our future. Because finally, their attitudes and those communicated by their way of living are those that should inspire our search for new ways of life and of harmonious living if as humanity we want to have a future.

Although they may not know of their importance for humanity, they certainly must feel its weight through their solitude in carrying out their function of protecting the world. They may feel it concretely and in daily things, when heavy machinery disturbs the silence of their territory to fell trees for cattle ranches and to make new entries to take precious wood, and when they feel how the consistence of the world of which they are a part is eroded and weakened.

They still have to feel that our strength is added to theirs, that we have taken up our mission again of protecting their world and ours, everybody’s world.

By: Benno Glauser, “Iniciativa Amotocodie”, e-mail: coordina@iniciativa-amotocodie.org

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- Peru: Policy development for indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation

In 1990, the Peruvian state established the Kugapakori/Nahua Reserve to protect the lives, rights and territories of indigenous peoples in South East Peru avoiding, or strictly limiting their contact with national society. Despite safeguarding these territories on paper, since its creation the Reserve has been continually threatened by illegal logging and two years ago it was opened up for extraction of natural gas as part of the Camisea Gas Project (See “Camisea gas project undermines the rights of indigenous peoples”, WRM bulletin No. 62, September 2002). In the face of these threats, some of its inhabitants who had established contact with outsiders began to voice their own opinions about the Reserve and its inability to protect their territories and rights.

To address these challenges, a group of Peruvian NGOs and Indigenous Federations formed a committee to defend and strengthen the Reserve both legally and on the ground. It was clear to the Committee that in its current form the Reserve was neither working to prevent exploitation by outsiders nor meeting the needs of its inhabitants. The challenge was how to take into account the diverse needs and interests of all its inhabitants, including those avoiding all contact, and translate these into legal concepts and practical recommendations. The hope was that the proposals would serve as a model for developing legislation and policies to protect the rights of indigenous peoples living in isolation not only within the Kugapakori/Nahua Reserve but throughout Peru.

After 18 months of fieldwork and legal analysis the work of the Committee is now nearing completion and in November 2004 the proposals will be presented to senior representatives of the Peruvian state. This article briefly reviews the challenges faced by the Committee and the ways by which the project has sought to overcome them. It is hoped that the processes, methodologies and terms of reference developed through this process can serve other institutions hoping to develop policies to support indigenous peoples in isolation in Latin America and beyond.

Until 1984 the Nahua, a Panoan speaking indigenous people, lived in the headwaters of the Purus, Manu and Mishagua basins in South East Peru, avoiding all direct contact with outsiders and attacking anyone entering their territory. In April 1984, this isolation ended when four Nahua were captured by loggers and taken to Sepahua, the local town, before being sent back to their villages. A year later over half the Nahua had died from colds and other respiratory diseases introduced by this first contact, and loggers had taken advantage of their weakness and overrun their territory.

In 1990, the Peruvian state established the Kugapakori/Nahua State Reserve to protect indigenous peoples in the region still avoiding all direct contact with outsiders, or those like the Nahua who had only recently established this contact. However, in practice the Reserve consistently failed to protect the territories and rights of its inhabitants and since its establishment has been invaded by loggers, overlapped with illegal forestry concessions and opened up for the extraction of natural gas. This has led to a variety of impacts ranging from cases of forced contact and subsequent epidemics, invasions of indigenous territories by loggers and the relocation of some of its inhabitants who felt threatened by the activities of the Camisea gas project (See, http://www.ecoportal.net/content/view/full/31947 for AIDESEP’s denunciation of the forced relocation of Machiguenga living in Shiateni).

In 2001 the Nahua, who were campaigning against an invasion of loggers demanded that their territory be recognised in a communal land title and excluded from the Reserve feeling that it would offer them greater legal protection. This presented a major challenge; how to support the legitimate claim of the Nahua without undermining the legal status of the Reserve and therefore the territories of its other inhabitants.

In 2002 Shinai Serjali, a Peruvian NGO that was helping the Nahua in their struggle with the loggers, began to consult a wide range of state and civil society institutions involved with the Reserve for legal and practical solutions to address its problems. An initial workshop in 2002 identified various problems: the lack of any clear legislation for State Reserves in Peru, confusion over its administration and boundaries, the lack of local awareness of its rules and boundaries and the absence of any efficient system of control (a full report from this workshop is available in English at http://www.serjali.org/en/projects/workshop/ ). After the workshop, a group comprising six NGO’s and indigenous federations continued to discuss the situation and the result was the formation of the Committee for the Defense of the Reserve in 2003. Its objective was to strengthen the Reserve and the territorial security of its inhabitants and to propose policies and recommendations that were based on the perspectives and priorities of its inhabitants rather than those of outside institutions. The Committee was supported by AIDESEP, the national indigenous peoples organization, and its members include: Shinai Serjali, Racimos de Ungurahui, COMARU (Machiguenga Council for the Lower Urubamba), IBC (Institute of the Common Good), CEDIA (Centre for the Development of Amazonian Indigenous People) and APRODEH (Association for the Promotion of Human Rights).

The main challenge of this project was how to take into account the diverse needs and interests of all the indigenous peoples living within the Reserve. In 2002 there were at least 9 known communities corresponding to 3 different ethnic groups, each of whom had different relations with, and attitudes towards, national society. Only some of these groups like the Nahua were interacting directly with external individuals or institutions, while others were preferring to avoid such contact altogether. In addition, many of its inhabitants spoke minimal or no Spanish and had limited or no understanding of concepts such as the State, the law, property, let alone the Reserve.

To cope with these difficulties three field teams were formed whose task was to work for extended periods with only those communities who already had a sustained contact with outsiders. All field teams were made up of individuals who had previous field experience with these communities, spoke their language and had established relationships of trust with them. During 12 months of fieldwork, the teams used sketch maps and GPS equipment to help the communities make geo-referenced maps of their territories illustrating its cultural, historical and practical importance to them as well as the issues threatening its integrity The maps also illustrated their knowledge about the location and movements of peoples living in the Reserve who were avoiding all contact with outsiders.

In addition, the field teams listened to the major concerns and priorities of these communities, that ranged from invasions of loggers, disease transmission, exploitation by school teachers and the impact of the Camisea gas project. In many cases the teams introduced the concept of the Reserve, discussed how it was designed to protect their rights and to what extent it was working. A fourth field team worked for three months with the titled Machiguenga communities who border the Reserve helping them to map their resource and territory use within the Reserve and their attitudes and knowledge towards it and its inhabitants to ensure that their rights were also respected in the development of any proposals. The teams worked with the Nahua, the Nanti of the River Camisea, the Machiguenga of the River Paquiria and the Machiguenga communities bordering the Reserve.

On the basis of these concerns, a specialist lawyer in indigenous rights began to develop a legal proposal that would best reflect the problems of the Reserve and the concerns of its inhabitants. The proposal is based on the highest standards of human and indigenous rights at an international level and applies to all five State Reserves in Peru. The proposal establishes intangibility for the Reserves and prohibits all extractive industries within them as well as any efforts to contact peoples in voluntary isolation. It establishes definitions of indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation and initial contact, contingency plans in case of unwanted contact or a medical emergency, the means for creating new Reserves for peoples who currently live outside of them and severe sanctions for people or institutions who breach the law. The draft proposal was presented to the National Indigenous Federation (AIDESEP) and its regional bases (FENEMAD, ORAU, ORAI and COMARU) who were developing a similar proposal. The two proposals were merged and modified in consultation with all of AIDESEP’s regional and local federations.

One of the Committee’s objectives was also the development of recommendations that could be applied to the specific problems of the Kugapakori/Nahua Reserve. In order to do this, the key problems and priorities of the Reserve’s inhabitants were circulated amongst a larger group of people including local Indigenous representatives, members of NGOs working in the area or in neighbouring regions and representatives of state institutions responsible for forestry, indigenous peoples and human rights. The group worked to develop specific recommendations to deal with a variety of complex problems ranging from illegal logging, the activities of the Camisea Gas project, the transmission of introduced diseases to peoples with minimal or no natural resistance, the incursion of settlers and the efforts of some Missionaries to forcibly contact some of the peoples avoiding all contact.

In November 2004, the results of the fieldwork and the legal proposal will be presented to senior representatives of the Peruvian Government. The presentation is the first step in the process of their acceptance and ratification by the State. It is hoped that key government ministers and other representatives will accept the proposals as an informed and thorough initiative and commit to promoting their implementation both in the law and on the ground.

By: Conrad Feather, Shinai Serjali, e-mail: conrad@serjali.org . For more information on the work to defend the Nahua/Kugapakori Reserve and its indigenous peoples please visit http://www.serjali.org or email serjali@serjali.org