OUR VIEWPOINT

- The Indigenous Peoples’ Right to live in Voluntary Isolation

In a world characterized by information, there are issues that have been made so invisible that the great majority of people do not know that they exist. This is the case of the Indigenous Peoples living in voluntary isolation. Most are not even aware that some of these peoples have not yet been contacted by the predominating society and in other cases, have resisted integrating it in spite – or as a result of – having been contacted.

To this ignorance is added a second one: that the very existence of these peoples is seriously threatened by the destructive advance of “development.” Roads penetrating into the forests to extract timber, oil, minerals or to promote land settlement for agriculture and cattle-raising, can be labelled “roads of death” for these peoples. They bring unknown diseases their bodies are unready for, the destruction of the forests that provide for their livelihoods, pollution of the waters that they drink, where they bathe and fish, confrontations with those who intend to take over their territory, the death of their millenary cultures.

To understand the problem we need to divest ourselves of our “truths” and try to put ourselves in their place. All of us live in territories with very precise limits. They do too. All of us are jealous custodians of our frontiers when faced with potential or real external aggression. They are too. All of us have our feeling of nationality, with a specific language, culture and knowledge. They have too.

What would we do if a group of armed foreigners entered our territory without our authorization? The same as they do: we would resist in every possible way, including armed resistance. However while we would be considered to be “heroic patriots” they are classified as “savages.” Why is this? Because we are the ones to describe resistance.

It is important to emphasize that these peoples were never asked if they wanted to be Brazilians or Ecuadorians or Peruvians or Congolese or Cameroonian or Indonesian or Malaysian. Each government (colonial or national) simply drew up a map and determined that all the territories included within its frontiers “belong” to the corresponding country or colony. No matter that these peoples had been living on these territories before the very creation of national states or foreign colonization. They were in fact “nationalized.”

Again the question: what would we do if we had to face a similar situation? Would we accept the imposed change of nationality or would we resist it? Surely we would do everything possible to continue being what we are and what we want to be.

The difference is that these peoples are in total inferiority of conditions to resist the devastating advance of predominant society. For this reason, all of us who believe in justice have the obligation to provide them, under many forms, with the support that they need – although they do not ask for it – to defend their rights and to stop the silent and invisible genocide they are being subjected to.

In this respect, the first thing we can do is inform the world that they exist, as an initial step towards the objective of gathering determination in defence of their right to live in their territories in the way they themselves decide, including the right to remain outside a society they have no wish to belong to.

In addition to this, we must do everything possible to protect their territories from outside invasion linked to activities such as logging, mining, oil exploitation and settlement. In the first place, this implies legal recognition of their rights by the State and strict compliance with legal provisions vis-à-vis possible non-authorized invasion. It also implies that the State explicitly excludes these territories from its development programmes.

In fact, we should not be surprised that there are peoples who do not want to integrate a society such as the one we live in, that thrusts millions of people into poverty and hunger and that destroys everything it touches (climate, forests, grasslands, wetlands, soil, air). These peoples are neither poor nor ignorant. They are different and are showing enormous wisdom in wanting to maintain their isolation. In the contemporary world where so many people dream of living on an idyllic tropical island, they are integrating something very similar. But it is increasingly difficult for them to defend themselves from external aggression. Let us help them to live on their own island until the day comes when they freely decide to integrate the predominant society – if ever they decide to do so.

Ricardo Carrere

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When the first ‘conquistadores’ travelled down the Amazon in the 16th century, they found populous settlements, hierarchical chiefdoms and complex agricultural systems all along the main river. The ‘Indians’, they reported, raised turtles in ponded freshwater lagoons, had vast stores of dried fish, made sophisticated glazed pottery, and had huge jars, each one capable of holding a hundred gallons. They also noted these peoples had flotillas of canoes and traded up into the Andes and down to the mouth of the great river. Their numerous warriors carried wooden warclubs and thick leather shields made of the skins of crocodiles and manatees. Behind the large settlements, they noted ‘many roads that entered into the interior of the land, very fine highways’ some so broad they likened them to a royal highway in Spain. These stories were later discounted as the puff of promoters trying to magnify the importance of their ‘discoveries’, for since the late 18th century the banks of the Amazon have been almost entirely depopulated. During the 20th century the archetypal Amazonians were ‘hidden tribes’, groups of hunters, gatherers and shifting cultivators, who lived isolated in the headwaters of the main rivers, eschewing contact with the national society.

With the benefit of hindsight and new insights from history and archaeology, we can now see that these two perceptions of Amazonia are strangely and tragically related. Archaeology now teaches us that lowland Amazonia, even in areas of poor soil and blackwater like the Upper Xingu, was indeed once quite heavily settled. Regional trade and dynamic synergies between Amazonian peoples had led to the sub-continent being densely peopled by widely differentiated but inter-related groups, who specialised in local skills to work and use their specific environments in diverse and subtle ways.

The onslaught of western societies brought much of this complexity to an end. Warfare, conquest, religious missions and the scourge of old world diseases reduced populations to less than a tenth of the pre-Colombian levels. Slave raids, both by European soldiery and by other indigenous groups, who traded the ‘red gold’ of enslaved ‘Indians’ for the products of western industries, stripped the lower rivers bare of any remnant groups. Raiding, slaving and competition for trading opportunities with the whites created turmoil in the headwaters. The myth of the empty Amazon became a reality, as any survivors moved inland and upriver to avoid these depredations.

In the late 19th century, overseas markets and advances in technology created new possibilities of exploitation. In particular, the discovery of the process of vulcanisation, led to a global trade in a non-timber forest product, rubber, which could now be hardened for industrial use. The onerous task of bleeding latex, yoked to global trade, yielded fortunes for entrepreneurs prepared to penetrate the headwaters, enslave local tribes and force them to work the scattered stands of rubber trees. International capital flooded in to make the most of these opportunities. Tens of thousands of indigenous people perished from the renewal of slaving, the torching of settlements, the starvation of survivors, the forced labour and diseases. The process also led to further waves of surviving indigenous peoples fleeing deeper into the forests, seeking to break off contact with a changing world that brought them death and cultural degradation.

Of course, not all the indigenous peoples in the Amazonian headwaters are refugees escaping the brutalities of contact, but the impact of the outside world on even the remotest headwaters is often underestimated. For many indigenous peoples in the Amazon and also in other parts of the world, the search for isolation has been an informed choice – the logical response of peoples who have realised that contact with the outside world brings them ruin not benefits. Life in the forests without trade may have its hardships, not just because the absence of the metal goods like axes, machetes, fishhooks and cooking pots makes subsistence harder work, but also because customary trade, barter and exchange between indigenous peoples were also once ways of making life more varied and richer. But it is these peoples choice.

21st century industrial societies are now being drawn into the last reaches of the Amazon, where these indigenous peoples now live in voluntary isolation, for other globally traded resources – not slaves or rubber this time, but timber, oil, gas and minerals. If we deplore the horrors of death and destruction that ineluctably accompanied previous penetrations of the Amazon, can we now show that modern industrial society is more civilised? Can we respect the choice of other societies to avoid contact and leave them in their homelands undisturbed until, perhaps, some future time when they themselves decide on the risky venture of contacting a world that they have learned by bitter experience is not safe to interact with? If we can’t, then it is almost certain that future generations will condemn us for the same avarice, indifference, selfishness and greed, for which we today condemn the conquistadores and the rubber barons.

Marcus Colchester, Forest Peoples Programme.