Following their first real contact in 1987, 45 Zo’é died from epidemics of flu, malaria and respiratory diseases transmitted by the missionaries. They then built a mission station only several days’ walk from the Indians’ villages. Between 19 the missionaries flew over the Zo’é’s villages dropping gifts. Members of the New Tribes Mission, a fundamentalist missionary organisation based in the US, carried out a clandestine mission to make contact with the Zo’é of Brazil to convert them to Christianity. The missionaries called, ‘Come out! Come out!’ When I heard the motor-boat’s engine running, I said to myself, ‘What’s happening? A motor-boat! People are coming!’ When we saw them, we went and hid deeper in the undergrowth. The man, known as Hipa, told a Survival researcher about first contact: ‘I was eating peanuts when I heard the missionaries coming in a motor-boat. They succeeded in making contact with four people: one man and three women. In Peru, just a few years ago, evangelical Protestant missionaries built a village in one of the remotest parts of the Peruvian Amazon with the aim of making contact with an uncontacted tribe living in that region. Often believing that the tribes are ‘primitive’ and living pitiful lives ‘in the dark’, the missionaries’ ultimate aim is to convert them to Christianity – at whatever cost to the tribal peoples’ own health and wishes. Half of my people died.’ MissionariesĬhristian missionaries, who have been making first contact with tribes for five hundred years, are still trying to do so today. One of the Murunahua survivors, Jorge, who lost an eye during first contact, told a Survival researcher, ‘The disease came when the loggers made contact with us, although we didn’t know what a cold was then. In Peru, more than 50% of the previously-uncontacted Nahua tribe were wiped out following oil exploration on their land in the early 1980s, and the same tragedy engulfed the Murunahua in the mid-1990s after being forcibly contacted by illegal mahogany loggers. Introduced diseases are the biggest killer of isolated tribal people, who have not developed immunity to viruses such as influenza, measles and chicken pox that most other societies have been in contact with for hundreds of years. He and his small band of survivors now live alone in a fragment of forest – all that remains of their land, and their people. One of the men, Pupak, has lead shot still buried in his back, and mimes the gunmen who pursued him on horseback. They are the last known survivors of their people and live in Rondônia state, western Brazil. © Fiona Watson/Survival The Akuntsu are a tiny Amazonian tribe of just five individuals. But when agents of Brazil’s Indian affairs department FUNAI contacted them in 1995, they found that the cattle ranchers who had taken over the Indians’ land had massacred almost all the tribe, and bulldozed their houses to try to cover up the massacre. No-one speaks their language, so the precise details of what happened to them may never be known. Their fate is all the more tragic for being so recent. Of all the tribal peoples wiped out for standing in the way of ‘progress’, few are as poignant as the Akuntsu. Cattle ranchersĬattle ranching has destroyed nearly all the Akuntsu’s land. A vast array of powerful forces are ranged against them. Uncontacted tribes are the most vulnerable peoples on earth. Uncontacted tribes: the threats Awá men travel down a road cut by loggers, Brazil. © Uirá Garcia/Survival
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