Knowing and protecting someone using only the traces they leave along the way – bows, arrows, artifacts, food traces and items from temporary camps. This is how indigenists work in defense of peoples in voluntary isolation, such as Bruno Pereira, who headed the General Coordination of Isolated and Recent Contact Indians, of the National Foundation of Indigenous Peoples (Funai), and was killed in June 2022, in an ambush that also claimed the life of British journalist Dom Phillips, correspondent for The Guardian. Both paid the price for denouncing socio-environmental crimes committed in the Amazon. A year after the two were murdered, questions remain for many people about the communities they sought to protect. Isolated peoples are in greater numbers in Brazil than anywhere else in the world, in the Indigenous Land (TI) Vale do Javari, where other indigenous groups also live, including some of recent contact. Isolation is, in general, a choice of these communities. They prefer to keep their distance from non-indigenous people, and even from other ethnic groups, for several reasons. One of the main reasons is the refusal to maintain a bridge with the State and to exist in accordance with the logic of profit, since, in most cases, they have already been victims of this situation, having experienced the killings of their peers. There is a possibility that there was a trauma arising from other experiences, such as the shock with other peoples. As a book by the Conselho Indigenista Missionário (Cimi) and the Publishing House of the Federal University of Amazonas on the subject highlights, “the existence of isolated indigenous groups, many driven from their lands and in search of refuge in places of very difficult access, warns of ‘development terrorism’, conceived in terms of external interests, outside the Amazon”. Cimi’s work, from 2011, points out that isolation is more common in the Amazon region because of its geographic and environmental characteristics. However, other places, such as the Brazilian Cerrado, the Gran Chaco, located between Paraguay and southern Bolivia, and islands in New Guinea and southern India are also home to peoples in voluntary isolation. As clarified by anthropologist Tiago Moreira, from the Instituto Socioambiental (ISA), many peoples leave isolation to signal that they are in trouble in the face of threats to their existence and their way of life. The request for help can occur even if it is not explicit, but subtle. “Often, these peoples have intermittent, sporadic contact with other indigenous peoples, through whom they even manage to gain access to metal instruments, such as machetes and axes”, he says, in addition to defining what peoples in voluntary isolation are. . The founder of the Centro de Trabalho Indigenista (CTI), anthropologist Gilberto Azanha, emphasizes that the reduced number of traces and signs left by peoples in voluntary isolation is deliberate and calculated. “What does it mean to live in hiding? Living in hiding means leaving little clue,” says he, who is currently an advisory member of the CTI. “There are several situations. Each people has a small, profound story about their experiences of contact with others, whether terrible others, like the agents of our Western society, whether missionaries, agents of real estate speculation, loggers, and with other indigenous peoples of the region, its surroundings. Everyone built theirs, for whatever reason. We will only speculate when they decide to come forward and expose their history, why they isolated themselves, why they started to live in hiding. That we can only speculate.” Atalaia do Norte (AM), 02/28/2023 – Movement at the port of Atalaia do Norte, which receives indigenous people from communities in the Javari Valley. Photo: Marcelo Camargo/Agência Brasil – Marcelo Camargo/Agência Brasil The isolated people who live in the TI Massaco, in Rondônia, says Azanha, are among those who have shown curiosity to see what is happening on their borders. “They have some ways out, specialists usually talk about young people, to observe what is going on and in this they leave some clues that Funai people follow and activate a more effective protection system in those areas where they have appeared, rather suddenly.” As there is generally no verbal communication with peoples in isolation, which could allow for a greater understanding of each culture, they can be identified based on their geographic location. There are names like “isolated people from Alto Xeruã”, “isolated people from Copaca/Uarini River” and “isolated people from Igarapé Lambança”. Some of these people, explains Azanha, develop sophistication in their walks and movements, I have exceptional skills, for example, walking in the forest at night. As the intention is to wander unnoticed, one of them even stopped clearing fields, opening clearings in the forest and building more permanent homes. Tiago Moreira also comments that, in the 1980s, there were, in Rondônia, occurrences of isolated peoples and recent contacts, who ended up encountering people who did not belong to their community and the result of this was a high number of deaths. “From the 1980s, a policy of non-contact was also created, mainly based on the fact that experiences of rapprochement were disastrous, people died, groups went through a process of very large population loss. So, Funai, together with anthropologists, indigenists, they met to decide what to do. Then, this policy of non-contact was indicated and a series of protocols adopted, because, eventually, this contact would have to be made in case of risk for this group [isolado]. Protection network The body that officially monitors and registers people in voluntary isolation is Funai. However, other organizations, such as the Instituto Socioambiental (ISA), collaborate with this function. The autarchy, says Tiago Moreira, is looking for traces and trying to keep a safe distance from these people”. “It is a very meticulous and careful job, because finding the traces of these populations in the forest is really quite difficult. And, at the same time, you can’t just hang around there, because you can meet these isolated people. It already happened, we lost a colleague from Funai, Rieli [Franciscato, coordenador da Frente de Proteção Etnoambiental Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau]. He was carrying out a protection action in the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau Indigenous Land, in Rondônia, because the isolated people were being seen outside the indigenous land. They had shown up at a farm, a farm, something like that, which is on the edge of the indigenous land, and he went there, in order to try to understand the situation and see these traces, to find out where they were going. He ended up being shot by these isolates. It is a job that is done at a distance”, says the anthropologist, adding that when the area is not yet demarcated, there is an effort to at least interdict the territory, with the aim of preserving it against invaders and threats. According to Moreira , in the case of ISA, monitoring is done with the help of satellites. “In this case, trying more to monitor the pressures on the territory than if the isolated people are there, because, using the satellite, it is almost impossible to monitor their presence. So, we monitor threats, mainly deforestation”, he clarifies. For the ISA anthropologist, the biggest enemies, currently, of peoples in voluntary isolation are mining and deforestation. In addition, they face drug trafficking, farmers, hunters, squatters, loggers and real estate speculation Manaus (AM) – Federal Police disable illegal mining rafts with support from IBAMA and took place in Vale do Javari/AM Photo: Federal Police/Disclosure – Federal Police/disclosure Moreira recalls that, in inside the Yanomami TI, there are peoples with this profile. “What we saw in the last four, five years was that there was an unprecedented increase in deforestation in indigenous lands and that a good part of it was in indigenous lands with the presence of isolated peoples “. PL 490/2007 Another entity that forms the protection network is the Observatory of Human Rights of Isolated and Recently Contacted Indigenous Peoples (OPI), created, according to one of its members, Luisa Suriani, during the Bolsonaro government, as a reaction to the increased vulnerability of indigenous peoples. Many people who are part of the observatory, she reports, left other activities they were involved with to dedicate themselves exclusively to it, after the death of Bruno Pereira and Dom Phillips. The Master’s student in Anthropology at the Federal University of Pará (UFPA) says that Bill (PL) 490/2007, approved last Tuesday (30) in the Chamber of Deputies by 283 votes against 155, contains a section related to the peoples in isolation that worries experts. Article 29 of the proposal, which deals with the timeframe for the demarcation of indigenous lands, allows for contact with these peoples, “to mediate state action of public utility”. On the 26th, the OPI and Cimi already warned about this aspect, questioning the forced contact and denouncing that, in the name of “supposed public interest”, large undertakings promoted veritable massacres, genocides, such as the construction of highways, hydroelectric plants, mining, colonization and agriculture. “This completely undermines Funai’s non-contact policy. In other words, we respect the autonomy of isolated peoples and understand that this way of life is a way of refusing direct contact. Article 29 proposes something that goes against the non-contact policy, consolidated in Brazil, and poses a very serious problem”, says Luisa. Although she believes that what she calls “Funai’s disintrusion” is under way, that is, the replacement of figures with an anti-indigenous position by indigenous peoples and indigenists with years of career in the autarchy, Luisa says that the recovery of the dismantling, which extends to budget constraints, still causes disquiet. “The Ethno-environmental Protection fronts, which are Funai’s bases by region and take care of records of isolated peoples, suffer from a lack of food. Soon, there will be no food to supply these bases. It’s a very elementary thing”, she says. . The notion that few people have mastered knowledge about peoples in voluntary isolation is an erroneous perception, for the anthropologist. “At the end of the day, the true specialists are the indigenous people who share the territories with them. But, for a long time, the issue of isolated people was very marked as a FUNAI policy. invasion. So, it is difficult to access information precisely because of the protection of this data. Often, this cloudiness is created that it is something that few know. No, actually, who is in the field, at the base, who are the indigenous people themselves know this very well. And I think that, within anthropology, now thinking of something more academic, also for a political discussion, it is an agenda that has grown, these more anthropological, sociological studies have been expanded. But the expertise in fact, it belongs to those who are in the field, who are the indigenous people themselves”, argues the researcher, for whom the due remuneration and hiring of indigenous people who are close to the isolated people should be a priority for Funai. Agência Brasil contacted Funai and the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, but had not heard back at the time of writing this article.
Agência Brasil
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