Al Jazeera: Uncontacted tribe filmed on Brazil-Peru border
Isn’t this amazing? In an age when seemingly all the world has been colonized by civilization there is still a people who don’t know about it at all. They don’t know that they are living in a country defined by national borders. They don’t know that there are people who would only have to push one button to kill them all. They likely don’t know depression and anorexia (according to even the corporate media “body hatred seems to be the number one export of western civilisation” – this sentence was actually quoted by the dpa about a year ago in a rare moment of truth.), they likely don’t get cancer – or if they do it’s because the air never stays in the place where it’s polluted.
Am I romanticising this? Common sense would suggest so. The ethnological and historial record does not. The quote at the top of the window – “No European who has tasted savage life can afterwards bear to live in our societies (Benjamin Franklin)” – is authentic. It was made in the light of white settlers deserting their settlements by the hundereds, instead choosing to live with the Natives. Of whites who at prisoner exchanges preferred to stay with their captors instead of going back to their people and who were not even moved by the tears of their loved ones. In the end deserting to live with the Natives was made an offense punishable by death. And, of course, the Natives were killed. We know *that* part. Today of course no threats are necessary anymore. You needn’t make a person’s life pleasant and you needn’t threaten them in order to make them stay with you if you can only persuade them that no other way of living is possible.
The government agency says it will leave the uncontacted tribes alone – fair enough, but deforestation will soon “contact” these people anyway. If they are to be protected, the deforestation has to stop. Otherwise, I can predict exactly what will happen. Their culture will crumble in just a few years and when they are finally driven off their land which can’t sustain them anymore because the whole ecosystem has been destroyed, the same people who destroyed it in the first place will take this as yet another proof of our culture’s superiority. Otherwise, why would these people want to be ‘like us’ so much?
Culture is sustained by the land. When the land is deprived of its integrity, so are the bodies and minds of the people living there. What gives a landscape its character? The skyscrapers? The shops? Or the rivers and the mountains? Modern cities look the same everywhere in the world, symbol of a diffuse would-be culture that is present everywhere yet rooted nowhere. It’s like a tie that is tied to tightly, cutting off the flow of vital blood and oxygen to the head. (Interestingly, tieing it so tightly has also been reported to give people a giant head…;)) You can continue the analogy from there… I think it’s finally starting to rain.
