![]() ![]() Instead, their first contact is often with greedy mineral prospectors and the rabble employed by great landowners, banks and investment companies and other agencies which seek to empty the land and sell it for a profit. Perhaps the saddest fact of all is that the many tribes in Brazil and elsewhere seldom meet the best representatives of modern culture. Since one of the most important concerns of the Ministry is the development of the interior of the country by the construction of roads and highways which bring settlers and industry into the jungle, the Indian is often displaced and suffers as a consequence. Yet while the old Service had been directly responsible to Brazil’s president, FUNAI was made a department of the Ministry of the Interior. A certain reform came with the establishment of the National Indian Foundation (Fundacao Nacional do Indio, or FUNAI). ![]() Many of its functionaries were prosecuted for crimes ranging from theft to murder. Lewis concluded that unless such processes were halted, within a decade there would be no survivors.Īnd, in the late 1960’s, Brazil’s Indian Protection Service was disbanded because it was found to be riddled with corruption. Disease had been the chief factor and it was introduced both purposefully and as a natural consequence of contact with disease-bearing whites. In February, 1969, writer Norman Lewis observed in London’s Sunday Times Magazine that many Indian tribes in Brazil had been almost annihilated since the turn of the century and that the means of annihilation had been poison, dynamite, machine guns and torture. Xingu has been given other land in compensation, but this land has already been settled, and some of the forest burned, by squatters and prospectors and it contains no Indians.īrazil, a vast country which is only now being seriously developed under twentieth century technology, offers a dramatic example of the encounter between modern and primitive societies. There, government policy has been traditionally enlightened on behalf of the Indian, but in 1971 the government permitted the construction of a highway through Xingu National Park, the Indian sanctuary built up over the past twenty years by Claudio and Orlando Villas Boas, who were featured in Adrian Cowell’s award-winning documentary The Tribe That Hides From Man. ![]() In Brazil, Indians are being harassed by squatters, prospectors and settlers who are attempting to open up new territories. When the primitive Stone Age Tasaday tribe emerged from their rain forest on the Philippine island of Mindanao in 1971, they were startled by helicopters and endangered by feuding and competitive logging companies. Claudio Villas Boas takes a moment to pose with a Kamayura Indian chief at a village in Xingu National Park A proposed new dam will be an even greater threat, since it will flood 80 percent of their land and involve the resettlement of about the same proportion of their population Significantly, the water will also push them back beyond the limits of the land granted to them by the Panamanian government so that they will no longer have any title to their land. If the road pushes through, it will mean the loss of much jungle and many of their game animals and a much more intensive contact with unscrupulous traders. There, the Cuna and the Choco (Embera) Indian tribes are facing the prospect of what will happen to them if the highway is completed. In Panama, engineers are laying plans for building the final link of the Pan-American Highway through the dense jungles of the “ Darien Gap” which separates Panama from Colombia. The threat proceeds on almost a daily basis, and is reaching the crisis stage. Everywhere around the globe whole tribes and populations are being abused and forced from their lands and are having their folkways threatened. But the same thing has been happening to people as well. Because of ecological and environmental concerns, much attention has been given in the past few years to the erosion of natural habitats and the desiccation of wildlife in the face of spreading urban and technological development. ![]()
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