In the depths of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil live Indigenous people who have no contact with the outside world.


Illegal loggers and cattle ranchers are invading their land and bringing disease. They won’t survive unless this stops.


Brazil’s Amazon is home to more uncontacted Indigenous peoples than anywhere in the world. There are thought to be at least 100 uncontacted groups in this rainforest, according to the government’s Indigenous affairs department FUNAI.


Their decision not to maintain contact with other Indigenous peoples and outsiders is almost certainly a result of previous disastrous encounters and the ongoing invasion and destruction of their forest home.


 For example, the uncontacted groups living in the state of Acre are probably survivors of the rubber boom, when many Indians were enslaved.


It is likely that the survivors escaped by fleeing up the rivers. Memories of the atrocities against their ancestors may still be strong.


Very little is known about these peoples. What we do know is that they wish to remain uncontacted: they have shot arrows at outsiders and airplanes, or they simply avoid contact by hiding deep in the forest.


Some, like the uncontacted Awá, are nomadic hunter gatherers constantly on the move, able to build a home within hours and abandon it days later.


Others are more settled, living in communal houses and planting manioc and other crops in forest clearings as well as hunting and fishing.


It is believed that around 300 uncontacted live in the Massaco Territory. They use enormous bows and arrows – one bow was found measuring over four metres – very similar in size and design to the Sirionó people who live in neighbouring Bolivia. They clearly like to eat tortoises as mounds of shells have been found in abandoned camps.


However, other uncontacted groups are teetering on the edge of extinction with no more than a handful of individuals left.


These tiny fragmented groups living mainly in Rondônia, Mato Grosso and Maranhão states are the survivors of brutal land grabs when they were targeted and murdered by loggers, ranchers, and others.


Today they are still deliberately hunted down and their forests homes are being rapidly destroyed.

surrounding groups.



Lethal diseases caught from outsiders are affecting contacted groups in the territory and there are fears these could be transmitted to uncontacted groups with tragic consequences.


 



The last of his tribe, Rondônia

This lone man was believed to have been the last survivor of his Indigenous people, who were probably massacred by ranchers who occupy the Tanaru Indigenous Land region in the state of Rondônia.


We never knew his name what his name was, the people he belonged to or the language he spoke. He was known for the large holes he dug to hide in or to capture animals. He totally rejected any kind of contact.



‘The last of his tribe’ was believed to be the only survivor of an Indigenous people massacred by ranchers in the 1970s and 1980s.

In the past, many ranchers have used armed men to kill uncontacted people in Rondônia.


In August 2022, after almost 30 years of living alone and constantly on the run, unfortunately the ‘last of his tribe’ died, apparently of natural causes.