U.S. academics Professors Robert S. Walker and Kim R. Hill published a dangerous and misleading editorial in Science magazine in 2015. They claimed that uncontacted people should be contacted for their own benefit, ignoring centuries of experience of the devastation forced contact inflicts.
Disease and violence have wiped out whole tribes soon after first contact, and reduced others to just a few survivors. The academics state that “a well-designed contact can be quite safe,” but the examples of contact they choose to illustrate their point were in fact catastrophic, and left many of the tribespeople dead.
Forced contact missions were official policy in Brazil for decades but led to the decimation of countless tribes. It was this devastation that led Brazil’s Indigenous affairs department FUNAI to adopt, in the late 1980s, its policy of protecting uncontacted tribes’ land rather than forcing contact upon them. Professors Hill and Walker also argue that the existence of isolated peoples is "not viable in the long term.” But, in fact, there are more than one hundred uncontacted tribes around the world, and where their lands are protected, they are thriving.
Hill and Walker, and any other proponents of forced contact, play straight into the hands of those who want to steal tribal land in the name of “progress” and “civilization,” and open Amazonia up for resource extraction and “investment.” At the end of 2018, Hill’s statement that “No groups want to live isolated forever” was used to justify a missionary’s dangerous attempt to impose contact on the Sentinelese in the Andaman Islands. John Allen Chau was killed by the Sentinelese, who have made it repeatedly clear that they reject contact with outsiders.
Indigenous people and experts respond
Indigenous peoples, organizations and experts around the world, including Brazil’s Indigenous affairs department, FUNAI, have attacked the academics’ ideas as being “arrogant," “dangerous," and “genocidal.” Read some of their statements rejecting forced contact here and here. Olímpio Guajajara, of the contacted Guajajara people, said “We are aware that some anthropologists have been calling for ‘controlled contact’ with the uncontacted Indians… We will not allow this to happen because it will be another genocide of a people… of an Indigenous group which doesn’t want contact.”
Survival opposes attempts by outsiders to contact uncontacted tribes. It’s always fatal and initiating contact must be their choice alone. Those who enter uncontacted tribes’ territories deny them that choice.
The way forward
The key to stopping the annihilation of tribal peoples is protecting their land rights – which are enshrined in national and international law. All uncontacted tribal peoples face catastrophe unless their lands are protected. Survival is doing everything we can to secure their land for them, and to give them the chance to determine their own futures. Sign the global declaration for uncontacted tribes
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