Uncontacted peoples

Human rights and environmental groups broadly define uncontacted peoples as Indigenous groups that do not have sustained contact with outsiders from the developed world. In the 2020s, experts estimated that there were approximately one to two hundred such groups around the globe, concentrated mainly in tropical climate zones in South America and the islands and archipelagos of the Indian Ocean and South Pacific. However, given the distant and elusive nature of uncontacted peoples, researchers are unsure of their total population.

As noted by the Survival International nongovernment organization (NGO), uncontacted peoples exist in various situations. Some groups have retreated into nomadic lifestyles in dense, undeveloped, and isolated areas as members of mainstream society increasingly intruded into their traditional territories. Other groups are known to have had contact with frontier and colonial groups in the past, but made a conscious decision to avoid further association due to the negative nature of their previous interactions. Researchers have also documented situations in which uncontacted groups elected to break ties with the larger Indigenous populations to which they originally belonged, choosing to return to traditional lifestyles in isolation as the parent group became more deeply involved in the developed world.

Overview: The Sentinelese

The Sentinelese people of North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean archipelago of the Andaman Islands rank among the world’s best-known examples of uncontacted peoples. They are widely considered the most isolated such group on Earth. Experts believe the Sentinelese have occupied North Sentinel Island for up to 60,000 years, developing a language largely unintelligible to other Andaman Islands Indigenous groups. The Sentinelese people were first detected by outsiders from the developed world in 1771, when an East India Company ship conducting a survey observed lights on North Sentinel Island as it sailed past.

In the nineteenth century, Great Britain claimed colonial control of the Andaman Islands, and in 1880, a British expedition party exploring North Sentinel Island captured an older Sentinelese couple and four Sentinelese children. All six of the Sentinelese captives became seriously ill during their detention, and the British party decided to return the four sick children to North Sentinel Island following the deaths of the older Sentinelese couple. Researchers speculate that the four children may have transmitted devastating illnesses to the other members of the Sentinelese tribe, potentially explaining the notorious hostility with which the Sentinelese have met subsequent efforts to establish contact. In 2006, two men from India were killed by the group after their wayward fishing vessel floated onto the shore of North Sentinel Island. In 2018, John Chau, an American missionary, met the same fate after illegally traveling to the island in an effort to make contact with the Sentinelese. National Geographic released a documentary about his mission in 2023. These incidents echoed multiple earlier episodes, in which the Sentinelese have used arrows and other weapons to promptly attack outsiders who travel in close proximity to North Sentinel Island.

The Sentinelese continue to live in isolation, maintaining their traditional lifestyle. The Indian government enforces strict regulations to protect the Sentinelese people, prohibiting outsiders from approaching the island. However, the government planned a major development project for the Great Nicobar Island in the mid-2020s, which is home to the uncontacted Shompen tribe. This raised concerns from conservationist and activist groups.

The government of India maintains administrative control of the Andaman Islands, and has a policy strictly prohibiting unauthorized visits to North Sentinel Island since the 1950s. Rare exceptions have been granted to scientific researchers, with Indian anthropologist T.N. Pandit successfully establishing brief, but peaceful, interactions with the Sentinelese in the early 1990s. Pandit describes the group as generally peace-loving but highly suspicious of outsiders, noting that the Sentinelese have clearly communicated that they do not wish to be disturbed by members of the outside world. Based on efforts to model the number of people that North Sentinel Island could organically support, experts believe that there could be up to five hundred Sentinelese on North Sentinel Island, with their most likely population numbers falling in the range of 80 to 150.

Uncontacted Peoples of New Guinea

Researchers believe the rainforests of West Papua on the island of New Guinea in the western Pacific Ocean may be home to as many as forty different uncontacted Indigenous groups. According to scientists, these groups primarily follow traditional hunter-gatherer practices, with many actively avoiding the limited efforts that have been made to establish contact. West Papua is a province of Indonesia, and the Indonesian government has imposed strict bans on journalists, NGOs, and commercial groups from attempting to interact with the isolated Indigenous groups living in the region.

Two of the documented West Papua groups include the Yaifo and Korowai tribes. The Yaifo became the subject of public curiosity in the late 2010s, when a British explorer apparently disappeared while attempting to reach them. Media agencies covering the explorer’s disappearance noted that the Yaifo are considered dangerous to outsiders and are believed to engage in the ancient practice of headhunting, in which the severed heads of rivals and enemies are taken and kept as trophies. The explorer was later found safe.

The Korowai, alternately known as the Kolufo people, traditionally live in small, treehouse-based communities built in small clearings within the dense jungles of West Papua. According to estimates published in Smithsonian Magazine, there are approximately four thousand active members of the uncontacted Korowai tribe, and the small number of researchers who have made contact with the group have confirmed that they continue to observe cannibalistic ritual practices.

Both the Indonesian government and researchers with advanced insights into the uncontacted tribes of West Papua share very little specific information regarding the exact locations, activities, and characteristics of New Guinea’s uncontacted peoples. Experts note that the continued survival of these groups depends on a combination of publicity and secrecy, in which awareness of their existence and the threats they face from resource exploitation, tourism, and military expansionism must be balanced with respect for their autonomy and maintaining a distance that does not interfere with their traditional lifestyles.

Uncontacted Peoples of South America

South America is believed to host both the largest and densest concentration of uncontacted peoples and isolated Indigenous tribes in the world. Many such groups live in a region known as the Amazon Uncontacted Frontier, which is in a large forested area that spans the border between western Brazil and eastern Peru. According to estimates, there may be more than one hundred such groups of varying sizes living in the Amazon Uncontacted Frontier. Some local groups, including the Chitonahua, Isconahua, Mashco-Piro, Mastanahua, Matsés, Matsigenka, Nahua, Nanti, and Sapanawa peoples, have been documented by researchers, while an unknown number of others are believed to be undiscovered. Of the known groups, most have actively rebuffed attempts at contact after previous interactions with outsiders led to disease, exploitation, slavery, and other abuses.

Other regions of South America, including sections of the Amazon in Venezuela, Paraguay, Ecuador, and other parts of Brazil and Peru, are known to be home to uncontacted peoples and Indigenous groups that continue to reject contact attempts. The Ayoreo people of Paraguay are believed to be the only uncontacted group in the Americas that lives outside the ecosystem served by the Amazon River. Based in the forests of the Gran Chaco basin, the Ayoreo made reluctant contact with external populations in the early 2000s after land developers had destroyed their traditional homelands. The Gran Chaco woodlands face some of the most rapid deforestation rates of any region on Earth.

Further Insights

Uncontacted peoples face multiple threats from mainstream society. Some such groups live in areas known to contain resources of high economic value, such as arable land and oil deposits. These populations face serious risks as property developers and corporations seek to harvest and monetize these resources. Such issues are particularly prevalent in South America. An NGO known as the Organization of Indigenous Peoples of the East (ORPIO) has been working since 2003 to establish a nature reserve for the multiple recently contacted and uncontacted groups living in the Napo-Tigre region of the Peruvian Amazon. ORPIO’s activism helped multiple such Indigenous populations earn official recognition status in 2022, marking a major step in the group’s efforts to achieve its core objective. However, ORPIO’s work is opposed by a consortium of regional officials, petroleum companies, and development entrepreneurs who seek to conduct commercial operations in the oil-rich area and consider the proposed reserve an obstacle to resource development.

Deforestation and its ecosystem impacts represent another major threat to the prosperity of the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon. Clear-cutting and logging operations, which are carried out to harvest wood for commercial purposes and to create farmland, continue to encroach on the traditional territories and activities of multiple uncontacted peoples of the Amazon in several South American countries. In 2022, news agencies reported that the Brazilian government under Jair Bolsonaro was involved in a secretive operation to suppress information about the existence of an uncontacted tribe in the country’s Pará state as part of an effort to open forested lands in the region to commercial development. Legal and illegal logging represents only one of multiple such encroachment threats. Others include off-the-record gold mining operations and the influence of South American drug cartels, which use the Amazon’s thick forest cover to create secret coca plantations. Drug cartels are known to have carried out violent attacks against local Indigenous groups opposing their presence.

Other forms of commercial exploitation also threaten uncontacted peoples: some tour companies, including operators in Brazil, Peru, and India, run tours dubbed as “human safaris,” in which customers pay for the opportunity to view members of isolated Indigenous tribes living their traditional lifestyles. So-called human safaris have become a particularly problematic issue in India, with tour operators continuing to offer guided visits to the Andaman Islands despite longstanding official bans on the practice. Such activities have particularly threatened the Jarawa people of Middle Andaman Island, who had a highway built through the center of their traditional territory in the 1970s and have reportedly been lured with drugs and alcohol by tourists during illegal visits.

Disease represents another serious potential consequence of intercultural interactions, as members of isolated communities have never been exposed to many common infectious illnesses. In the late 1970s, contact between outsiders and the Matis people of Brazil’s Javari Valley resulted in the rapid death of approximately half of the Matis population due to transmissible illnesses such as influenza, malaria, and hepatitis. By 1983, the Matis population had declined to less than one hundred. A similar fate befell the Nahua people of Central America, who came into contact with outsiders after the Shell oil and gas company began conducting surveys in their traditional homelands. Over half of the total Nahua population died within a few years of first contact.

Viewpoints

NGOs, human rights groups, and Indigenous activists generally share a belief that uncontacted peoples are best left to continue living their traditional lifestyles without external interference, especially in cases where the groups have clearly communicated a desire not to be disturbed by outsiders. Such perspectives generally hold that uncontacted peoples represent an important and desirable element of human cultural diversity, highlighting the deep and increasingly rare knowledge of local zoology and botany possessed by members of these populations. Some commentators also consider Indigenous peoples living traditional lifestyles to hold immense value as environmental stewards during an era of human history in which the need for more effective ecosystem protections as a buttress against ongoing climate change has become a major point of public and political debate.

Other viewpoints, generally held by supporters of efforts to commercialize the resources contained in the traditional lands of uncontacted and traditional Indigenous tribes, suggest that it is virtually impossible for any population group to continue living in isolation in the modern world. Some proponents of these views have suggested that the members of uncontacted population groups would almost certainly choose to abandon their traditional lifestyles in favor of modern life if they had full awareness of what the outside world can offer them. However, opponents of this perspective argue that Indigenous peoples have historically been forced to occupy the bottom rungs of the hierarchies created and imposed on them by settler societies, often culminating in outcomes that are arguably much worse than continuing to live without the technologies of the developed world. Some observers similarly believe that contact should be made with isolated groups to supply them with the benefits of modern medicine. Critics of this viewpoint cite the many historical instances in which contact with outsiders has introduced serious diseases to which the isolated peoples have no natural immunity, often resulting in widespread death rates and creating more problems for these populations than modern medicine would solve.

In 2022, proceedings in a landmark case attempting to establish legal rights for uncontacted peoples concluded at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The case, which is recognized as the first of its kind in the history of international law, was brought before the tribunal by plaintiffs, including Ecuador’s National Indigenous Confederation (CONAIE) and the Yasunidos environmental NGO in response to a series of massacres that victimized the isolated Tagaeri and Taromenane peoples from 2003 to 2013. Attorneys arguing on behalf of the uncontacted tribes stated that deforestation-related activities in the impacted region of Ecuador introduced dynamics that contributed to rising tensions between rival Indigenous groups, resulting in widespread violence. The plaintiffs sought to hold the Ecuadorian government responsible for its failure to protect the Tagaeri and Taromenane, and to secure the future cultural, territorial, and self-determination rights of Indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation.

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