The death of Tanaru, the last member of an uncontacted group in the Amazon, raises questions about ethnic cleansing of Indigenous people, justice and the future of ancestral lands

For at least 26 years a man known as Tanaru lived alone in a small forest in the south-western Brazilian Amazon, moving around his territory, building several houses, planting crops and hunting. He also dug large, mysterious holes inside his homes.

When a team from the National Indigenous Peoples Foundation (Funai) came across him in 1996, he resisted contact, aiming an arrow at them through a gap in his palm shelter, a scene captured in the 2009 documentary Corumbiara. In 2007, Funai officials made another attempt at contact. Again Tanaru repelled it, leaving one man with a bad arrow wound.

He lived undisturbed for another 15 years as the environmental destruction continued around him in Rondônia, one of Brazil’s most deforested Amazonian states. Some called him the “man of the hole” without knowing why he dug the holes.

In 2022, Tanaru lay down in his hammock and died; Algayer was the one who found him. His death, confirming the extinction of his people, made the future of his 8,000 hectares (19,800 acres) of rainforest contentious. Local lawyers argue against demarcating it as Indigenous land, citing a lack of native population. Government prosecutors insist the territory was historically occupied, so should be protected despite not having Indigenous people left in it. The dispute highlights the complexity surrounding the fight for Indigenous land rights, the impact of historical atrocities, and the ongoing risk to uncontacted people (isolados) in the Amazon.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldMEnglish
    1·
    1 day ago

    Well there’s no question they did soil management and the early Europeans who were later ignored talked about orchards, so they definitely did some sort of organized farming, so I think maybe some of it was just forest, but a lot of it was also organized agriculture.

    • theneverfox@pawb.socialEnglish
      2·
      7 hours ago

      I mean, beyond that, the practice is still around to this day

      Here’s an article on chacas. They’re more local and personally managed, but they’re a textbook example of agroforestry

      Here’s an article about the evidence the Amazon was intentionally cultivated

      He’s an excerpt:

      In 2013, community ecologist Hans ter Steege and colleagues were taking inventory of the vast diversity of the Amazon’s trees. The team sampled 1,170 scattered plots far from modern human inhabitants to identify more than 16,000 different species among those 390 billion individual plants. Then they noticed something odd: Despite that broad diversity, over half of the total trees were made up of just over 1 percent (227) of the species.

      About 20 of these “hyperdominant” plants were domesticated species such as the Brazil nut, the Amazon tree grape and the ice cream bean tree. That was five times the amount researchers expected if chance were the only factor. “The hypothesis came up that perhaps people might have domesticated these species a lot […] which would have helped their abundance in the Amazon,” says ter Steege says, who is the lead author of the recent study.

      To test this hypothesis, ter Steege teamed up with archaeologists to look more closely at the number of domesticated species in proximity to where there was evidence of pre-Columbian communities. “Indeed, the distance to these archaeological sites has an effect on the abundance and richness of domesticated species in the Amazon,” ter Steege says, noting that he and his team were able to plot a decrease in the number of domesticated species as the distance from archaeological sites increased.

      The researchers also found that many of these domesticated species were identified far from the areas where they first arose, leading to speculation that humans transported them to cultivate elsewhere. Cocoa, used by some native peoples for beverages and in religious ceremonies, was first domesticated in the northwestern region of the Amazon, where researchers today have identified a larger genetic diversity reflecting more time established there. But today the species is most prevalent in the southern areas of the rainforest.

      It’s not a particularly new theory, and the evidence fits the claims and practices of the surviving cultures - I think it just hasn’t caught on because of cultural bias. The Americas have a long history of sprawling empires and evidence of trade from Washington State to the Andes mountains.

      Disease and outright genocide just destroyed most of these cultures, not because they were primitive (we have no problem praising their math and astronomy), but because they developed down a very different path