More members of Amazonian tribe seek help from Brazil

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Amazon, attacks, tribe

More members of Amazonian tribe seek help from Brazil

More than 20 members of an isolated Amazonian tribe have made contact with the Brazilian authorities amid growing fears that they are being driven from their forest home by drug smugglers or illegal loggers.

The outreach – effectively a plea for sanctuary, support and weapons – follows earlier encounters in June and July that were captured on video.

This time it was a larger group – 23 men, women and children, probably from the same tribe – that crossed the border from their territory in Peru to seek help from Brazilian government officials, despite a long reluctance to make contact with the outside world.

Brazil’s health ministry is monitoring the physical condition of the group, who are at the Xinane monitoring post neat the Envira river in Acre state. They appear healthy but, lacking antibodies against common diseases, they are taking a considerable health risk through their action. After previous similar contacts, many tribes have been decimated by deadly flu epidemics.

The group are aware of such dangers, but appear to be more frightened of attacks on their territory by intruders. They are said to have confirmed earlier reports that elder tribesmen were massacred and their homes burned by outsiders.

Their migration has disturbed settled communities of the Asháninka indigenous group, as the tribe have stolen food, clothes and weapons from many homes.

The Brazilian government now faces a tough decision on the best way to help them and avoid the tragedies that have followed so many previous contacts.

The National Indian Foundation (Funai) recently reopened the base at Xinane, which it had abandoned in 2011 after attacks by drug traffickers, who run a lucrative cocaine trail across the border from Peru – the world’s biggest coca producer. But long-term observers of the situation say protection on the Peru side of the border is negligible and resources for support on the Brazilian side are inadequate.

José Carlos Meirelles, a frontiersman who has spent more than 20 years as an official in the region, said Brazil had a responsibility to help the young tribesmen who had made contact, otherwise there was a danger that another tribe would be wiped out. “They are asking Funai to do what the Brazilian state has the duty to do. They should not need to ask, it is our obligation,” he told Blog da Amazônia.

Survival International, the movement for tribal people’s rights, urged the Peruvian government to do more to protect its isolated indigenous communities. “The accounts given by these Indians – of the killing of their relatives, and the burning of their houses – were incredibly disturbing,” said Stephen Corry, the group’s director. “This appears to have taken place on the Peru side of the border, probably at the hands of the illegal loggers and drug traffickers whose presence has been known of for years. What will it take for the Peruvian government to actually protect these tribes’ territory properly?”

Survival has launched a letter-writing campaign to urge the governments of the two countries to provide more support for the tribes.

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Another stolen generation: how Australia still wrecks Aboriginal families

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Aborigines, assimilation, Australia, forced removal, forced separation, social engineering, stolen children, stolen generation

Another stolen generation: how Australia still wrecks Aboriginal families

The tape is searing. There is the voice of an infant screaming as he is wrenched from his mother, who pleads, “There is nothing wrong with my baby. Why are you doing this to us? I would’ve been hung years ago, wouldn’t I? Because [as an Aboriginal Australian] you’re guilty before you’re found innocent.” The child’s grandmother demands to know why “the stealing of our kids is happening all over again”. A welfare official says, “I’m gunna take him, mate.”

This happened to an Aboriginal family in outback New South Wales. It is happening across Australia in a scandalous and largely unrecognised abuse of human rights that evokes the infamous stolen generation of the last century. Up to the 1970s, thousands of mixed-race children were stolen from their mothers by welfare officials. The children were given to institutions as cheap or slave labour; many were abused.

Described by a chief protector of Aborigines as “breeding out the colour”, the policy was known as assimilation. It was influenced by the same eugenics movement that inspired the Nazis. In 1997 a landmark report, Bringing Them Home, disclosed that as many 50,000 children and their mothers had endured “the humiliation, the degradation and sheer brutality of the act of forced separation … the product of the deliberate, calculated policies of the state”. The report called this genocide.

Assimilation remains Australian government policy in all but name. Euphemisms such as “reconciliation” and “Stronger Futures” cover similar social engineering and an enduring, insidious racism in the political elite, the bureaucracy and wider Australian society. When in 2008 prime minister Kevin Rudd apologised for the stolen generation, he added: “I want to be blunt about this. There will be no compensation.” The Sydney Morning Herald congratulated Rudd on a “shrewd manoeuvre” that “cleared away a piece of political wreckage in a way that responds to some of its own supporters’ emotional needs, yet changes nothing”.

Today, the theft of Aboriginal children – including babies taken from the birth table – is now more widespread than at any time during the last century. As of June last year, almost 14,000 Aboriginal children had been “removed”. This is five times the number when Bringing Them Home was written. More than a third of all removed children are Aboriginal – from 3% of the population. At the present rate, this mass removal of Aboriginal children will result in a stolen generation of more than 3,300 children in the Northern Territory alone.

Pat (not her real name) is the mother whose anguish was secretly recorded on a phone as four department of child services officials, and six police, descended on her home. On the tape an official claims they have come only for an “assessment”. But two of the police officers, who knew Pat, told her they saw no risk to her child and warned her to “get out of here quick”. Pat fled, cradling her infant, but the one-year-old was eventually seized without her knowing why. The next morning a police officer returned to apologise to her and said her baby should never have been taken away. Pat has no idea where her son is.

Once she was “invited” by officials to bring her children to “neutral” offices to discuss a “care plan”. The doors were locked and officials seized the children, with one of the youngest dragging on a police officer’s gun belt. Many Indigenous mothers are unaware of their legal rights. A secretive children’s court has become notorious for rubber-stamping removals.

Most Aboriginal families live on the edge. Their life expectancy in towns a short flight from Sydney is as low as 37. Dickensian diseases are rife; Australia is the only developed country not to have eradicated trachoma, which blinds Aboriginal children.

Pat has both complied with and struggled bravely against a punitive bureaucracy that can remove children on hearsay. She has twice been acquitted of false charges, including “kidnapping” her own children. A psychologist has described her as a capable and good mother.

Josie Crawshaw, the former director of a respected families’ support organisation in Darwin, told me: “In remote areas, officials will go in with a plane in the early hours and fly the child thousands of kilometres from their community. There’ll be no explanation, no support, and the child may be gone forever.”

In 2012 the co-ordinator general of remote services for the Northern Territory, Olga Havnen, was sacked when she revealed that almost A$80m (£44m) was spent on the surveillance and removal of Aboriginal children compared with only A$500,000 (£275,000) on supporting the same impoverished families. She told me: “The primary reasons for removing children are welfare issues directly related to poverty and inequality. The impact is just horrendous because if they are not reunited within six months, it’s likely they won’t see each other again. If South Africa was doing this, there’d be an international outcry.”

She and others with long experience I have interviewed have echoed the Bringing them Home report, which described an official “attitude” in Australia that regarded all Aboriginal people as “morally deficient”. A department of family and community services spokesman said that most removed Indigenous children in New South Wales were placed with Indigenous carers. According to Indigenous support networks, this is a smokescreen; it does not mean families, and it is control by divisiveness that is the bureaucracy’s real achievement.

I met a group of Aboriginal grandmothers, all survivors of the first stolen generation, all now with stolen grandchildren. “We live in a state of fear, again,” they said. David Shoebridge, a state Greens MP, told me: “The truth is, there is a market among whites for these kids, especially babies.”

The New South Wales parliament is soon to debate legislation that introduces forced adoption and “guardianship”. Children under two years old will be liable – without the mother’s consent – if “removed” for more than six months. For many Aboriginal mothers like Pat, it can take six months merely to make contact with their children. “It’s setting up Aboriginal families to fail,” said Shoebridge.

I asked Josie Crawshaw why. “The wilful ignorance in Australia about its first people has now become the kind of intolerance that gets to the point where you can smash an entire group of humanity and there is no fuss.”

http://www.johnpilger.com

Brazil tribe plagued by one of the highest suicide rates in the world

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suicide

Brazil tribe plagued by one of the highest suicide rates in the world

The discovery of an indigenous girl’s body hanging from a tree in Bororó de Dourados was as grim as it was familiar for Brazil’s Guarani-Kaiowá tribe, which has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, according to a new report.

Ahead of World Mental Health Day on Thursday, figures from Survival International suggest that the Guarani-Kaiowá are 34 times more likely to kill themselves than Brazil’s national average.

This has prompted warnings that a “silent genocide” is under way.

The community of 31,000 people, mostly based in the south-western state of Mato Grosso do Sul, is plagued by alcoholism, depression, poverty and violence after losing its ancestral lands to ranchers and biofuel farmers.

The problem is decades-old, but Survival says the rate has increased in recent years. Since the start of the century, one suicide has been reported on average almost every week.

 

Almost all are hangings, with ropes, belts or cloth. Most are young. The latest victim, on Wednesday, whose name has yet to be released, was a 17-year-old girl. Last week, a 16-year-old, in Dourados reserve and a 19-year-old in Amambai reserve killed themselves.

 

“The principle reason is their lack of land,” said Mary Nolan, a US nun and human rights lawyer. “The Guarani people think their relationship with the universe is broken when they are separated from their land. They feel they are a broken people.” Many in the community cosmologically interpret their situation as a symptom of the destruction of the world.

As well undermining their spiritual base, the seizure of their land by farmers has disrupted the social structure of the community. Traditionally, disputes between families were settled by one side moving away and starting again in a new territory. But this is no longer possible now that thousands of Guarani are crammed together in camps.

One camp in Dourados now has a murder rate that is more than 50% higher than that of Iraq. The stressful, violent environment is worsened by beatings and assassinations of indigenous leaders who try to reclaim their land from wealthy farmers.

The suicides began among the first generation to grow up on reservations, which the tribes moved into in the 1970s, according to Guarani ethnologist, Tonico Benites.

“With no land to maintain their ancient cultures, the Guarani-Kaiowá feel ashamed and humiliated. Many feel sad, insecure, unstable, scared, hungry and miserable. They have lost their crops and their hope for a better life. They are exploited and enslaved by sugar cane production for alcohol,” he said. “These conditions of despair and misery cause the epidemic of violence and suicide among the young.”

The authorities have recognised the community is in the midst of suicide epidemic, but the government is criticised for not doing enough to deal with the cause.

Although courts have ordered the authorities to demarcate land for the Guarani, little progress has been made since the 1990s when a small tranche of land was returned to them – and the suicide rate temporarily declined. Now, however, the process has almost ground to a halt and some fear it could slide into reverse because Brazil’s Congress is dominated by the powerful “ruralista” lobby of landowners.

Many other indigenous communities in the world, including the Tiwi Islanders in Australia, Khanty herders in Siberia and Inuits in Greenland, have unusually high suicide rates. Anthropologists say this is closely linked to the loss of land, which is often followed by social disintegration and economic dependence on charity and state handouts. The result is often alcoholism inside the community and racism outside, which leaves the young – in one man’s words – “stuck somewhere between a past they don’t understand and a future that won’t accept them”.

“Sadly, the Guarani are not a unique case – indigenous peoples worldwide often suffer far higher rates of suicide than the majority population,” Survival’s director Stephen Corry said in a statement.

“So-called ‘progress’ often destroys tribal peoples but in this case the solution is clear: demarcate the Guarani’s land, before more innocent lives are lost.'”

Amazon’s Olympic athletes aim for faster, stronger, deadlier

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Amazon Olympics

Amazon’s Olympic athletes aim for faster, stronger, deadlier

Poised on the starting blocks at the Olympics, the 15 swimmers had good reason to feel apprehensive. But the cause of their nervousness was not the race itself – it was the piranhas, anacondas and crocodiles lurking in the turbid waters below.

This is the Amazon Olympics, an annual sporting event for indigenous tribes in this isolated region along the borders of Colombia, Brazil andPeru. Instead of track and field events, however, the competition tests skills and disciplines essential for survival in the jungle: 500 men and women compete in a range of disciplines including, tree-felling, canoe-racing, archery and blowpipe-shooting.

It is a far cry from London 2012’s multimillion-pound arenas: the canoes are hand-carved from tree trunks, the bows fashioned from branches, In one event, men and women wield two-metre blowpipes to fire wooden darts at a target. In another event, contestants with axes raced to reduce tree trunks to kindling.

The swimming events all take place in the murky waters of the Loretoyaco river, a tributary of the Amazon. Waiting for her 100m freestyle race, Lina Castro, a 20-year-old member of the Tikun indigenous community, gazed into the water and considered the hazards. “When the race is about to start I need to be calm and not think about all the things that live in the river,” she said.

Teams from two dozen villages and towns fight for a cash prize of £1,000, but tribal elders say the main purpose of the games is to help safeguard ancient traditions. “These games are a way of preserving our culture,” said Olga Bastos, an indigenous leader, who also competed in the bow and arrow and blowpipe events.

Hanging over the event is the fear that these communities are losing their identities. Even in the tiny town of Puerto Narino – only accessible by river – indigenous teenagers dress in skinny jeans and listen to American dance music and reggaeton. Most can’t speak the indigenous languages, only Spanish.

“The youngsters are taking outside influences, the way they dress, how they comb their hair and the music they listen to,” said Puerto Narino resident William Fernandez. He fears that by losing the skills of hunting, the younger generation is losing something much larger – a connection to the surrounding rainforests.

“The jungle is our natural home. It’s our mother, providing everything we need to eat and our whole way of life.”

Ecuador auctions off Amazon to Chinese oil firms

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Amazon, China, Ecuador

Ecuador auctions off Amazon to Chinese oil firms

Ecuador plans to auction off more than three million hectares of pristine Amazonian rainforest to Chinese oil companies, angering indigenous groups and underlining the global environmental toll of China’s insatiable thirst for energy.

On Monday morning a group of Ecuadorean politicians pitched bidding contracts to representatives of Chinese oil companies at a Hilton hotel in central Beijing, on the fourth leg of a roadshow to publicise the bidding process. Previous meetings in Ecuador’s capital, Quito, and in Houston and Paris were each confronted with protests by indigenous groups.

Attending the roadshow were black-suited representatives from oil companies including China Petrochemical and China National Offshore Oil. “Ecuador is willing to establish a relationship of mutual benefit – a win-win relationship,” said Ecuador’s ambassador to China in opening remarks.

According to the California-based NGO Amazon Watch, seven indigenous groups who inhabit the land claim that they have not consented to oil projects, which would devastate the area’s environment and threaten their traditional way of life.

“We demand that public and private oil companies across the world not participate in the bidding process that systematically violates the rights of seven indigenous nationalities by imposing oil projects in their ancestral territories,” a group of Ecuadorean organised indigenous associations wrote in an open letter last autumn.

In an interview, Ecuador’s secretary of hydrocarbons, Andrés Donoso Fabara, accused indigenous leaders of misrepresenting their communities to achieve political goals. “These guys with a political agenda, they are not thinking about development or about fighting against poverty,” he said.

Fabara said the government had decided not to open certain blocks of land to bidding because it lacked support from local communities. “We are entitled by law, if we wanted, to go in by force and do some activities even if they are against them,” he said. “But that’s not our policy.”

Amazon Watch said the deal would violate China’s own new investment guidelines, issued jointly by the ministries of commerce and environmental protection last month. The third clause of the guidelines says Chinese enterprises should “promote harmonious development of local economy, environment and community” while operating abroad.

Fabara said he was not aware of the guidelines. “We’re looking for global investors, not just investors from China,” he said. “But of course Chinese companies are really aggressive. In a bidding process, they might present the winning bids.”

Critics say national debt may be a large part of the Ecuadorean government’s calculations. Ecuador owed China more than £4.6bn ($7bn) as of last summer, more than a tenth of its GDP. China began loaning billions of dollars to Ecuador in 2009 in exchange for oil shipments. More recently China helped fund two of its biggest hydroelectric infrastructure projects. Ecuador may soon build a $12.5bn oil refinery with Chinese financing.

“My understanding is that this is more of a debt issue – it’s because the Ecuadoreans are so dependent on the Chinese to finance their development that they’re willing to compromise in other areas such as social and environmental regulations,” said Adam Zuckerman, environmental and human rights campaigner at Amazon Watch. “The message that they’re trying to send to international investors is not in line with reality.”

Last July the inter-American court on human rights ruled to prohibit oil developments in the Sarayaku, a tropical rainforest territory in southern Ecuador that is accessible only by plane and canoe, in order to preserve its rich cultural heritage and biodiversity. The court also mandated that governments obtain “free, prior and informed consent” from native groups before approving oil activities on their indigenous land.

A TV news report broadcast by the US Spanish-language network Telemundo showed members of Ecuadorean native groups – some wearing traditional facepaint and headdresses – waving protest banners and scuffling with security guards outside the Ecuadorean government’s roadshow stop in Houston.

“What the government’s been saying as they have been offering up our territory is not true; they have not consulted us, and we’re here to tell the big investors that they don’t have our permission to exploit our land,” Narcisa Mashienta, a women’s leader of Ecuador’s Shuar people, said in the report.

Moken nomads leave behind their ‘sea gypsy’ life for a modern existence

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alcohol, assimilation, Burma, citizenship, culture, customs, decompression sickness, dive, education, employment, fish-bombing, gambling, integration, Language, livelihood, Moken, nomads, sea cucumber, sea-gypsies, stateless, Thailand, traditions, tribe, tsunami

Moken nomads leave behind their ‘sea gypsy’ life for a modern existence

Ngui takes one last breath and disappears with a tiny splash. Tunnelling through the turquoise waves, he dives past brightly coloured fish and coral, until he reaches the sandy bottom of the seabed, 20 metres deep, where he begins scouring for tonight’s dinner.

He wears no mask, no fins, and no diving tank. He prefers sarongs and button-down shirts decorated with seashell and starfish motifs but the most startling thing about him underwater is his eyes. They are wide open.

Ngui, 30, belongs to the Moken, a nomadic, seafaring tribe of hunter-gatherers who live in the southern seas of Burma and Thailand. Little is known about their origins, but it is believed they descended from migrant Austronesians who set sail from southern China around 4,000 years ago. Spending eight months of the year at sea, the Moken roam in small flotillas of kabang – boats fashioned from a single tree and shared by a nuclear family – and return to land only to barter fish and shells for essentials such as rice and petrol, or to wait out the monsoon season in temporary shacks. It is a way of life that has existed, unchanged, for centuries – but one that may not last for much longer.

The 2004 tsunami greatly depleted the source of the Moken’s only livelihood: the ocean’s once-abundant array of seafood. International fishing boats are now wiping out the little that’s left. Those Moken who have moved ashore are often forced to take dangerous jobs for menial pay. Those who stay at sea are sometimes arrested for lacking papers or permits. Others return to land after months afloat only to find their huts destroyed and luxury tourist resorts built in their place.

“The sea has changed and life has changed,” explains Ngui’s father, Jao. “Things we used to do we can’t do any more. Places we used to go we can’t go any more. Life isn’t fun any more.”

It would be difficult to find a family that represents the changes wrought on the Moken as well as Jao’s. He was born on a boat and spent his childhood at sea. He married at 16 and nearly pursued a traditional, aquatic lifestyle – until he and his wife decided to settle on land.

“Life was hard being illiterate,” says Jao in the cramped house in Kuraburi they now share with a 13-member extended family. “I wanted my children to go to school and have options.”

Education is still a relatively new concept to the roughly 2,000 Moken who live in the waters around Burma and Thailand, most of whom are stateless. A recent push by various charities and the Thai government to issue Thai identity cards has granted some access to state-run schools and healthcare, but claiming full-blown citizenship – by proving that they, or a parent, were born in Thailand – is a complex issue for a nomadic people who hardly use numbers and mark the date according to the tide, not the Gregorian calendar.

Even getting children to school can prove trying, said Sumana Sirimangkala, headteacher at the only school on Koh Lao, an island of 50 Moken families on the Thai-Burmese border. “Moken lack supplies like clothes, food, stationery, textbooks, shoes, raincoats, lifejackets, umbrellas – all the things that are necessary for children to come to school,” she says.

“Moken can’t afford any of these things, so the school has to provide it all – otherwise they don’t want to come.”

Moken children regularly drop out to help their parents earn money, students say. Some boys as young as eight are sent to work in construction, while others help their mothers dig for shells – backbreaking labour in the hot sun.

Nearly all the men on the island are hired by Thai fishing boats to plant explosives on the seabed, or to dive for expensive and exotic rarities such as sea cucumber. Sometimes they are sent down with air run through thin plastic tubes hooked up to a spluttery, diesel-run compressor; other times they dive without any air at all. Many succumb to decompression sickness (the bends) from ascending too quickly; some don’t return at all.

“I’m afraid of being killed, it’s so risky,” admits a 30-year-old Moken who has just returned from a fish-bombing expedition. “We wire together four to five dynamite sticks, connect another explosive wire that hooks up to the boat, and then I dive down to the bottom of the sea. When I come back up, the sticks are ignited with a battery.”

Sitdit, a Moken elder whose son died from decompression sickness during a job in the Nicobar Islands, says risks such as these are increasingly part and parcel of a new way of life.

“We are running out of resources, so our skills have to be adapted to the new challenges,” he says simply. “Sometimes the big boats get caught by the Burmese military and Moken are arrested. I had four relatives arrested by the Burmese military and they all died in jail.”

Apart from a handful of researchers who had studied their language and customs – notably the French father-son anthropologist duo Pierre and Jacques Ivanoff – the Moken were a relatively unknown lot until the tsunami, when headlines described the mysterious “sea gypsies [who] saw signs in the waves”. Charities and religious groups poured in with free supplies – food, petrol, boats and building materials – at such a velocity that some communities were left bewildered by the handouts.

“We had to become Christian to qualify for a boat, so I became a Christian – I even became a church leader!” explains Sitdit, his charity-built, two-room stilt house facing the “church”, an empty wooden structure with a simple roof. “All we had to do was follow the gospel and sing songs. But then the church [group] cheated us, and now nobody goes to church any more.”

Today, a different kind of communion is going on, one where Moken women in sarongs while away the afternoon heat with card games and whisky so strong it makes the eyes burn. When the men return from their jobs at sea, they too take to drinking and gambling.

“There’s an issue with their drinking a lot of alcohol – it’s everywhere,” says Jitlada Rattanapan of Plan Thailand, a charity working to support Moken children.

At Baan Tung Wah, a Moken village of around 70 families in the mainland resort town of Khao Lak, children with snotty noses and dirty T-shirts beg for sweets while elders take shots of strong drink. Most of the parents are away doing menial day jobs – working in construction, spraying insecticides, or scavenging for recyclables along the beaches and streets – leaving the children to play among puppies and chickens in the rubbish-filled streets.

“Everyone in this village drinks – they hit their kids, too,” says a shopkeeper, Kong Kwan, 35, who spends all day selling sweets and crisps to Moken children and petrol and whisky to Moken elders. “Sometimes the police come, but they can’t be bothered to deal with it.”

The community’s 20-year-old youth leader, Big, says that life in the village can be stifling, forcing many youths to look for a way out.

“We’re restricted to living in this area only – about five acres [2 hectares] – and because of the influx of hotels and resorts around here, the sea has been polluted,” he says. “That makes it difficult to go fishing. So a lot of young people just choose easier jobs, like working in hotels or at 7-Eleven.”

Big adds that the Moken youth have pretty much “assimilated seamlessly” into Thai society, so much so that “whatever ‘bad Thais’ do, Moken do now too”, he notes. “Drugs, stealing, marijuana, glue-sniffing. We never saw this before, and it’s getting serious.”

The village is trying to counter such behaviour by offering classes in Moken language and customs to the children, many of whom are unaware of their traditions. Other classes, directed at teens, offer training as tour guides.

The community leader, Hong, who heads the classes and created the village’s Moken museum, hopes that turning Baan Tung Wah into an ecotourism destination may help get people back on track.

“Moken are supposed to travel, to be nomadic, to travel freely. So if we cannot travel freely, we are dead, culturally at least,” he says. “Moken children use mobile phones, study English and choose to be educated. We’ve abandoned our old traditions so much we risk losing them entirely.”

While many charities working for the Moken promote education and citizenship as giving new “options” to such a vulnerable group, Narumon Hinshiranan – a cultural anthropologist at Chulalongkorn University who speaks fluent Moken and has studied the group for the past decade – says this kind of “one-size-fits-all development … limits their nomadic background”.

“I don’t see education as an ‘option’, I see it as integration into Thai society – so that they are essentially cut off from their roots.”

Those who have pursued this new kind of life – such as Jao’s 23-year-old daughter, Kang, who is so far the only Moken to have graduated from university – may determine what choices the Moken make next.

“I see myself as a bridge between the Moken community and the outside world,” says Kang, who this month starts her first job, as the only Moken teacher at the school on Surin island.

She will be living with her brother Ngui, along with some 200 other Moken villagers, but they will be parallel lives in what seems like a parallel world.

“I like to be out doing things,” says Ngui, thrusting a hand out to the sea to explain why he chose not to stay in school. “I dive to collect seafood, gather it up bit by bit, and sell it to shops. It’s enough to make a living for now.”

The Moken

• The Moken are one of many sea gypsy tribes across south-east Asia: there are the Orang Laut of Indonesia; the Bajau of Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei and the Philippines; and the Salone (Moken) of Burma

• Thailand is home to an estimated 12,000 sea gypsies, divided into three groups: the Moken, the Moklen and the Urak Lawoi

• A 2003 study by Lund University in Sweden found that the underwater vision of Moken children was twice as good as that of their European counterparts

• Food sourcing is subsistence-based: men traditionally spear fish, or use nets or traps, to find seafood, while women catch crabs and oysters by hand, or dig for shells. They also engage in basic agriculture

• The Moken are often described as sincere and peace-loving, preferring to flee trouble than engage in disagreements

• Traditionally animist, the Moken perform a large spirit-offering festival in the fifth lunar month and celebrate death by singing, dancing and drinking

• Though the Moken give themselves only one name, the Thai monarchy has created surnames for them, among them “Klatalee” (“brave person of the sea”)

• A bucket of sea cucumbers, which the Moken dive for, earns about $10 a day. A small dish of the stuff sells for $30 or more in Taiwanese restaurants

• Moken are often called “dirty islanders” by Thai people, a phrase that has encouraged many Moken youth to adopt Thai fashion and haircuts to fit in

• Surin island, home to a large Moken settlement, was turned into a national marine park by Thailand in 1981, rendering illegal traditional Moken activities such as fishing and logging (in order to make boats)

• Burma has been rumoured to be looking to permanently resettle many of its Moken and has already turned one Moken island into a military base.

Colombia’s Nukak Maku tribe faces extinction

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Nukak Maku Tribe

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/05/colombia-nukak-maku-tribe-extinction

Only a decade ago, the Nukak Maku, a Colombian indigenous community, lived a peaceful life disconnected from the modern world.

Nomadic hunter-gatherers, they roamed a chunk of the Amazon three times the size of London, spending days trekking to one corner just to fish, then weeks to another to hunt.

Now driven out of their territory by the Farc left-wing guerillas, the tribe occupies a shabby glade half the size of a football field on the outskirts of a frontier town, San José del Guaviare.

“We fled day and night through the jungle,” a young woman, Monica, says. “Finally we arrived in this place, no one is happy here.”

The Nukak say their new home is poor for hunting and fishing. Local farmers get angry when they hunt in the forests.

To make up for the loss of food, Acción Social, the government’s aid organisation, delivers rations. However, the women say it is not sufficient. “They often forget to bring us the rations, and sometimes it is not enough,” says Sandra, a young Nukak mother. “We do not like some of the things they give us, our bodies are not used to it.”

The change in diet has harmed the Nukaks’ health. Many of the children and adults are visibly malnourished. At the time of this reporter’s visit, Sandra’s daughter, Kelly, was in hospital with severe malnutrition. “She is a one-year-old, but has the body of a six-month-old baby,” says Luza Marina, who is in charge of monitoring the Nukak community’s health.

The community suffers from skin infections, respiratory diseases, diarrhoea and other common illnesses. “We never had these diseases before,” says Monica. As a result of daily difficulties and the inability to hunt, many are depressed and have other mental health problems.

Since the Nukak were first “contacted” in 1988, the illnesses of the modern world have had devastating effects. Anthropologists estimate they used to number more than 2,000 but the population has fallen to fewer than 600, bringing fears of extinction.

“For thousands of years the Nukak lived peacefully in their forest. Then the white man arrived. In the 20-odd years since, half their population has been wiped out, their territory has been invaded, and they’ve been driven out of the forest,” says Stephen Corry, director of Survival International in the UK.

“There’s little doubt that if the authorities allow this to continue, the Nukak stand little chance of survival.”

Another concern is the Nukak’s loss of culture. Since leaving the jungle, they have almost lost their traditional ways. Missionaries have taught them to wear clothes and eat modern food.

Whereas previously they had no sense of money, the Nukak people now spend their days begging in the town.

“It is very sad to see our people change their ways so much,” says Fellipe, a man in his 50s. “Now I’m not sure we could even survive in the jungle, it feels like we are doomed to the modern world.”

Responding to the threatened extinction of indigenous communities such as the Nukak, and the nearby Jiw and Sicuani, the Colombian government has started a national safeguard plan. This aims to legally enforce protecting these communities. Few of the Nukak have faith in the government, and many are concerned it is already too late.

“The idea is to guarantee their survival,” says Javier Sanchez, who is coordinating the plan. “If the state does not act quickly, they will be responsible for the disappearing of an indigenous community in our country.”

In the meantime, the Nukak continue to languish in hammocks, longing to return to their nomadic life.

“If we stay here much longer, our people will completely lose our ways, and we will just die off, far from the land where we belong,” says Monica.

What happens when an uncontacted tribe meets ‘civilisation’?

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Ache Tribe

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/what-happens-when-an-uncontacted-tribe-meets-civilisation-6358885.html

Margarita Mbywangy has spent her life fighting for the right to exist. At the age of five, she was kidnapped and sold into domestic slavery, removed from her family and the hunter-gather way of life that her Ache tribe had practiced in eastern Paraguay for millennia.

Ms Mbywangy spent the next 13 years known only as Margarita – the name chosen by her new “mother” who insisted she was her daughter, but never hugged her, didn’t send her to school and made her cook and clean for the family. She looked and felt different; people in the street called her “Indo” – a derogatory term used to insult Paraguay’s indigenous people – but she had no identity papers, just a name.

This part of her story is by no means extraordinary. In the 1960s and 1970s many indigenous children in Paraguay were kidnapped and their parents killed by government forces and farmers who wanted to develop the acres of forest, their ancestral land, where they lived a nomadic life, trying to avoid the threats of the “civilised” world.

By 1976, all the Ache had been forcibly resettled on small areas of designated land where they had to swap hunter-gathering for agriculture in order to survive. Many died trying to defend themselves and the forest; many more died from new diseases such as flu because they had no immunity to these common conditions. The land was sold to farmers, roads were built and the valuable timber harvested. Only 36 families survived the slaughter. The government was accused of genocide.

“When we were taken out of the forest and forced to live in communities, we were left without medicine or doctors, and many, many more people died than even in the fighting. That was really the end of our way of life,” she says. Ms Mbywangy, 49, cannot remember those early years, and perhaps would never have known her story had she not found her family at the age of 18. For two years she tried to find out who she really was with the help of a priest and missionaries – whose predecessors had been responsible for brutal civilisation programmes centuries before.

“My people cry when they are sad and when they are happy, so when they saw me after so many years they started crying. But it was difficult, I was so desperate to know my mother and father but they were already dead, and I couldn’t speak Ache, there were many mixed emotions.”

From her siblings she learnt that her father had died from a snake bite; her mother from flu. She had been captured by farmers on horseback along with two other children when trying to escape with her clan. Ms Mbywangy learnt her forgotten language, and reassimilated with every tradition that her people still practised as best they could. They have been “given” a small forest where they can hunt monkeys and rodents and collect wild fruits, but they also cultivate maize, sweet potatoes, peanuts and rice.

The Ache tribe is now the second smallest, but fastest growing, indigenous group in Paraguay, with about 1,200 people in six communities, each with different customs. Their ancestral forest, and with it their old way of life, has been largely destroyed. Across the world there are more than 150 million tribal people in 60 countries, but only 100 truly uncontacted tribes are known to still exist.

More than half these tribes are in the Brazilian Amazon basin, 15 in Peru and one in Bolivia. Outside Latin America there are uncontacted groups in India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Australia and Russia. Only one, part of the Ayoreo nomadic tribe, is known still to exist in Paraguay. The threats they all face are simple: diseases introduced by outsiders and deforestation, for logging, farming, mining and oil and gas exploration.

The rights organisation Survival International last week released the first- ever images of the nomadic Mashco-Piro Indians in Peru to pressure the Peruvian government into protecting the tribe’s land from loggers and other outsiders. About 70 per cent of land in the Peruvian Amazon has already been sold off to oil and gas companies.

Paraguay, like many of its neighbours, has signed International Labour Organisation 169, a law which protects the land rights of indigenous people. It also has strong national laws which guarantee lands to tribal groups. But an unwelcome throwback to the country’s violent past means there is no public land in Paraguay, as it was all sold to raise money for the government in the early 20th century. Since then there has been no land reform in Paraguay and the government cannot afford to buy back the land.

Apart from a few hard-earned victories, the vast majority of indigenous groups are still struggling to retrieve even small parts of their ancestral land. Many work in slave labour conditions or rely on food handouts.

Ms Mbywangy eventually became a tribal chief and, in an extraordinary twist, she was approached in 2008 by the newly elected leftist president, Fernando Lugo, after she became a tribal activist. Despite her lack of political experience she was appointed Minister for Indigenous Affairs – the first woman and first indigenous person to hold the job. “I accepted because I thought it would be a great opportunity for not just my people, but for all the indigenous people, to fight for what we need, for the forest,” she says.

The tenure was bittersweet, and she stood down at the end of last year amid internal and external opposition. “I would never disappoint my people, never let them down. So I left.” She is clearly angry and disillusioned.

Ms Mbywangy was in the UK speaking at a conference held by the World Land Trust (WLT), which helps NGOs in 20 countries buy land to protect the rapidly disappearing flora and fauna.

John Burton, chief executive of WLT, said: “Conservationists like us need to save big areas of land to protect the wildlife. Groups like the Ache also need big areas of land, but in order to live their lives as hunter-gatherers. These are not necessarily incompatible, but there is potential for conflict so we have to learn to work together. Establishing trust with indigenous people, who have suffered such terrible abuses from outsiders, is the most difficult thing.”

Ms Mbywangy says: “The small areas of forest we have left are crying out asking to be saved. It is very important to protect the birds and animals, but also, organisations like the Wildlife Land Trust must realise that indigenous people are part of the forest too… so we will work with those NGOs trying to preserve the forests, because we are the forest. We cannot survive without it.”

First contact: The hazards

Most invasions of areas which are home to uncontacted tribes are prompted by the desire of loggers, miners, oil companies and cattle ranchers to seize lands and resources. But well-intentioned non-governmental organisations, missionaries, tourists and even locals who try to make contact can prove dangerous.

One of the reasons for trying to avoid contact, such as in the case of the people of the Mashco-Piro tribe who were chanced upon by Spanish archeaologist Diego Cortijo recently in a remote part of Peru, is the risk of passing on diseases to which they have no immunity. “First contact” usually results in 50-80 per cent of the tribe dying of imported sicknesses.

The danger of forcing contact on isolated nomadic tribes was reaffirmed by the recent death of Nicolas “Shaco” Flores (right), who was shot by an uncontacted tribe’s arrow near Manu National Park in Peru. He had been leaving food and gifts for Mashco-Piro Indians for 20 years and thought he was helping, but even he became viewed as a threat by some in the group.

In July 2011, a Brazilian tribe who lived near the Peruvian border is believed to have been massacred by drug traffickers. A few months later an eight-year-old girl from the Awa tribe was burnt to death by loggers in the north-east.

About 450 tribespeople were murdered in Brazil between 2003 and 2010, according to the Catholic Indigenous Missionary Council.

Nina Lakhani

Australia set to recognise Aborigines as first people of continent

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Aborigines, Australia

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/20/australia-aborigines-race-discrimination-referendum

Australia is poised to make historic changes to its constitution, recognising Aborigines as the country’s original inhabitants and removing the last clauses of state-sanctioned racial discrimination.

The amendments could be put to the Australian people in a referendum before the next general election in 2013, after the prime minister, Julia Gillard, endorsed the unanimous findings of a panel of 19 experts.

Section 25 of the constitution recognises that states can disqualify people, such as Aborigines, from voting. Section 51 says federal parliament can make laws based upon a person’s race. Both were put in the constitution in 1901 to prevent certain races from living in areas reserved for white people or from taking up certain occupations.

The prime minister, Julia Gillard, welcomed the report. “We are big enough and it is the right time to say yes to an understanding of our past, to say yes to constitutional change, and to say yes to a future more united and more reconciled than we have ever been before,” she said.

The panel’s report followed public consultation with more than 4,500 people and more than 250 public meetings. The panel’s co-chair, Aboriginal elder Professor Patrick Dodson, urged bipartisan support for the proposals.

“This is a time when truth and respect for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples needs to be achieved through the recognition in our constitution,” he said. “Strong leadership and our national interest are critical for our nation to go forward.”

When Australia became a federation in 1901 there were only two references to Aborigines in the constitution: one denied federal parliament the power to make laws with respect to Aboriginal people in any state, while another excluded what it termed “Aboriginal natives” from the census. Both of those sections were scrapped in a 1967 referendum (by a majority of 90%), leaving a constitution that made no mention whatsoever of indigenous people.

Referendums in Australia have historically been hard to pass. Only eight out of 44 have succeeded since 1906, partly because any alteration to the constitution must be approved by a “double majority”. This demands that, as well as a majority yes vote being required nationally, a majority must also be reached in four of the six states.

The opposition leader, Tony Abbott, has said he will study the document. “We have some reservations about anything that might turn out to be a one-clause bill of rights but we accept that millions of Australians’ hopes and dreams are resting on constitutional recognition of indigenous people,” he said.

The report also called for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages to be recognised as the country’s first languages. It calls for continuing respect for these cultures, languages and heritage.

The government aims to hold the referendum at or before a general election, due in 2013.