![]() ![]() They grow plants for food and medicine and use them to build houses and make everyday objects. Most tribes live entirely off the forests, savannas and rivers by a mixture of hunting, gathering and fishing. Many, such as the nomadic Kawahiva, who number a few dozen, are fleeing loggers and ranchers invading their land.Īs pressure mounts to exploit their lands, all uncontacted Indians are extremely vulnerable both to violent attack (which is common), and to diseases widespread elsewhere like flu and measles, to which they have no immunity. Others are scattered fragments, the survivors of tribes virtually wiped out by the impacts of the rubber boom and expanding agriculture in the last century. Some number several hundred and live in remote border areas in Acre state and in protected territories such as the Vale do Javari, on the border with Peru. It is now thought that over 100 such groups live in the Amazon. Uncontacted Indians in the western Brazilian Amazon. © Gleison Miranda/FUNAI/Survivalīrazil is home to more uncontacted peoples than anywhere on the planet. The Awá are the most threatened tribe on earth. © Survival International Uncontacted ![]() The Akuntsu tribe, for example, now consists of just four people, and the Awá just 450.Īwá mother and baby. Many Amazonian peoples number fewer than 1,000. The smallest consists of just one man, who lives in a small patch of forest surrounded by cattle ranches and soya plantations in the western Amazon, and eludes all attempts at contact. The largest Amazonian tribe in Brazil is the Tikuna, who number 40,000. The people with the largest territory are the relatively isolated 19,000 Yanomami, who occupy 9.4 million hectares in the northern Amazon, an area about the same size as the US state of Indiana and slightly larger than Hungary. The smallest Amazonian tribe consists of one man, who lives in this house in western Brazil. © Survival Many communities are crammed into overcrowded reserves, and others live under tarpaulins by the side of highways. During the past 100 years almost all their land has been stolen from them and turned into vast, dry networks of cattle ranches, soya fields and sugar cane plantations. The largest tribe today is the Guarani, numbering 51,000, but they have very little land left. Those peoples who live in the savannahs and Atlantic forests of the south, such as the Guarani and the Kaingang, and the dry interior of the north-east such as the Pataxo Hã Hã Hãe and Tupinambá, were among the first to come into contact with the European colonists when they landed in Brazil in 1500.ĭespite hundreds of years of contact with expanding frontier society, they have in most cases fiercely maintained their language and customs in the face of the massive theft of, and continuing encroachment onto, their lands. The Yanomami paint their faces with the natural black genipapo dye, and decorate themselves with natural fibres. © Fiona Watson/Survival Nearly all of this reserved land (98.5%) lies in the Amazon.īut although roughly half of all Brazilian Indians live outside the Amazon, these tribes only occupy 1.5% of the total land reserved for Indians in the country. The government has recognized 690 territories for its indigenous population, covering about 13% of Brazil’s land mass. There are about 305 tribes living in Brazil today, totaling around 900,000 people, or 0.4% of Brazil’s population. ![]()
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