Since we’ve posted about their first attempt at contact with the outside world in 2011, two years later, one of the world’s most isolated tribes has yet again been seen and recorded on video after briefly emerging from the Peruvian jungle, apparently, asking for food.
The tribe, which numbers in the hundreds, has had virtually no contact with the wider world. It’s been said that logging and urban development have diminished the area in which the tribe can live.
Anthropologis Beatriz Huertas told the Associated Press news agency that the tribe could sometimes be seen migrating through the jungle during the dry season, but it was strange to see them so close to the village across the river, she said.
“It could be they are upset by problems of others taking advantage of resources in their territories and for that reason were demanding objects and food of the population,” she said.
The footage, filmed late in June and released by local rainforest campaign group AIDESEP and the Fenamad federation for indigenous rights, showed how the tribe members of all ages and sexes can be seen standing in the river, asking villagers on the other side to send them bananas. The villagers placed the bananas in a canoe and floated them towards the tribe to avoid coming into closer contact.
It’s pretty disturbing to see how these people have to come out and ask us for food, (considering we are the ones who destroy their habitat) while they have been able to sustain themselves for such a very long time.
Perhaps this should open our minds and give us a mirror of what our society is about.
The government forbids direct contact because the tribes’ immune systems are not
thought able to cope with the type of germs carried by other Peruvians.
There are thought to be between 12,000 and 15,000 people from “contacted” tribes living in the jungles east of the Andes.