Just less than a month ago there was lots of excitement about a tribe of people living deep in the Brazilian jungle that had been photographed from the air. It was claimed at the time that these villagers were just now being discovered for the first time.In the past few days it's been determined that this was a lie on the part of the photographer.
José Carlos Meirelles has admitted that authorities have known about the tribe since at least 1910! He took the photos and still claimed that these people had been completely undiscovered until his aerial reconnaissance.
Why? Because he wanted it to seem like they were a truly lost tribe so that more attention would be given toward the issue of the impact of logging in the Amazon basin.
In other words: it was a lie driven by a political agenda. What a shocker eh?
1 comment:
There was no lie. There may have been some media misunderstanding, but from the moment the photos emerged, Survival International (the global movement for tribal peoples) and FUNAI (the Brazilian Government's National Indian Foundation), which supplied the photos, have not said that the tribe was 'unknown' or 'lost'. The tribe was and remains ‘uncontacted’: no outsider has been known to have any peaceful contact with its members.
This is true of about 100 tribes worldwide. Since the photographs were released, Peru has acknowledged the lands of uncontacted tribes on its side of the border, and sent a team to investigate the illegal logging that threatens their survival.
Find out more about the world's uncontacted tribes at http://www.survival-international.org/uncontactedtribes and read Survival's article on the supposed hoax at http://www.survival-international.org/news/3400
Matt
Survival International
Post a Comment