Ghost protocol: Wknd explores the growing threat to the world’s uncontacted tribes
In a world of new needs and scarcities, conflict is escalating. The tussles are over rare metals, ores, timber, space – and the right to be left alone.
For millions of years, we moved through the world and left almost no trace at all. It’s what makes the study of early humans so challenging.
Incredibly, there are still humans who live like this.
In 2021, a team of government researchers in Brazil found traces of one such uncontacted tribe: signs of campsites and rough-hewn ceramic pots and baskets, deep in the Mamoria Grande region of the Amazon rainforest.
It was known that a tribe lived here (the Amazon is home to most of the world’s remaining 100-odd uncontacted tribes). But this was the first evidence officially recorded. Last December, FUNAI, the indigenous affairs agency of the Brazil government, acted on that information to pass new norms that prevent further activity in Mamoria Grande.
Such action is rare, and often comes after years of advocacy and litigation by NGOs. Brazil’s FUNAI is itself an attempt to navigate such conflicts better. And the conflict is intense.
Most of the world’s remote and uncontacted tribes live in rainforests that are being eaten away at, in bursting-at-the-seams South America and Asia. Among local communities, the uncontacted are often treated with respect bordering on awe.
In her remarkable biographical work, We Will Not Be Saved (2024), Nemonte Nenquimo — who grew up in a remote tribe and now leads a pan-Amazon fight for the right to land and the right to be left alone — describes them as “the people we used to be”.
They often wear no clothes. The only objects they acquire, usually via quiet barter with local tribes, tend to be things like tobacco, fishing lines and machetes.
They communicate with the outside world through signs they leave behind, usually asking to be left alone. A red feather and a blow dart are a warning: “This is our territory.” Two crossed spears placed across a path are, as Nenquimo puts it, a message that shouldn’t have to be explained.
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In our world, with all its interconnectedness and scarcities, these nomadic hunter-gatherers face heightened risk of interference.
In the mildest versions of such interference, the sounds of logging, quarrying and oil-drilling disturb local wildlife and disrupt the hunts on which the very survival of these people depends. More severe interferences range from overfishing and water pollution from effluents, to armed conflict, abductions and killings. Eventually large sections of forest that go missing, forcing them into the mainstream.
It isn’t clear which of these factors was at play last month, when a young man from an isolated tribe in the Brazilian Amazon approached a riverine community.
He was barefoot and wearing a loincloth. He was looking for something, he signalled. The villagers attempted to communicate with him, but couldn’t. They attempted to show him how to use a lighter, and eventually succeeded, they said. He was offered some fish to eat, and left the next day.
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In India’s Andaman and Nicobar island clusters, in the Bay of Bengal, only two of the six indigenous groups still remain uncontacted: The Sentinelese and the Shompen.
The Sentinelese, named after the North Sentinel Island in the Andamans that they inhabit, have famously remained so by killing anyone who attempts to approach them. This, and the fact that their island is tiny (about 60 sq km; smaller than Mumbai’s Sanjay Gandhi National Park), have helped keep their way of life intact.
The Shompen of Great Nicobar, meanwhile, face an existential threat.
In 2021, a ₹72,000-crore mega-infrastructure project was conceived that seeks to remodel this 921-sq-km island as India’s answer to Singapore, Hong Kong or Macau. The proposal received environmental clearance in a year. The budget has since grown to ₹80,000 crore, and work hasn’t even begun yet.
The plan makes provisions for a massive shipping terminal, a large airport, residential townships, and a solar and gas-based power plant. Land prices have started to rise.
According to the proposal, the Shompen will, in a few years, share their island with 6.5 lakh people, and tens of thousands more visiting as tourists.
There is talk of creating no-go areas to protect the tribe and the island’s delicate biosphere. There are also plans to fell more than two million trees. And at least three Shompen settlements have been identified as “too close” to project sites.
Added risk factors, for the tribe, include noise pollution, light pollution and dams along slender rivers, as well as garbage, sewage and other effluents generated at a scale never known on the island.
There is also the physical risk of contact itself.
When the British first arrived in the Andamans in the 18th century, they introduced influenza, measles and syphilis. Between the diseases, violent battles, and the impact on habitat as the British set about building naval bases and the famous Kala Pani prison, among other installations, the tribal population was decimated.
This has happened over and over, around the world, says Sophie Grig, a researcher with the indigenous-rights advocacy group Survival International. “In Brazil in the ’70s and ’80s, contact with the outside world introduced new diseases such as polio, in addition to devastating local cultures, habitats and ways of life. They said: ‘We’ll take doctors. We’ll make sure we’re vaccinated. We’ll have all the medical supplies ready’,” she adds. “Time and again, it resulted in people dying.”
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It is important to acknowledge, activists add, that uncontacted tribes have not remained so by accident, or from some fathomless ignorance of the world.
They are uncontacted because it is the life they choose, generation after generation.
The Sentinelese make this known with arrows. The Shompen quietly wait for a visitor to walk away, before heading deeper into their forest to rejoin their tribe.
“Walk down the trail, then veer into forest, leaving no tracks,” as Nenquimo puts it in her introduction, quoting her father Tiri.
Around the world, these tribes leave quiet threats like the red feather, blow dart and crossed spears, pleading to be left alone. Some plant booby traps of spikes in the ground, hoping to deter those who won’t listen.
They know if it comes to a fight, they cannot win. It is why the United Nations has, since 2018, recognised the state of being uncontacted as a sign of non-consent to being contacted.
In the tribes’ view, nothing we can offer justifies the changes to their lifestyle and culture; not medicine or trade, money or roads, says Manish Chandi, a researcher of human geography and ecology, who has worked in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands for 25 years.
“Our political systems or solar energy have no meaning or relevance,” he adds. “They care for their world and way of life and have made this very clear.”
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Mashco Piro, Peru: Caught in a timber trap
The rubber trees that grow across much of India come from the lands of the Mashco Piro in Peru.
In the late 19th-century, their territories were invaded by rubber barons who wanted the Hevea trees from the Amazon Basin, which are rich in the material needed for the latex in vulcanised rubber.
As the harvesting began on an industrial scale, the Mashco Piro were among the tribes who were displaced, captured, flogged, killed, raped and robbed.
Tribe members who survived are said to have fled deeper into the massive forests of south-east Peru, where they regained their isolation and returned to their traditional ways.
They are known to spend part of the year in palm-leaf huts, near the rivers they fish in. In the wet season, they move away from the swelling rivers and find higher ground.
Estimates put their population at 750, according to the indigenous-rights advocacy group Survival International, making them one of the largest isolated groups in the world.
(The population estimates are made based on regular expeditions, which analyse traces such as the remains of hammock frames and of fires in abandoned camps.)
Amid intensifying logging activity in these forests, the tribe is now under threat again.
In 2002, the Peruvian indigenous activist group FENAMAD pushed the government to create the Madre de Dios Territorial Reserve. This reserve now protects 8,000 sq km of Mashco Piro territory (about the size of Puerto Rico). Non-indigenous people cannot enter this region without permission.
But logging licences have been granted near the reserve, the terms of which have been violated, leading to conflicts with the Mashco Piro.
At least two loggers have been killed in confrontations.
One logging licence has been suspended.
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Hongana Manyawa, Indonesia: A homeland invaded for EVs
The Weda Bay Project mine, located in Maluku, Indonesia, is the largest nickel mine in the world by production volume.
It is one of 19 located in the Halmahera rainforests, across land that overlaps with the territory of the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa people.
This tribe numbered about 3,500 in the mid-1990s. About 3,000 of these were contacted, “mainstreamed” and “settled” by missionaries and the government.
The 500 that remained in the forest fled deeper into what is now the Aketajawe Lolobata national park. Like the Sentinelese, they have expressed their disinterest in being contacted by shooting arrows at those who try to enter their territory.
“We know a lot about the Hongana Manyawa’s way of life, because we can speak to their contacted relatives,” says Sophie Grig, a researcher with the indigenous-rights advocacy group Survival International.
It is known, for instance, that the Hongana Manyawa consider the forest sacred and believe that trees possess souls and feelings. They do not build habitation of wood, as a result. Instead, their homes are made of sticks and leaves. When harvesting food and medicine, they seek the permission of the plants. They see themselves as de facto protectors of the Halmahera rainforest and its inhabitants. (Much of this is common to remote and uncontacted tribes around the world.)
Ironically, the nickel being mined here is a key component of green vehicles’ electric batteries. Indonesia is currently the world’s largest producer of the mineral.
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Mamoria Grande, Brazil: Life amid a hunting and fishing boom
In the torrential monsoon of the Amazon rainforest, the uncontacted people of the Mamoria Grande Indigenous Territory in Brazil abandon their huts in the lowlands and move to higher ground.
Priscilla Schwarzenholz, an anthropologist and researcher with the indigenous-rights advocacy group Survival International, used the opportunity to visit the site of the huts recently, as part of an expedition organised by FUNAI, the indigenous affairs agency of the Brazilian government.
“We could see where they hung their hammocks,” she says. “We saw Brazil nut shells, which is one of their main food sources; and baskets of different sizes, which they make, to carry things around.”
There were traces from where the tribals had scraped at trees to collect a resin that helps keep their fires going. The group also found signs of a presumed play area, in which a small bow and arrow remained.
“There was a rope around a tree, where we think they had tethered a small animal, probably a pet pig,” says Schwarzenholz.
Very little is known about this group. According to Survival International, it is made up of hunter-gatherers who live close to the Purus River in the western Amazon. Though neighbouring indigenous communities have known about them for decades, conclusive evidence of their existence was only found in 2021. It included hunting shelters, pottery, woven baskets, and bows.
In December, FUNAI issued a temporary land protection order that declares the region off-limits to those without special permission. Still, Schwarzenholz says, “hunting and fishing are done on such a large scale around their area, we’re afraid it could affect their supply of food.”
It is the same in the Amazon’s Javari Valley region, which sprawls across border areas of Peru, Colombia and Brazil. The region hosts an estimated 16 uncontacted groups, the biggest such concentration in the world, Schwarzenholz says. There too, logging, fishing, and lately drug smuggling, act as threats.
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Shompen, India: In their twilight years?
Of the approximately 8,500 people who now inhabit Great Nicobar island, about 200 are uncontacted Shompen, most of whom live deep in the evergreen forests.
About 1,200 people are the various Nicobarese tribes, the other indigenous community on the island. The remaining 7,000 or so are servicemen, ex-servicemen and their families, living in settlements built here since the 1970s and ’80s.
The hunter-gatherer Shompen have traditionally emerged from their settlements to barter with their coastal Nicobarese neighbours. Since the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, a few individuals emerge from time to time, to pick up government-sanctioned rations of rice.
They are resolutely uncontacted. They have thrown spears at government officials who have wandered too close to their settlements.
Even the traditional barter transactions were unusually executed.
“Each group deposits their respective produce at an appointed place, and leaves,” says SA Awaradi, former director of tribal welfare in the Andaman and Nicobar Administration. “The Shompen leave honey, cane, lemons and resin, while the Nicobarese leave tobacco and metal implements such as machetes, which are very useful to the Shompen.”
While the Shompen are largely hunter-gatherers, they do cultivate small gardens of yam, taro, chilli, lemon, tobacco, vegetables, bananas, and pandanus (a fleshy local fruit that grows on palm-like trees). Like most remote tribes, they eat a wide range of locally available animals.
“They collect the larvae of the wood-boring beetle, and also consume macaques, crocodiles, wild boar, and a lot of fish, eels, snails and shellfish,” says Manish Chandi, a researcher of human geography and ecology, who has worked in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands for 25 years. “The forest is a bounty of food, if you know where and how to find it.”
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Sentinelese, India: A kingdom of their own
Whatever we know about the Sentinelese, we’ve learned largely against their will.
Considered the most isolated tribe in the world, they are said to have lived on North Sentinel Island in the Andamans for over 50,000 years.
Through modern history, they have been unwavering in their determination to repel overtures from outsiders.
In 2006, they are believed to have captured and killed two Indian fishermen who ventured too close to the island (Indian law prohibits non-Sentinelese from approaching North Sentinel).
The American missionary John Allen Chau, who travelled to the island illegally aiming to introduce the tribals to Christianity, was killed too.
Attempts by the government of India to approach did not bear much fruit either, in most instances. Expeditions in the 1960s were called to a halt after a live pig meant as a gift was speared to death and buried.
Fresh attempts were made in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Teams of anthropologists and doctors from the Anthropological Survey of India were sent on missions that used a slow, gentle touch.
“About once a month, we would arrive a little distance from the island and drop coconuts and make friendly gestures,” says SA Awaradi, an anthropologist and former director of tribal welfare in the Andaman and Nicobar Administration.
The Sentinelese would walk down to the edge of the water, armed with bows and arrows, and collect the coconuts that washed up on shore.
After nearly three years of doing this, one day they arrived unarmed, which the team used as a cue to get into small lifeboats and venture closer. In 1991, a woman anthropologist named Madhumala Chattopadhyay, a Nicobarese anthropologist named Anstice Justin, and Awaradi, were among those who stepped off the lifeboat and into knee-deep water, to hand the coconuts to the Sentinelese directly.
“Given that they had women in their midst, of whom they are fiercely protective, perhaps they let their guard down because of my presence,” says Chattopadhyay, now 64. “Another time, they even got into our boat. They were as curious about us as we were about them.”
The meeting, and the images captured of it, made news around the world.
“We became concerned that there was too much attention on the island, which could lead to people being curious enough to try to visit,” says Awaradi. “The tribe is also vulnerable to diseases and exploitation. So we pushed through a policy decision to stop contact expeditions, maintain a distance, intensify patrolling around the island, and allow the Sentinelese to eventually re-establish their hostility towards us.”
The Government of India maintains what is referred to as a “hands off, eyes on” approach. In the wake of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, for instance, glimpses emerged of a man firing arrows at a Coast Guard helicopter that was checking on the island.
The Sentinelese language, laws and traditional knowledge systems remain unknown. Population estimates oscillate between 50 and 300. There is no way of telling how many Sentinelese there are.
What helps them maintain their independence is the small size of the island, says Awaradi. It measures about 60 sq km, smaller than Mumbai’s Sanjay Gandhi National Park. Small enough, he adds, for it not to be considered worth colonising.
It remains illegal for civilians to travel within five nautical miles of the island.
