David Hill
What is your role at Survival International (SI)?
My official title is assistant campaigner and researcher. I have quite a lot of responsibility for the Peru and Colombia campaigns, so one crucial thing is to monitor what’s going on in those countries with respect to the groups with which we’re working. I’m also involved in the Botswana bushmen’s campaign and I coordinate something called the ‘stamp it out’ campaign, which is aimed at challenging the use of terms such as primitive and Stone Age in the media to describe tribal peoples today. Those terms are dangerous because governments often justify removing tribal people on those grounds.
What exactly does it mean when a group is
described as ‘uncontacted’?
Today, the majority of Peru’s indigenous peoples are believed to be the descendants of indigenous peoples who had contact with Europeans during the rubber boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when hundreds of thousands of Europeans entered [South America] and recruited indigenous people as labour, enslaving them and massacring them. These people fled to the most inaccessible parts of the rainforest and have largely remained uncontacted by foreigners since, but they have had some contact with other tribal or indigenous peoples in the rainforest.
What did your recent trip to Peru involve?
Ten years ago, SI organised a successful campaign in Peru to keep Mobil out of areas where uncontacted Indians lived. The brief for my field trip was to return to Peru and get the lowdown on the distribution of uncontacted peoples today. That involved speaking to people in Lima and in the rainforest towns of Pucallpa and Puerto Maldonado, indigenous organisations, anthropologists, environmentalists, journalists – anyone who’s interested in the issue and knows something about it. I decided to go to those places where there had been contact with the isolated peoples in the past and made three river trips up the Las Piedras, Yurua and Carabja rivers, aiming for the last settled contacted indigenous or tribal communities on each river – beyond, there’s nothing but protected areas and the isolated peoples.
What kind of material did you gather?
I filmed 14 interviews with people who’ve had encounters with uncontacted peoples; I had a 1:100,000 scale map so I was also able to get them to show me where it was that they’d had these encounters.
What are the main threats to Indians in Peru?
The main threat is from logging, but they are also very vulnerable to encounters with Europeans – because of their isolation, they don’t have immunity to outside diseases. Natural-resource exploration [and extraction] is another big concern, and in 2002, a group of evangelical protestant missionaries called Pioneer Mission made contact with four Mastanahua people. Missionaries represent a different type of threat as they are actively looking to make contact with these people. Pioneer Mission has now left, and we suspected that it gave up after having only succeeded in contacting four people during three years. But it’s the loggers that concern me the most – they’re there right now and there are encounters between the loggers and uncontacted Indians every year. The loggers simply want to kill them, to remove these obstacles from the rainforest. One group, the Murunahua, have had a reserve created for them in 1997, but they were utterly uncontacted until 1996.
How many reserves like this are there?
The Murunahua Territorial Reserve was created by the government in 1997, but it’s completely unobserved. There are technically five of these reserves [in Peru] for isolated people and they’re all unobserved – they have people crawling all over them. The estimate is that 60 per cent of the Murunahua Land Reserve has been logged out already. Another reason I went there was
to gather information about the Murunahua and also observe whether any logging is taking place.
How do we know they feel threatened?
By talking to people in Peru, the evidence suggests that in the past, the uncontacted peoples would deal with an encounter with other tribes by simply walking away. They’ve walked away enough for us to know that they don’t want contact. But what’s happened in the past six or seven years is that the uncontactables have become more aggressive. And what that suggests is that they’re feeling pressure on their land. But in terms of defending themselves, they only have two ways: that’s to literally walk away or defend themselves with a bow and arrow.
What is SI ultimately trying to achieve?
We want the loggers, oil companies, missionaries, whoever – to respect the land rights of these people and respect their wishes. And their overriding wish is clear: they don’t want contact.
My official title is assistant campaigner and researcher. I have quite a lot of responsibility for the Peru and Colombia campaigns, so one crucial thing is to monitor what’s going on in those countries with respect to the groups with which we’re working. I’m also involved in the Botswana bushmen’s campaign and I coordinate something called the ‘stamp it out’ campaign, which is aimed at challenging the use of terms such as primitive and Stone Age in the media to describe tribal peoples today. Those terms are dangerous because governments often justify removing tribal people on those grounds.
What exactly does it mean when a group is
described as ‘uncontacted’?
Today, the majority of Peru’s indigenous peoples are believed to be the descendants of indigenous peoples who had contact with Europeans during the rubber boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when hundreds of thousands of Europeans entered [South America] and recruited indigenous people as labour, enslaving them and massacring them. These people fled to the most inaccessible parts of the rainforest and have largely remained uncontacted by foreigners since, but they have had some contact with other tribal or indigenous peoples in the rainforest.
What did your recent trip to Peru involve?
Ten years ago, SI organised a successful campaign in Peru to keep Mobil out of areas where uncontacted Indians lived. The brief for my field trip was to return to Peru and get the lowdown on the distribution of uncontacted peoples today. That involved speaking to people in Lima and in the rainforest towns of Pucallpa and Puerto Maldonado, indigenous organisations, anthropologists, environmentalists, journalists – anyone who’s interested in the issue and knows something about it. I decided to go to those places where there had been contact with the isolated peoples in the past and made three river trips up the Las Piedras, Yurua and Carabja rivers, aiming for the last settled contacted indigenous or tribal communities on each river – beyond, there’s nothing but protected areas and the isolated peoples.
What kind of material did you gather?
I filmed 14 interviews with people who’ve had encounters with uncontacted peoples; I had a 1:100,000 scale map so I was also able to get them to show me where it was that they’d had these encounters.
What are the main threats to Indians in Peru?
The main threat is from logging, but they are also very vulnerable to encounters with Europeans – because of their isolation, they don’t have immunity to outside diseases. Natural-resource exploration [and extraction] is another big concern, and in 2002, a group of evangelical protestant missionaries called Pioneer Mission made contact with four Mastanahua people. Missionaries represent a different type of threat as they are actively looking to make contact with these people. Pioneer Mission has now left, and we suspected that it gave up after having only succeeded in contacting four people during three years. But it’s the loggers that concern me the most – they’re there right now and there are encounters between the loggers and uncontacted Indians every year. The loggers simply want to kill them, to remove these obstacles from the rainforest. One group, the Murunahua, have had a reserve created for them in 1997, but they were utterly uncontacted until 1996.
How many reserves like this are there?
The Murunahua Territorial Reserve was created by the government in 1997, but it’s completely unobserved. There are technically five of these reserves [in Peru] for isolated people and they’re all unobserved – they have people crawling all over them. The estimate is that 60 per cent of the Murunahua Land Reserve has been logged out already. Another reason I went there was
to gather information about the Murunahua and also observe whether any logging is taking place.
How do we know they feel threatened?
By talking to people in Peru, the evidence suggests that in the past, the uncontacted peoples would deal with an encounter with other tribes by simply walking away. They’ve walked away enough for us to know that they don’t want contact. But what’s happened in the past six or seven years is that the uncontactables have become more aggressive. And what that suggests is that they’re feeling pressure on their land. But in terms of defending themselves, they only have two ways: that’s to literally walk away or defend themselves with a bow and arrow.
What is SI ultimately trying to achieve?
We want the loggers, oil companies, missionaries, whoever – to respect the land rights of these people and respect their wishes. And their overriding wish is clear: they don’t want contact.
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