Tribal woman, Omo Valley, Ethiopia © Matilda Temperley / www.matildatemperley.com

It rises in Ethiopia’s Shewa Highlands, and flows for 760 kms through terraced hillsides, volcanic outcrops and fertile grasslands as far as the world’s greatest desert lake, Lake Turkana, in Kenya.

The lower valley of the Omo River is believed by some historians to have been a cultural crossroads for thousands of years, where a vast diversity of migrating peoples have converged. Today, at least eight different tribes speaking six different languages (the Bodi (Me’en), Daasanach, Kara (or Karo), Kwegu (or Muguji), Mursi and Nyangatom) live along the lower reaches of the river. Many are a blend of nomadic herdsmen and shifting agriculturalists. They travel the area in search of water and grazing lands for their cattle, goats and sheep. They also depend on the river for their livelihood, having developed ecological practices that are intricately adapted to the semi-arid climate and the flooding cycles of the river.

Tribal boy with livestock, Ethiopia. Terry Hughes / www.terryhughesimages.com.

Every year the Omo swells, reaching its maximum level in August or September, when it overflows, depositing a fertile silt on its riverbanks as it retreats. This nourishes crops such as sorghum, corn and maize planted on the flood plains. Then the mighty river retreats, and the cyclical process begins again. ‘The annual flood is the life-blood of the local population.’ said Dr. David Turton, of Oxford University’s African Studies Centre.

Now, however, the life-giving river is threatened by government-sanctioned development schemes.

In July 2006, Ethiopia signed a contract with the Italian company Salini Costruttori to build Gibe III, the biggest hydroelectric dam in sub-saharan Africa (dams I and II have already been built). This dam will block the southwestern part of the river, so ending the Omo’s natural flood cycle and jeopardizing the tribes’ sophisticated flood-retreat cultivation methods. Tribes such as the Kwegu who rely on hunting, gathering and agriculture will be pushed to the brink by the inevitable reduction in fish stocks. ‘All but two tribes combine agriculture with pastoralism, and none could survive without ‘flood- retreat’ or ‘recession’ agriculture,’ said Dr. Turton. This fear is echoed by a Kwegu man. ‘We depend on the fish,’ he said. ‘They are like our cattle. We eat from the Omo River’.

In addition to the construction of Gibe III, Survival International recently discovered that vast tracts of fertile farmland in the Omo Valley are being leased to foreign companies to grow and export food, as well as being cleared for vast state-run plantations to produce export crops and crops for the Ethiopian market, notably sugar-cane. Tribes such as the Suri, Mursi, Bodi and Kwegu are being violently evicted from their villages.

This week, Survival International also revealed that three independent reports have warned that the controversial Gibe III dam, and land grabs for plantations, risk imminent ‘catastrophe’ in Ethiopia’s Lower Omo Valley.

- Humanitarian Catastrophe and Regional Armed Conflict Brewing in the Transborder Region of Ethiopia, Kenya and South Sudan published by the Africa Resources Working Group concludes that 200,000 tribal people in Ethiopia and 300,000 in Kenya will suffer irreversible impacts from the dam and plantations.

- The Downstream Impacts of Ethiopia’s Gibe III Dam – East Africa’s Aral Sea in the Making? published by International Rivers warns that the hydrological changes from the dam and associated irrigation for the plantations, which will use fertilizers, may lead to dead zones in the Omo River.

‘The world needs to be aware of the decision to violently strip the Lower Omo Valley tribes of their self-sustaining way of life,’ says Stephen Corry of Survival International. ‘These peoples have used their land to cultivate crops and graze cattle to feed their families for generations. This basic right has now been taken from them, in a brutal manner, leaving them hungry and afraid.’

‘There is no singing and dancing along the Omo River now,’ said a Mursi man. ‘The people are too hungry. The kids are quiet. If the Omo floods are gone, we will die.’

Tribal women on the Omo River, Ethiopia. © Terry Hughes / www.terryhughesimages.com

Karapiru 

His name means “Hawk” in his language. Yet even with the acuity of vision the moniker suggests, Karapiru could not have foreseen thetragedy that befell his people, the Awá tribe of northeastern Brazil. He could never have imagined the day that he would flee for his life far into the rainforest, a shotgun pellet burning in his back, his family mown down by gunmen. Nor could he have known that this brutal day would be the first in a decade of solitude and silence.

Karapiru’s ancestral homeland lies in Maranhão state, between the equatorial forests of Amazonia to the west and the eastern savannahs. To the indigenous Awá, however, the land has only one name: Harakwá, or, “the place that we know”.

The 460 members of the Awá tribe live by hunting for wild pigs, tapirs and monkeys, traveling through the rainforest with 6-foot bows, and by gathering forest produce: babaçu nuts, açaí berries, and honey. Some foods are considered to have special properties; others, such as vultures, bats, and the three-toed sloth, are forbidden. The Awá also hunt by night, lighting the way with torches made from tree resin.

The tribe nurtures orphaned animals as pets; they share their hammocks with raccoon-like coatis, and split mangoes with green parakeets.  Awá women even breastfeed capuchin and howler monkeys and have also been known to suckle small pigs.

Awá child.

The Awá year is divided into “sun” and “rain”; the rains are controlled by celestial beings called mai ra who oversee vast reservoirs in the sky. When the moon is full, the men, their dark hair speckled white with king vulture feathers, commune with the spirits through a chant-induced trance, during a sacred ritual that lasts until dawn.

For centuries, their way of life has been one of peaceful symbiosis with the rainforest. But over the course of four decades, they have witnessed the destruction of their homeland – more than 30 percent of one of their territories has now been razed to make way for cattle ranches – and the murder of their people at the hands of karaí, or non-Indians. Today they are one of the last nomadic tribes in Brazil. As they are so few in number (there are fewer than 100 uncontacted Awá, some of whom live outside any protected area), they are surrounded on all sides by hostile frontier forces such as ranchers, loggers and settlers who invade and kill with impunity; as a result, much of their forest has been destroyed. They are now also the most threatened tribe on Earth.

Karapiru’s harrowing story really begins with a chance discovery in 1967 when American geologists were carrying out an aerial survey of the region’s mineral resources. When the helicopter needed to refuel, the pilot decided to land on a treeless summit high in the Carajás Mountains. One geologist reputedly noticed a scattering of black-grey rocks on the ground. In fact, the soil beneath him contained what a geological magazine would later refer to as, “a thick layer of Jaspilites and lenses of hard hematite”. In layman’s terms, the prospectors hadjust touched down on the planet’s richest iron ore deposit.

Their discovery swiftly gave rise to the development of the Great Carajas Project, an agro-industrial scheme financed by the U.S., Japan, the World Bank, and what was then known as the European Economic Community (now the European Union). It consisted of a dam, aluminium smelters, charcoal camps and cattle ranches. Tarmacked roads and a long-distance railway cut through the Awá tribe’s territory in order to transport workers in and minerals out.

The project’s industrial showpiece was a chasm gouged from the forest floor — one so vast that it could be seen from space — and one which would, in time, become the world’s largest opencast mine.

The Great Carajás Project was devastating for the region’s environment and its tribal peoples, despite the fact that in return for the billion-dollar loan, the financiers had asked the Brazilian government to guarantee that its indigenous territories would be mapped and protected.

But there was a fortune to be made from the forest, so a flood of ranchers, settlers and loggers soon began to pour into the region. Huge bulldozers gouged the land, tearing through layers of soil and rock to reach ore, bauxite and manganese. Ancient trees were chopped and burned; the black of charcoal ash replaced the deep green of the forest’s foliage: Harakwá became a polluted, scarred, muddy vision of hell.

To the invaders the Awá tribe was nothing more than an obstacle to their territory’s natural treasure trove; a primitive nuisance that they needed to fell together with the trees.

So they started killing them.

Some were inventive in their killings: several Awá died after eating flour laced with ant poison; a “gift” from a local farmer. Others, like Karapiru, were shot where they stood — at home, in front of their families.

Karapiru believed that he was the only member of his family to survive one such massacre. The killers murdered his wife, son, daughter, mother, brothers and sisters. Another son was wounded and captured.

Severely traumatized, Karapiru escaped into the forest, lead shot embedded in his lower back.  “There was no way of healing the wound. I couldn’t put any medicine on my back, and I suffered a great deal,” he told Fiona Watson, director of field and research at tribal rights organization Survival International. “The lead was hot in my back, bleeding. I don’t know how it didn’t become full of insects. But I managed to escape from the whites.”

For the next 10 years, Karapiru was on the run. He walked for nearly 400 miles across the forested hills and plains of Maranhão state, crossing the sand dunes of the restingas and the broad rivers that flow into the Atlantic.

He was terrified, hungry and alone. “It was very hard,” he told Survival International. “I had no family to help me, and no one to talk to.”

He survived by eating honey and small Amazonian birds: parakeet, dove and the red-bellied thrush. At night, when howler monkeys called from the canopy, he slept high in the boughs of vast copaiba trees, among the orchids and rattan vines. When grief and loneliness became too much, he would talk quietly to himself, or hum as he walked.

More than a decade after he had witnessed the murder of his family, Karapiru was spotted by a farmer on the outskirts of a town in the neighboring state of Bahia. He was walking through a burned section of forest, carrying a machete, a few arrows, some water containers and a chunk of smoked wild pig.

They greeted each other. The farmer gave him shelter in exchange for chores, and provided him with food he had never eaten before — manioc, rice, flour and coffee — for which Karapiru developed a taste. He discovered a little about the ways of the karai, the white man, learning that his hosts kept cattle and slept in a bed, which he found extremely uncomfortable.

He was a man who had spent ten years “fleeing from everything”.

“It was very sad,” he says. But just as Karapiru could not have envisaged his long years of suffering, neither could he have predicted the joy that was soon to come.

Once news spread that a solitary, unknown Indian had emerged from the forest, an anthropologist visited him. Karapiru tried to recount his story, telling the anthropologist that he had seen his family brutally cut down; that he had spent a decade in silence and that he was now the only one left.

But there was a problem: the anthropologist couldn’t understand the language he spoke. Believing it to be part of the Tupi language group, he thought Karapiru might be a member of the Avá Canoeiro tribe, so officials from FUNAI, the government Indian affairs department, sent Karapiru to Brasilia. There he was introduced to Avá Canoeiro speakers, in the hope they would be able to understand each other. They couldn’t. So in a final attempt to communicate with Karapiru, FUNAI sent a young Awá man called Xiramukû to talk with him.

The meeting with Xiramuku was one Karapiru could never have imagined. Not only could Xiramuku understand Karapiru’s language, but he used one specific Awá word that instantly transformed Karapiru’s life: he called him “father.” The man standing in front of Karapiru, talking to him in his mother tongue, was his son.

Xiramuku persuaded his father to leave the farmer’s house and live with him in the Awá village of Tiracambu.  After years of isolation, Karapiru once more led an Awá way of life: eating game hunted in the rainforest, sleeping in a hammock, and keeping monkeys as pets.

Since then, Survival International has discovered that Karapiru has remarried, has several children and lives near his son in an Awá village. “I feel good here with the other Awá,” he says. “I found my son after many years, which has made me very happy.”

Although Karapiru has found some measure of peace, his tribe’s problems aren’t over. Armed ranchers and criminal logging gangs, together with the grisly help of hired guns called pistoleiros  are once again shooting the Awá on sight. “The invasion of white people in Awá territory is not good,” says Karapiru. “We don’t like it.  After what happened to me, I try and hide from white people.” Death is the usual price of indigenous resistance to invaders.

Their forests are disappearing faster than in any other indigenous area in the Brazilian Amazon. “Satellite images reveal that over 30 percent of one Awá territory has already been destroyed, despite the land having been legally recognized,” says Watson of Survival International. The land they call Harakwá, “our place”, is beginning to take on the appearance of a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Their forest is chopped down by loggers and colonists who work day and night to sell wood and clear land for cattle pasture.

The forest game on which the Awá survive is becoming increasingly hard to find, as the animals die and bird life scatters. “The loggers are destroying our land,” Pire’i Ma’a, an Awá man, told Watson recently. “Monkeys, peccaries and tapir are all running away. Everything is dying. We are all going to go hungry. We are not finding any game, because the white people use guns and kill all the game.”

The Carajás train, whose long cargo wagons rattle along the boiling tracks, carrying thousands of tons of iron ore, passes just yards from the forest where uncontacted Awá live, who are some of the last uncontacted people on the planet.  If forced into contact with outsiders, however, many of their people could die. Survival International research has shown that up to 50 percent of uncontacted peoples die on first contact with outsiders from Western diseases to which they have no immunity.

Almost a year later, the situation is still so serious that a Brazilian federal judge has described it as a “real genocide.”

Karapiru is now extremely concerned for his daughter’s future. “I hope the things that happened to me won’t happen to my daughter,” he says. “I hope she will be able to eat lots of game, lots of fish, and grow up to be healthy. I hope it won’t be like in my time.”

Awá girl.

Picture © Matilda Temperley / www.matildatemperley.com

For International’s Women Day on the 8th of March I profiled the pictures and stories of inspiring tribal women around the world who are fighting for their fundamental human rights.

Tribal women have known brutal displacement, fear, murder and rape at the hands of invaders, for decades. They have suffered humiliation by governments that perpetuate the idea that they are somehow ‘backward’ or ‘stone age’.

They have seen their lands taken from them, their self-respect annihilated and their futures become uncertain.

Yet despite their suffering, the resistance of many tribal women is growing. Survival International’s photographic gallery to celebrate International Women’s Day, backed by Survival Ambassadors actress Gillian Anderson and jeweller Pippa Small, reflects not only the many tragedies that tribal women have endured, but also profiles some of the courageous and inspiring women who are fighting for their lands to be returned to them and for their fundamental human rights.

Picture © Steve Morgan/www.stevemorganphoto.co.uk

A Nenets woman outside her chum (tipi) in Siberia’s Yamal Peninsula. Her homeland is a remote, wind-blasted place of permafrost, serpentine rivers and dwarf shrubs; the reindeer-herding Nenets people have migrated across it for over a thousand years.

During the winter, the women endure temperatures that plummet to -50C. This is when most Nenets graze their reindeer on moss and lichen pastures in the southern forests, or taigá. In the summer months, when the midnight sun turns night into day, the women pack up camp and migrate north with their families.

Today, their ways of life are severely affected by oil drilling and climate change. Their migration routes are now affected by the infrastructure associated with resource extraction; roads are difficult for the reindeer to cross and they report that pollution threatens the quality of the pastures.

The reindeer is our home, our food, our warmth and our transportation, said a Nenets woman.

Picture © Jason Taylor/Survival International

To be a Dongria Kondh woman of the Niyamgiri hills in Odisha state, India, is to be intimately connected to one’s homeland; they have lived successfully in the lush forested hills with their perennial streams and giant jackfruit trees for millennia. They call themselves Jharnia, or, protectors of streams.

For the past 10 years Dongria Kondh women have been standing shoulder to shoulder with Dongria men to protect Niyamgiri against devastating plans by Vedanta Resources to construct an open-pit bauxite mine on their most sacred mountain, Niyam Dongar, the ‘mountain of law’. At one time they formed a human chain around the base of the mountain to prevent Vedanta’s bulldozers from destroying it.

In August 2010, in a victory for the Dongria Kondh and for Survival International, the Indian government found Vedanta guilty of ‘total contempt’ for the rights of the Dongria Kondh, and denied Vedanta Resources permission to mine in the Niyamgiri Hills. But an appeal that is currently in the Indian Supreme Court could yet overturn this.

The Dongria Kondh women are as defiant as ever. We will not give our forests to anybody, said one. All of the women are prepared to go to jail for this. And even if you threaten to kill us, we will carry on living here peacefully.

I will not leave my Niyam Raja until I die.

The full picture gallery can be seen on Survival International’s website.

Sadly, no one now says “laughter” in Eyak, a language from the Gulf of Alaska, whose last fluent speaker died in 2008, or in the Bo language from the Andaman Islands, for Survival International discovered that its last remaining speaker, Boa Senior, died in 2010.  Nearly 55,000 years of thoughts and ideas— the collective history of an entire people— died with her. Before she died, she said, ‘They don’t understand me.  What can I do?  ‘If they don’t speak to me now, what will they do once I’ve passed away? Don’t forget our language, grab hold of it.’

Most tribal languages are disappearing faster than they can be recorded. Linguists at the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages believe that on average, a language is disappearing every two weeks. By 2100, more than half of the more than 7,000 languages spoken on Earth—many of them not yet recorded—may disappear. The pace at which they are declining exceeds even that of species extinction and still, very few tribal languages have been recorded.

‘As tribal peoples are evicted from their lands, as their children are taken away from their communities and forced into education systems that strip away traditional wisdom, as wars, urbanization, genocide, disease, violent land-grabs and globalization continue to threaten tribal peoples with extinction, so the world’s tribal languages are dying. And with the death of tribes and the extinction of their languages, unique parts of human society become nothing more than memories’, said Stephen Corry, Director of Survival International, which works for tribal peoples rights worldwide.

In western Brazil, among the endlessly dry, yellowing soya fields of Rondônia state, where smoke billows on the horizon and the smell of burning wood hangs in the air, there still exist small fragments of lush, intact rainforest. Here the five remaining members of the once-thriving, and isolated, Akuntsu tribe live. Their diminished population is due to the building of a major highway through Rondônia in the 1970s, which resulted in waves of cattle ranchers, loggers, land speculators and colonists occupying the state.  The settlers were hungry for land, at any price. Cattle ranchers bulldozed the forest home of the Akuntsu, tried to hide the destruction, and employed gunmen to murder the inhabitants. The surviving members fled into the forest, where they remained, traumatised, until contact was made in the mid-1990s. Since then, linguists have been working with the tribe in an effort to understand their language.  The hope is that one day the Akuntsu will not only be able to recount their tragic story in detail, but will be able to share the knowledge and insights embedded in their words.

Further north, in Maranhão state, between the equatorial forests of Amazonia to the West and the eastern savannas, live the Awá people.  They call their ancestral homeland Harakwá, or, ‘the place that we know’.  But today the Awá are the most threatened tribe on earth.  Over the course of four decades, they have witnessed the destruction of their homeland – more than 30% of one of their territories has now been razed – and the murder of their people at the hands of ‘karaí’, or ‘non-Indians’. In 2012, Survival launched an urgent campaign to protect the lives and lands of the Awá, but almost a year on, the situation is still so serious that a Brazilian federal judge has described it as a ‘real genocide.’  And while their very existence remains threatened, so does their language.

The fate of tribal languages is the same across the world. Before Europeans arrived in America and Australia, hundreds of complex languages were spoken in each country. It is thought that when Captain Cook reached Australia, there were 1,000 languages being spoken there.

It is thought that when Captain Cook reached Australia, there were 1,000 languages being spoken there.  Fewer than 20 are now in daily – use the Yawuru of western Australia only has a handful of speakers, as does the Yurok language of California.  Among the Blackfoot tribes of the northwestern plains of North America, it is rare to find a person under the age of 20 speaking the mother tongue, Siksika; most speakers are dwindling groups of elderly people. When languages become the preserve of the old, the knowledge systems inherent in them become endangered; for the rest of the world, this means that unique ways of adapting to the planet and responding creatively to its challenges go to the grave with the last speakers. In a world of ecological uncertainty, such information is no small loss.

In fact, many of the world’s tribal languages are not spoken to children. Preventing a tribe from communicating in its language has long been a policy deliberately adopted by dominant authorities in order to marginalize tribal ways of life. From the 1950s to 1980s, the Soviet authorities in Siberia tried to suppress the traditions of the country’s tribal peoples by sending tribal children to schools that did not teach their own languages; some children were even punished for daring to speak them.

In Canada, Inuit children were taken away from their homes, sent to residential schools, and beaten for communicating in their mother tongue. “I didn’t expect to get strapped at that time, but I did,” said George Gosnell, an Inuit man, “I went to the principal’s office and I got strapped for using our languages.” In Canada’s Innu communities, although some teaching is now carried out through the medium of Innu-aimun, the Innu language, most is conveyed in English or French. “The kids don’t understand us these days we when use old Innu words,” an Innu man told a Survival International researcher, “and we can’t translate, because we don’t understand.”

Understanding is everything, however, in harsh environments. To understand a language and the knowledge and information held within it is to survive: land, life and language are intimately related for most tribal peoples.  Encoded within their vocabularies and passed down the generations are the secrets to surviving in the deserts of Africa, the ice-fields of the Arctic or the rainforests of Papua New Guinea. “I cannot read books,” said the Gana Bushman Roy Sesana from Botswana. “But I do know how to read the land and animals. All our children could. If they couldn’t, they would have died long ago.”

The languages of Bo, Innu-aiman, Penan, Akuntsu, Siksika, Yanomami and Yawuru are rich in the results of thousands of years of observation and discovery and aspects of life that are central to the survival of the community – and the wider world. “The hunter-gatherer way of being in the world, their way of knowing and talking about the world, depends on detailed, specific knowledge,” says anthropologist Hugh Brody; the Eveny language, for example has at least 1,500 words that refer to the colors and shapes of reindeer, their body parts, harnesses, diseases, diets and moods. Linguist K. David Harrison, in his book When Languages Die writes, “When we lose a language, we lose centuries of human thinking about time, seasons, sea creatures, reindeer, edible flowers, mathematics, landscapes, myths, music, the unknown and the everyday.”

Most tribal languages, however, cannot be found in books. Or on the Internet. Or for that matter in any form of documentation, because most of them have been orally conveyed. But this, of course, makes them no less valid, or relevant. Oral languages record their own parallel stream of history. “Australia’s true history is never read,” wrote an Aboriginal poet, “But the black man keeps it in his head”—a thought echoed by the Bushman woman Dicao Oma when she said simply, “We have our own talk.”

In the age of technology, there is some hope of revival for  fading languages of the world, as people are turning to the web as a tool for language revitalization. One encouraging example is Quecha, the most widely spoken indigenous language in South America. It has long been in slow decline but is being revived after Google launched a search engine in Quechua, Microsoft produced versions of Windows and Office in the language, and the scholar Demetrio Túpac Yupanqui translated Don Quixote into his own mother tongue. Documenting and saving ancient languages is thus entirely possible, and can actually be facilitated by the latest communication technologies: mobile phone texts, social networks such as twitter and iPhone apps.

In the Andaman Islands, where Boa Senior lived, Anvita Abbi, a Professor of linguistics, has compiled the first dictionary of four endangered tribal languages.  ‘Words are cultural, archaeological, and environmental signatures of a community,’ she says.  She has also spoken out over the Andaman Trunk Road that runs through the Jarawa people’s reserve, saying that the Jarawa face a similar fate to Boa Senior unless the road is closed – ‘unless we develop alternative sea routes, we cannot safeguard the life, culture, language and identity of one of the oldest civilizations on earth.’ Survival International’s campaign to stop ‘human safaris’ in India’s Andaman Islands has recently gained an important victory, after the Supreme Court banned tourists from traveling along the road which cuts through the Jarawa reserve.

In the end, the death of tribal languages matters. Not only for the identity of its speakers — for a language is, as the linguist Noam Chomsky said, “a mirror of the mind”—  but for all of us, for our common humanity. Tribal languages are languages of the earth, suffused with complex geographical, ecological and climatic information that is rooted in locale, but universally significant. The very fact that the Inuit people of Canada have no one word for snow, for example, but are able to name many different types, demonstrates just how attuned they are to their environment, and therefore to potential changes in it—a skill that, arguably, many urbanised people have lost now that they are that more removed from the natural world.

But languages are also rich in spiritual and social insights–ideas about what it is to be human; to live, love and die. Just as natural cures to humanity’s illnesses are waiting to be found in plants in the rainforest, so many ideas, perceptions and solutions about how humans engage with each other and with the natural world already exist, in the tribal languages of the world. are far more than mere words: they amount to what we know, and who we know ourselves to be.

“They say our language is simple, that we should give up this simple language of ours and speak your kind of language,” wrote Inuit Simon Anaviapik. “But this language of mine, of yours, is who we are and who we have been.  It is where we find our stories, our lives, our ancestors; and it should be where we find our future, too.”

Brazilian Indians blockade a key railway line. Copyright: CIMI/Survival

ON the forested western edge of Maranhao state in north-east Brazil lives the Awá tribe. One of only two nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes left in Brazil, the Awa have long lived in this area, which lies between the equatorial forests of Amazonia and the drier savannas to the east.  They are the most threatened tribe in the world.

The Awá spend their days hunting for game such as peccary, tapir and monkey, with 6ft bows made from the irapa tree and gathering forest produce such as babacu nuts and acai berries. Vultures, bats and the three-toed sloth are forbidden as prey for eating. They nurture orphaned animals as pets, share their hammocks with raccoon-like coatis and split mangoes with green parakeets. Awa women even breast-feed capuchin and howler monkeys and have also been known to suckle small pigs.

At night, the Awa travel with torches made from tree resin, carrying the embers of a fire as they move from one hunting ground to another. And when the moon is full, the men – hair speckled white with king vulture down – in a chant-induced trance – commune with forest spirits, during a sacred ritual lasting till dawn. Their existence is one of intimate connection with the forest, which provides food, shelter and spiritual solace.

Awá boy, Brazil. Copyright: Domenico Pugliese/Survival

Towards the end of the 1960s, geologists discovered that the world’s richest reserves of iron ore lay under the soil, and the US, Japan, World Bank and EEC, as it was then, loaned billions of dollars to Brazil to finance the extraction, in return for exports of minerals. The Greater Carajas Programme was devastating for the environment and its indigenous peoples: a mammoth agro-industrial complex consisting of a dam, tarmac roads, aluminium smelters using timber from the forest, cattle ranches, and a 560-mile long railway that cut through the Awa’s territory on its way to the coast; the Awá blame the railway for bringing thousands of invaders into their lands and scaring off the animals they hunt. And at its heart was an open-air iron mine so big it could be seen from space.

This week, a protest involving the Awá has forced the world’s largest iron ore mine to suspend operations along its main railway line.  On Tuesday 4th October 2012, hundreds of Indians including the Awá, took to the tracks of Vale’s Carajás railway to voice their opposition to Brazilian government plans that could weaken their land rights, if legalized.

 Survival International’s Director Stephen Corry said, ‘This protest shows that for tribes like the Awá, land rights are make or break.’

Maasai, Samburu National Reserve, Kenya.

We live in a beautiful world.

For generations, tribal peoples have been the guardians of their diverse habitats - tundra, sea-ice, mountains, deserts, oceans and prairies; for most, land and life are inextricably linked.  Earth is the bedrock of their lives, the provider of food and shelter, the sacred burial ground of their ancestors and the spiritual focus of their lives.

Most have lived on their lands for thousands of years, and know their territories intimately.  The Sentinelese, who are believed to have lived in the Andaman Islands for about 60,000 years, retreated to high ground when they saw the ocean recede during the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, following ancestral knowledge. The Innu of Canada are as in tune with the rocky barrens and frozen waterways of their homeland ‘Nitassinan’, as are the Maasai tribe with the highland plains and savannah woodland of East Africa and the uncontacted tribes of south-eastern Peru with the Amazon rainforest.

As you read this, however, tribal lands are being destroyed.  It is often the loss of lands that lies at the root of the appalling suffering they face.  ’This here is my life, my soul’, said Marcos Veron, a Guarani-Kaiowá man from Brazil.  ’If you take this away from me, you take my life.’

Survival International has recently launched its ‘Tribes from the Air’ gallery – an audio-video collaboration between Survival and leading international photographers – which shows the remarkable stewardship of tribal peoples when managing their own lands and resources, and the enchanting beauty of the world’s indigenous territories.

This area of low-lying Amazonian rainforest in the Madre de Dios region of south-eastern Peru is home to uncontacted tribes such as the nomadic Mashco-Piro people. During the forest's dry season, when water levels are low and white beaches form in the river bends, uncontacted families camp on the river bends and unearth buried turtles' eggs.

Survival has now received preliminary reports from Brazil indicating that this year’s fish stocks may be as low as those of 2009.

In the first light of dawn, Enawene Nawe men gather outside haiti: the house of sacred flutes.

They have recently returned from camps in the rainforest, in order to celebrate the most important fishing ceremony of the year: the Yãkwa banquet.

The Enawene Nawe are one of very few tribes in the world who do not eat red meat. They are expert fishermen. In the dry season, they catch fish with a poison called timbó, made from the juice of a woody vine. Bundles of vines are pounded in the water, so releasing the poison and asphyxiating the fish, which then rise to the surface.

In the wet season, when the hills of the Serra de Norte are shrouded in cloud, the longest indigenous ritual in Amazonia begins.

Yãkwa maintains the harmony of the world and is a four month exchange of food between the Enawene Nawe and the subterranean yakairiti spirits, who are the owners of fish and salt.

At the beginning of Yãkwa, the Enawene Nawe build waitiwina (dams) across Adowina (the Rio Preto).

The dams are created from criss-crossing trunks. These form a latticework of interwoven timber, into which are inserted dozens of cone-shaped traps. Bark and vine are used as joints.

‘The Adowina is a river for waitiwina’, said an Enawene Nawe man. ‘The trees are tall and the land is good.’

 

 

Water is then sucked through the cones, so trapping fish as they swim downstream, having spawned in the river’s headwaters.

Yãkwa has been recognized by Brazil’s Ministry of Culture as part of the country’s cultural heritage.

Fish are stored in small baskets woven from palm, and smoked in special smoke houses. They are then transported back to the village by canoe.

At the end of Yãkwa the dams are destroyed to ensure that fish can once more swim upriver to spawn.

 

 

The UN body UNESCO recently called for the urgent safeguarding of the Yãkwa ritual, referring to it as an ‘intangible cultural heritage.’

For the last few years however, the tribe has struggled to carry out Yãkwa, due to the decline in fish stocks from deforestation and hydro-electric dam construction.

The situation became so serious in 2009 that a dam construction company was forced to buy three thousand kilos of farmed fish to ensure the tribe’s survival.‘When I was a small boy, I always came to the dams with my father’, said Kawari, an Enawene Nawe elder.‘We let the fish go up the river to lay their eggs. But if hydro-electric dams are built all the eggs will disappear and the fish will die.’

The tribe has not given their consent for hydro-electric dam construction – such as the Telegrafica dam pictured above – or for the deforestation of their land by cattle ranchers.

Stephen Corry, Director of Survival International, said, ‘It is a bitter irony that while Yãkwa is now recognized as part of Brazil’s cultural heritage, the ritual could very soon cease to exist.’

 

 

‘We didn’t know the white people were going to take our land. We didn’t know anything about deforestation. We didn’t know about the laws of the white men’, say the Enawene Nawe.

The tribe is now lobbying for the Rio Preto area to be recognized as theirs  and for the removal of the ranchers.

‘The Rio Preto is vital for our survival. Why do the ranchers claim it is theirs?

‘Do they know the first names of the Rio Preto?  No.  These are the river’s real names: Adowina, Hokosewina and Kayawinalo.

And we, the Enawene Nawe, are the real owners.’

 

Awá child, Maranhão state, north-east Brazil.

In north-east Brazil, between the equatorial forests of Amazonia and the dry cerrado savanna, lies Maranhão state, home to the Awá tribe.

One of only two nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes left in Brazil, the tribe has a profoundly intimate relationship with their forest, which provides food, shelter and spiritual solace. They survive by hunting for game such as peccary, tapir and monkey with 6-foot long bows made from the irapá tree and gather forest produce such as babaçu nuts and açaí berries.

The Awá also have an extraordinary relationship with monkeys; orphaned infant monkeys are adopted and nurtured, and Awá women breast-feed several different species, including howler and capuchin. The Awá people are also excellent monkey mimics.

But the lives of the 360 contacted Awá – and those who are uncontacted – are now in severe danger. Their territory has been invaded by a vast army of illegal loggers, ranchers and settlers who are shooting them on sight. Today, oscar-winning film star Colin Firth helped to launch a major Survival International campaign to save the tribe, who Survival refers to as ‘Earth’s most threatened tribe’.Survival has also recently discovered that the Awá’s forests are now disappearing faster than in any other Indian area in the Brazilian Amazon. Without their forests, the Awá will not survive. ‘The loggers are destroying all the land,’ Pire’i Ma’a, an Awá man told Survival recently. ‘Monkeys, peccaries and tapir are all running away. Everything is dying. We are all going to go hungry. This land is mine.  It is ours.’

‘Their bows and arrows are no match for guns,’ said Colin Firth. ‘At any other time in history, that’s where it would end.  Another people wiped off the face of the earth, forever.  But we’re going to make sure the world doesn’t let that happen.’

Their disappearance is far from inevitable: the campaign aims to persuade Brazil’s Justice Minister to send in federal police to clear out the invaders.

‘The Awá are threatened by the armed loggers, but also by our own apathy,’ said Stephen Corry, Director of Survival. ‘Yet these campaigns have been repeatedly shown to be successful. If enough people around the world show they care, Awá children will be able to grow up in peace on their own land, and we will not have lost another part of our planet’s rich and vibrant human diversity.‘

www.survivalinternational.org/awa

New picture of an uncontacted Yanomami village in Brazil. © Hutukara/Survival

The view from the air: a brilliant green sea of Amazonian forest, interrupted by a circular, palm-thatched dwelling.

It was once thought that all Yanomami Indians of the Brazilian Amazon had been contacted during the latter half of the 20th century.

This photograph shows otherwise.

Released by Survival International this week, the image reveals that there is a community of uncontacted Yanomami still living in the heart of the largest forested indigenous territory in the world, in northern Brazil.

But illegal goldmining camps are operating just 15 kilometers from where they live. If the miners are not expelled as a matter of urgency, they could come into contact with the community and pose a threat to their lives: the Yanomami will have little or no immunity to diseases brought in by outsiders.

At least 800 people from Brazil’s army and police force are now involved in a mission to remove the goldminers; it has been reported that so far, 30 have been evicted.

‘There are many uncontacted Indians,’ Davi Kopenawa, a spokesman for the Yanomami, told Survival recently. ‘I want to help my uncontacted relatives, who have the same blood as us. They have never seen the white man’s world.’

If they do not want to join the white man’s world, that’s entirely up to them. It is their choice – and their right – to remain isolated.

Yanomami hunter darts through the Amazon rainforest, Brazil. © Claudia Andujar/Survival International.

‘I was born in the forest, and I grew up there.  I know it well, ‘ says Davi Kopenawa, a Yanomami spokesman from the Brazilian Amazon, who has devoted his life to fighting for the Yanomami’s human rights and the  environmental protection of his ancestral home.

Davi’s knowledge is unsurprising: the Yanomami have lived in the rainforest for thousands of years. Their very survival has depended on maintaining a delicate balance between the ecological health of the rainforest and the ongoing needs of their people. They have long lived by the principle that to take more than is needed from the forest – or to degrade it in any way – is not only self-defeating but a reckless neglect of their unborn children. ‘If we hurt nature, we hurt ourselves,’ says Davi.

So the results of a recent study by the World Bank, which show that indigenous peoples are key to preserving the world’s forests are  - again – unsurprising. After all, it is thought that 80% of the world’s protected areas lie within the territories of tribal peoples.  They are the forests’ original owners, scientists and conservationists. They have detailed knowledge of the flora and fauna; to put it simply, they know things we don’t.

It is, in fact, precisely because these protected areas have been looked after so well by their indigenous guardians that they have been chosen, by western conservationists, as reserves. The Jarawa of the Indian Ocean Andaman Islands, for example, inhabit the last remaining tracts of virgin rainforest on the Andaman Islands.  And a glance at a map of the Amazon shows that much of the rainforest that lies outside tribal reserves has been denuded, whereas, within indigenous areas, it largely remains intact.

This is also reflected in the World Bank’s report.  Using satellite data from forest fires to help indicate deforestation levels, the study showed rates were lower by about 16% in indigenous areas between 2000-2008. In short, conservation reserves that exclude tribal peoples suffer. And yet, ironically, millions of tribal people across the world are excluded from their homelands, becoming ‘conservation refugees’.  In India, an estimated 100,000 people have already been displaced in the name of conservation, while in Africa mass evictions from protected areas have taken place, including the Batwa ‘pygmies’, who were forcibly removed from Uganda’s Bwindi Forest in order to protect the mountain gorillas.   ‘Protecting ecosystems does not mean protecting them from the people who have always been their guardians,’ says Stephen Corry of Survival International. On the contrary, it stands to reason that the best way of protecting fragile ecosystems – as well as defending the rights of vulnerable peoples – is to secure the rights of indigenous communities.

To tribal peoples, rainforests are living, breathing entities that are vital for the future of the world. They look on in horror – and concern for us all – as the forests are slashed, felled and scorched.  ‘We know the health of the Amazon’, says Davi Kopenawa. ‘We know that when you destroy the rainforest, you cut the arteries of the future and the world’s force just ebbs away.  Give them back to us, before they die.’