Twilight for the Forest People

They dwell in crude thatched huts in forest depths and subsist by hunting and fishing and gathering plants and berries. They know nothing of television, the Internet or, it is safe to say, the Big Bang. But some have seen airplanes flying over, sometimes swooping low over their settlements.
A reminder of their situation came recently with the publication of aerial photographs of the encampment of a tribe in the upper reaches of the Amazon River in Brazil, near the border with Peru. The pictures showed a line of neat huts and people looking up at the small airplane. Two men, their faces and bodies painted red, raised bows and arrows as a pointed warning to the intruder.
As survivors whose continued survival is very much in doubt, these last primitive tribes hidden away in the planet’s most remote reaches pose a dilemma for their would-be protectors: whether to leave them to their fate or to assimilate them into the larger world before they are extinguished.
Neither course promises a happy ending.
If they remain isolated, these populations may cling to their way of life a little longer. Some have moved deeper into the rainforest, away from encroaching loggers and oil prospectors. But the bulldozers and saws seem destined to end their solitude.
If they are removed and survive the exposure to diseases they have never encountered, it is likely that the unique knowledge and beliefs that define them, the spirit of their life, will probably slip away.
The Brazilian government’s National Indian Foundation, Funai, came upon the encampment as it was making one of its regular patrols of the scattered settlements of tribes in the State of Acre who are thought to have had little direct contact with the outside world. The picture-taking plane had no intention of landing: it was only checking the location and apparent well-being of the people.
Survival International, a London-based organization supporting the cause of struggling indigenous people, estimates that at least 100 similarly isolated tribes remain in the world, about half of them in Brazil and Peru.