“They’re curious about us, and we’re curious about them.” That’s how Daniel Cangussu describes the recent interaction with a small Indigenous group that had just contacted non-Indigenous society in the depths of the Brazilian Amazon. “We don’t know their language yet, but we communicate all the time. We share food, we fish for them, and they accompany us on hunts,” says Cangussu, an official with Funai, Brazil’s federal agency for Indigenous affairs. The Indigenous group in question has lived for centuries in one of the Amazon Rainforest’s best-preserved areas, a region known as Mamoriá Grande, named after a tributary of the Purus River — itself one of the main tributaries of the Amazon — that crosses the territory. Their first contact occurred on Feb. 12, when a young man appeared in a nearby river community. “He came out of the woods because he had lost his fire,” says Cangussu, who coordinates Funai’s Madeira Purus Ethno-Environmental Protection Front, responsible for protecting the isolated Indigenous peoples of southern Amazonas state. An isolated Indigenous family comprising a couple and a baby, got lost from the rest of their group in the Mamoriá Grande area. Image courtesy of Daniel Cangussu. After providing food and medical assistance, Funai agents helped the man return to the point in the forest where he came from. A few days later, the agents realized he was still in the same area, now accompanied by his family: a woman and a baby about a year old. “We realized that not…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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