Why the survival of uncontacted Indigenous peoples is under growing threat

“If we don’t support the fight for their rainforest, my isolated relatives will die,” an anonymous man from the Hongana Manyawa tribe in Indonesia was quoted as saying in the report.

“The rainforest is everything, it’s their heart and their life. My parents, my brothers and sisters are in the rainforest and without support they will die,” he added.

The tribe lives on the Indonesian island of Halmahera, where nickel for electric vehicle batteries is mined.

Survival claims to rely on its international network of researchers and the testimonies of the indigenous people contacted.

Resource extraction is by far the greatest threat to the isolated population, the report says. Survival says around 96 percent of groups face threats from extractive industries like mining.

Thirty-eight of the isolated groups “risk being wiped out” by infrastructure projects such as roads and railways, he said.

According to Survival, criminal gangs threaten about a third of groups, and missionaries “funded by multimillion-dollar evangelical organizations” to hunt down and convert people to Christianity threaten about one in six.

Another growing threat is social media influencers seeking to make “first contact” for content and advertising, the charity said.

“Indigenous people have become this spectacle. They are there to be consumed by a global audience,” Michael Rivera, an anthropologist at the University of Hong Kong, told NBC News.

“This reproduces a sort of racial hierarchy that positions influencers, who are generally not Indigenous, [at the top.]»

Any activity on indigenous lands requires free, prior and informed consent, as required by international law; however, this is not possible when groups are not contacted. And the application of the measures varies at the national level.

For example, in April, Indian police arrested an American YouTuber who visited a forbidden island in the Indian Ocean and left an offering of a can of Diet Coke in an attempt to make contact with the reclusive Sentinel tribe, known for shooting foreigners with bows and arrows.

An American missionary was killed in 2018 after trying to make contact with the tribe.

“The solution is obvious: industries and governments must act now to end this continued colonization so that isolated peoples can live freely as they choose,” Caroline Pearce, director of Survival International, said in the report.

Isolated peoples typically receive little attention from the governments around them, which critics say is because they do not vote and the land they own is often resource-rich and ripe for exploitation.

Survival says that isolated peoples reject contact as a “deliberate choice”, which is “often rooted in memories of devastating past contacts and invasions, which resulted in violence, epidemics and death”.

The report calls for a global no-contact policy and urges private companies to ensure their supply chains are free of materials from lands inhabited by indigenous groups.

“People think electric cars are a green alternative,” said Fiona Watson, research and advocacy director at Survival, “but mining companies operate on isolated peoples’ lands and pose huge threats. »