A new tribe has been discovered in the Amazon. The tribe lives in darkness. The tribe lives with poor ideas about the moon and the stars. It lives with poor ideas about the microscopic realm—viruses, bacteria, cells. It has no idea of evolution, selection, and genetic drift. But instead of bringing these lost people into the human family, we keep them in the dark:

The Brazilian government policy is to avoid personal contact with uncontacted tribes in fear of disrupting their natural habitat or passing on germs the Indians are not immune from.

To not contact these people is to treat them like animals in a zoo. And what if one of them murders another human in their tribe? What about the law? The law must be universal. We can’t have humans running around outside of the law and its order. If one of these uncontacted humans murders another one, he/she must be brought into the justice system. These are humans. We must treat them like humans—they need passports, birth certificates, voter registration cards. This is not a joke. Recall that “thank you” means “think of you.” Humans think of (register) other humans.

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

115 replies on “No Human Should be Uncontacted”

  2. Charles, you and I seriously disagree about what makes a person human. I am very glad that your opinion on this matter will not effect the Brazilian government’s protection of them and their world. Your attempt at “thinking of them” has failed, as you have failed to see that they are perfect humans just the way they are.

  3. @96, I’m not really sure you have at any point understood what I was saying. Don’t let lack of comprehension stop you from commenting, though. Nobody else ever does.

    @93, I’m guessing you didn’t read the thread, because the “education” discussion and the “first contact” discussion were largely separate. If there was anyone advocating assimilation and reeducation, it was Charles, and you may notice upon closer inspection that I was arguing with him pretty vehemently. If I suggested that anyone lacked any sort of skill or expertise, it was directed at a couple of the commenters in this thread whose sole talent seems to be unprovoked butthurt, not at the happily self-sufficient uncontacted peoples.

  4. Charles read Things Fall Apart and his conclusion is that imperialism is a *good* thing? Jesus Fucking Christ.

    Europeans engaged in the same sort of practices millennia ago. They changed through their own natural progression, not by some asshole swooping in and telling them how to live.

    This is why Marxism is worse than capitalism. At least capitalists don’t pretend they’re doing native peoples any favors.

    Do they see airplanes overhead? What do they make of those?

    They shoot arrows at them.

    I’m sure they could have some use for modern inventions like steel or wheels.

    Wheels are worse than useless in dense jungle, or haven’t you read Jared Diamond?

  5. And there have been many examples of socialist/communist/Marxist regimes trying to force indigenous peoples to assimilate, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and Nyerere’s regime in Tanzania being notable examples. All they really accomplished was turning their minority groups against the regimes.

  6. Yes, in the past contact has resulted in imperialism but isn’t that because the imperialism was quite deliberate? Isn’t it possible for someone with good intentions to contact an isolated culture and engage in a two-way exchange of information? Maybe we could learn just as much from them and they could from us. I’m not sure you can learn the same things watching a culture from a distance that you can by being immersed in it and actually talking to people, face-to-face. Can’t we choose to break previous patterns?

    Of course there is still the matter of health risks. I’m not a doctor so I can’t speak as to what precautions should be necessary. And the other issue is the possibility that they don’t want to be contacted, but you don’t know until you try, right?

  7. Interesting way of thinking about this!

    As background here’s what Moral Relativism means, by way of an example question: was slavery moral in the U.S.? Some say we cannot apply current morality to past times, that the world was a different place, and we can’t judge them. (This is relativism.) Others say slavery is wrong, that negative effects of slavery are still plaguing our country, and that everyone has certain human rights no matter what. Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness for instance. I think most people give this answer.

    So I would expect someone who says “slavery is always wrong” to also say “contact the tribes, because keeping them in the dark deprives them of human rights.” This is in fact what Charles is saying.

    But this is really controversial — why? In this country we require kids to go to school and everyone thinks this is right. We don’t say “everyone has the right t be left alone” and let stupid people ruin their kid’s lives at home. We don’t leave people completely alone in the U.S., so why do only Americans deserve these rights? Ethically, not legally — obviously we have no legal right to interfere in Brazil. But the Brazilian government does.

    Would people argue we shouldn’t allow poor immigrants into the U.S. because they should be left alone? Do we violate the “prime directive” by allowing people from other cultures into our schools? I don’t think so.

    Is it even possible to leave these people in the dark forever?
    As resources get scarcer, someone is bound to start chopping down the forest. Poachers, at least.

    I don’t know the answer but it’s worth thinking about.

  8. This is the first time I think I’ve heard of a government actually taking into account the horrors of the past for the benefit of someone other than themselves. The only good argument here is that contacting these people will surely kill them. Kill them dead.

  9. @99 Sounds like the old Roman plan. They were some of the original Universalists, which often turned into extermination. There are possibly hundreds of tribes that did not survive their encounter with “classical civilization”.

    Nevertheless, this is epic trolling by Mudede. He even came back to do the ritual namedropping he forgot in the OP!

  10. Contact is tricky–by simply contacting these people we could kill them with germs they are unfamiliar with. They aren’t uncontacted totally–they have neighbors. They probably know we exist. And they are staying put. Other recently contacted tribes have said they wished we’d left them alone after epidemics wiped out their shamen ( that was the translation the doc i saw said, I know its not a culturally appropriate term) who knew medicine and their artisans who knew how to make weapons etc, leaving them way worse off then they were. Protect them against logging, let them make their own decisions and arrive with vaccines, if they want us.

  11. It’s kind of a tricky situation, because both views are paternalistic: on the one hand, the government feels the tribe must be protected from the knowledge of the modern world. On the other hand, the writer thinks the tribe must be uplifted from their own supposed savagery through the civilizing hand of the modern world. I would ideally like them able to chose their own fate, but practically, there are irrevocable consequence to any sort of dialog. Is the freedom to chose worth the ravages of the disease they will be exposed to, diseases which may decimate their population? How about the real possibility of the death of their culture through assimilation or worse? Leaving them alone as much as possible or else having slow, occasional dialog through anthropologists seems to be the lesser of two evils to me. Let them seek us out if they want what we have –altering them for their own good is morally questionable to say the least.

  12. “All contact with white people ever brought them was pain and misery.”

    So, you’ll be giving us back our penicillin, iPods, Jack Daniels and horseless carriages if we leave?

    Shame you can’t show us any deeds to ‘your lands’.

    “Is it worth that just to give them tvs, medicine, and our fucked up system of justice?”

    Yes, yes and yes.

    BTW, did the Indians never fight and kill each other over scarce resources?

  13. Mudede is a universalist–in all his posts. I dont know why people are surprised by this post at all. Also I think many americans underestimate the importance of birth certificates/passports etc. its not just about “government control” its also about citizenship. to be a citizen is to be a fully human person in a certain enlightenment tradition–from that perspective whats wrong with imperialism is NOT the assumed universalism but the subordination of one state to another and the resulting neutralizing of subject people’s citizenship. Subjects of empire are neither citizens of the imperial nation nor of their own. i think he makes perfect sense here.

  14. Now this has to be one of the least researched and most ignorant opinions ever launched by a slog writter. Please read some expert information on what happens to the so-called uncontacted indians and about knowledge they have. At least the tupis, in Brazil, have much more profound knowledge of the cosmos than most Americans. They also do have law, even if it isn’t the Western idea of law. The Brazilian government’s actions, in this case, are in tune with recent anthropological studies. Maybe a little anthropology would do you some good…

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