It begins:
These remarkable pictures of Envira Indians were taken by Brazilian government officials during several flights over a remote part of Brazil’s Acre state.
Painted a bright orange, two members of the tribe emerged from their huts to threaten the helicopter as it flew low over their small village.
Others could be seen in the background, apparently startled by the presence of the noisy machine in their skies.
“We did the over-flight to show their houses, to show they are there, to show they exist,’ said Jose Carlos dos Reis Meirelles, an expert on “uncontacted” tribes, who works for the Brazilian government’s Indian affairs department.
“This is very important because there are some who doubt their existence.”
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I agree that it's important to prove their existence. But I have to ask... if you fly a chopper over these people, are they not being contacted? It's the old notion that if you're trying only to observe a situation in a disconnected manner, you're still interacting with and affecting it. "Uncontacted" doesn't mean that the people have never been contacted whatsoever, but I'm just imagining these people racing out of their huts to find this terrifying monster swooping down upon them from the sky. They have probably encountered outsiders at some point in the past, but I think it's likely that such visitors would have been on foot to get to what must be rather remote areas. I'd love to know what effect such an event would have on these people, though. D'oh.
1 comment:
A coworker commented that now that that all this attention has been brought to them, won't people go looking for them? Seriously.
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