Ghost Protocol: The threatened world of uncontacted tribes

It invariably boils down to the land, and what's beneath it. India's Sentinelese, for instance, fight to protect their isolation. But it helps that their island is smaller than Mumbai's Sanjay Gandhi National Park. Elsewhere, the stakes are higher. Conflict is growing. The tussles are over rare metals, timber, space—and the right to be left alone

- Natasha Rego

For millions of years, we moved through the world and left almost no trace at all. It's what makes the study of early humans so challenging. Incredibly, there are still humans who live like this.

In 2021, a team of government researchers in Brazil found traces of one such uncontacted tribe: signs of campsites and rough-hewn ceramic pots and baskets, deep in the Mamoria Grande region of the Amazon rainforest.

It was known that a tribe lived here (the Amazon is home to most of the world's remaining 100-odd uncontacted tribes). But this was the first evidence officially recorded. Last December, FUNAI, the indigenous affairs agency of the Brazilian government, acted on that information to pass new norms that prevent further activity in Mamoria Grande.

Such action is rare, and often comes after years of advocacy and litigation by NGOs. Brazil's FUNAI is itself an attempt to navigate such conflicts better. And the conflict is intense.

Most of the world's remote and uncontacted tribes live in rainforests that are being eaten away at, in bursting-at-the-seams South America and Asia. Among local communities, the uncontacted are often treated with respect bordering on awe.

In her remarkable biographical work, We Will Not Be Saved (2024), Nemonte Nenquimo—who grew up in a remote tribe and now leads a pan-Amazon fight for the right to land and the right to be left alone—describes them as "the people we used to be."

They often wear no clothes. The only objects they acquire, usually via quiet barter with local tribes, tend to be things like tobacco, fishing lines, and machetes.

They communicate with the outside world through signs they leave behind, usually asking to be left alone. A red feather and a blow dart are a warning: "This is our territory." Two crossed spears placed across a path are, as Nenquimo puts it, a message that shouldn't have to be explained.