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‘Uncontacted’ Amazon Tribe Members Are Reported Killed in Brazil
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sillysaurus3 9y agoWell, that's awful. It would've been better to seek them out and bring them into the modern world. But hindsight is 20/20. Brazil in general is the wild west. https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/6wqzcw/man_getting_subway_with_wife_and_child_pulls_gun/?st=j7fmnj1s&sh=83450498 https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/6wqzcw/man_...
- slg 9y agoIt is a much more complicated problem than that. There are all sorts of potential biological problems like limited disease resistance and potential psychological problems when forcing someone who grew up so primitively into a modern life. The standard has been to let these people make the choice for themselves without forcing them out of their current life. However they can never really make a true choice because they have no real understanding of what the modern world has to offer.
- nether 9y ago"The white people, who are trying to make us over into their image, they want us to be what they call "assimilated," bringing the Indians into the mainstream and destroying our own way of life and our own cultural patterns. They believe we should be contented like those whose concept of happiness is materialistic and greedy, which is very different from our way. We want freedom from the white man rather than to be intergrated. We don't want any part of the establishment, we want to be free to raise our children in our religion, in our ways, to be able to hunt and fish and live in peace. We don't want power, we don't want to be congressmen, or bankers....we want to be ourselves. We want to have our heritage, because we are the owners of this land and because we belong here. The white man says, there is freedom and justice for all. We have had "freedom and justice," and that is why we have been almost exterminated. We shall not forget this."
- webo 9y agoVery beautiful. Where is this quote from?
- jfk13 9y agoIt's widely attributed to a notice published by the 1927 Grand Council of American Indians. E.g. see http://lakotadakotanakotanation.org/GENOCIDE.html http://lakotadakotanakotanation.org/GENOCIDE.html (search for "1927"); see also https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=0YzWCgAAQBAJ&lpg=PA349&ots=JZd9VC1fKL&pg=PA349#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=0YzWCgAAQBAJ&lpg=PA349&o...
- bartread 9y agoSadly, this reminds me of a line from Star Trek: "Resistance is futile."
- Chris2048 9y ago> we want to be free to raise our children in our religion, in our ways Do those children get a choice? Modern western is a multi-culture of choice.
- Johnny555 9y agoIt would've been better to seek them out and bring them into the modern world Why is that better? Is there some proof that a modern lifestyle is better than a tribal lifestyle that's been maintained for thousands of years? How would you even define "better"? Obviously unexpected mixing of uncontacted tribes with modern humans can end badly, but that doesn't mean that the best answer is to assimilate the tribe.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoIt seemed a matter of time till they'd be wiped out. The modern world is hostile to them and their way of living, and Brazil is disinterested in protecting them.
- eloff 9y agoOf course, it is. If you didn't believe that, go back to tribal living. The problem is they're not us. They're at risk for a lot of our diseases, they will have great difficulty joining our society. The process will take generations. We only have to look at natives elsewhere in the Americas to see that they're still struggling. They're caught between trying to keep some of their own ways and culture and at the same time be a part of society and deal with our ways and culture. And they've already had multiple generations to assimilate. All that said, the process must start sometime. It's not like there's an alternative.
- MichaelGG 9y agoI agree with you but I think it's yet to be shown they're less happy than modern people. Happiness seems to be relative, and bringing them in from masters of their environment (if they are) to lower status advanced humans could easily drop their happiness even if it improves things in an objective manner. I've absolutely no love for the concept of "nobel savages" or "primitives living in harmony with nature" but it's possible they're just as happy, even given disease, murder, etc.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoSure, but sadly they're not safe. At what point is it ok to let them die? On one hand, that would be letting nature take its course, since humans are a part of nature. On the other hand, we could do something.
- jlgaddis 9y ago> It would've been better... For whom?
- pamqzl 9y agoFor them, obviously. For us... well, it's no skin off my nose personally whether they live or die. But from their point of view... well, I'd be pissed off if it turned out I'd spent my whole life in poverty, hunger and ignorance because some do-goodies decided my objectively-terrible existence oughtn't be disturbed for some bizarre reason.
- gldalmaso 9y agoThere are hundreds of very different indigenous tribes spread throughout the country. It is entirely up to each community and individual if/when/how they want to assimilate into citizenship. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples_in_Brazil#Contemporary_situation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples_in_Brazil#C... As long as they remain in their indigenous status, they are actually exempt from some laws even. Brazil has 500 years of indigenous abuse and they are very aware of that, to this day they have to constantly protect themselves and raise public awareness that land grabbers and miners are out to kill them. Recent political affairs have only worsened this ordeal.
- Mikeb85 9y agoWell, not like we were peaceful during our stone age. I'm amazed people are surprised these tribes aren't friendly. There's a documentary about uncontacted tribes on Netflix worth watching, forget what it's called though. And there's similar issues with a remote tribe in India which kills anyone who comes too close.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- userbinator 9y agoFor a second, I thought there was a new product called Tribe from Amazon...
- dmix 9y ago> “There is a lot of evidence, but it needs to be proven,” she said. This won't stop the pitchforks from coming out well before we have such evidence, especially given they were workers from a mining company and the already hostile political climate regarding the topic of tribes. But personally I'd rather wait until this is the case before forming an opinion... > warned that given the small sizes of the uncontacted Amazon tribes, this latest episode could mean that a significant percentage of a remote ethnic group was wiped out. If 10 people dying means a "significant percentage was wiped out" shows that they were already on the brink of extinction as it was. It's not clear from the article if that was an obvious consequence to the preptraitors involved or they knew it was a risk. Either way hopefully it wasn't a case of disregard for human life, even if the tribe violently engaged them giving an exuse to use modern weaponry against them.
- dogruck 9y agoAlso this: With land disputes on the rise in many remote areas of Brazil, indigenous groups, rural workers and land activists have all been targeted by violence. Not justifying alleged murder -- but looks to be a generally violent region and environment.
- dogruck 9y agoInnocent until proven guilty. Gotta love this paragraph: “There is a lot of evidence, but it needs to be proven,” she said. What's the evidence?
- pvg 9y agoInnocent until proven guilty. This is a principle of the US criminal justice system not a law of newspaper reporting and/or nature.
- parineum 9y agoIt's a principle of the US criminal justice system that is derived from a moral intuition of justice. I hate seeing the US policy discarded because it's "irrelevant" to the context. The basis of the law is a moral issue that is always relevant. If murder wasn't illegal it'd still be wrong. If you want to disagree with the moral principle, go ahead (but I suspect you'll sound like a tyrant).
- jack9 9y ago> It's a principle of the US criminal justice system that is derived from a moral intuition of justice. Morals are about value systems. Moral intuition is a paradox, as there is a multitude of moral value systems. Innocent until proven guilty is an American ethical precept.
- dom0 9y ago> Innocent until proven guilty is an American ethical precept. B-7, miss! This concept predates Americans by a number of years; it certainly wasn't invented there. The idea can be traced to ancient Greek and was already applied by the Romans.
- quuquuquu 9y agoInteresting, thanks for the knowledge. So interesting how societies of all time periods have due process for some, and slavery/war for others
- Alex3917 9y agoOh well, there goes potentially thousands of years worth of medical knowledge, linguistic insight, etc.
- bdcravens 9y agoThe article said about 10 villagers, not the entire village.
- folli 9y agoLet's wait another couple of years, with increasing logging operations in the region, the introduction of diseases that their immune system hasn't encountered before etc.
- ekianjo 9y ago> thousands of years worth of medical knowledge If that can somewhat reassure you, most of the "traditional medicines" once tested in proper clinical trials, are just about the same as placebo. I'm not saying all, but a good majority. And people used to die from simple infections way more before we had modern medicine with antibiotics and the like, so I'd rather count on modern medicine any day for discoveries and treatments.
- kamaal 9y agoThat is not the point. Staying in the jungle for a few thousand years leads you to optimize locally sourced flora and fauna to amazing levels to solve a range of medical conditions. That could be helpful to a lot of people in many social and financial conditions.
- messe 9y ago> Staying in the jungle for a few thousand years leads you to optimize locally sourced flora and fauna to amazing levels to solve a range of medical conditions. Do you have a source to back that up?
- hallman76 9y agoI've always been completely blown away that there were 'uncontacted' tribes on Earth at the same time that we had a rover zipping around Mars. Gibson said it. The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sharkweek 9y agoOne of my favorite poems, by the late great Gil Scott-Heron, "Whitey on the moon" A rat done bit my sister Nell, with whitey on the moon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtBy_ppG4hY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtBy_ppG4hY I think it's obviously short-sighted to not budget for advancement, but it's important to remember this disparity exists.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- carapace 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island > It is home to the Sentinelese who, often violently, reject any contact with the outside world, and are among the last people worldwide to remain virtually untouched by modern civilization. As such, only limited information about the island is known. They are the control group. (And they live on Sentinel island! Get it?)
- kamaal 9y agoIt is also a little scary. Human civilization and progress associated with it is a function of continuity and inertia. And that requires all the right inputs . Else it is perfectly possible to keep going in infinite loops between the past and the current. I remember reading somewhere the human race would be way more advanced had the hellenistic period continued. War, politics, economics, social conditions, religions they have to be all perfect.
- addicted 9y agoSo 10 people were killed and possibly loads of culture destroyed because people wanted more shiny rocks. It goes to show that as advanced as we think we as modern humans are we are pretty damn primitive.
- nippples 9y ago> we as modern humans Most humans had literally nothing to do with this.
- adventured 9y ago> Most humans had literally nothing to do with this. It's impossible to apply effective collective guilt and to properly human-bash, if the "we" isn't used, that's why it is so frequently invoked that way. They know that the extreme majority of people had nothing to do with it when they use that phrasing, it doesn't have any captivation what-so-ever if you say: an extraordinarily small number of people out of seven billion are/were the problem/cause. It applies similarly to nearly every popular topic of human bashing, from animal cruelty to war (just as when people say their faith in humanity has been restored because of the act of one person, they're making a similar intentional error of collective application).
- Chris2048 9y ago> just as when people say their faith in humanity has been restored I don't find that convincing at all though.
- amelius 9y agoWell, one could argue that collectively we've created (or at least allowed to exist) the conditions for this to happen.
- nippples 9y agoWhat happened was a crime. What are we as a collective supposed to do? Routinely exterminate criminals? Develop pre-crime police units? Build a large well-monitored wall around protected areas? What is the big insight that we as as a collective are supposed to learn from the supposed collective guilt? There's literally a very small amount of people responsible for this atrocity and I hope they serve adequate sentences in prison for their crimes.
- aaron695 9y agoSo we let the human zoo keep on running and are supprised they get murdered? We refuse to supply them with medicine, technology and law and order and murders happen? Supprise supprise. What a awful awful thing it is to leave them in the stone ages, and all the horrific things that happen in tribes, just for our entertainment. OT There is a parellel here to possible libitarian utopias. Sure you are without government, but as such you have no protection. If you piss off a country and they bomb you/stop you resupplying, you don't really have any recourse.
- lawlessone 9y ago"What a awful awful thing it is to leave them in the stone ages, and all the horrific things that happen in tribes, just for our entertainment." Contact usually hasn't been good for the health of many of these people.
- aaron695 9y agoI'm better off than my parents who were better off than their parents etc for a while. Sorry, it's called progress. We war less, we rape less, we murder less, we live longer. And why this mythology than contact now is combiariable to contact 200+ years ago is beyond me. Anyway, as the zoo keepers we gave a responsibility for our exibit. We are possibly letting them down here. If we are going to keep them in the dark ages we need to step up.
- celticninja 9y agoThey don't want to, if they did they could have walked out of the forest at anytime.
- moretai 9y agoYou should go down there and help them out.
- aaron695 9y agoEven if it was efficient for myself to, it is not allowed to immunise them I believe? Anti-Vax to the max. I could not for instance voluntarily give them a schooling level that is mother fucking compulsory in the USA? And Europe of course, just picked USA cause it's very libertarian but STILL makes education compulsory.
- jjawssd 9y agoI have a lot of trouble feeling any amount of empathy for Brazilian natives after seeing How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (1971)
- celticninja 9y agoYou know that's not a documentary right?
- jjawssd 9y agoRegardless of whether the story is accurate or not the savagery of American native tribes is well-documented. Tribal warfare and cannibalism is commonplace.
- damnfine 9y agoWell, I didn't expect blatant racisim in HN comments, but there it is. Based on ignorance no less. Can we ban people like this? /serious I am all for free speech, but excusing murder based on race is where I may have to draw the fucking line. Feel free to post this on a board relevant to your hopefuly unique interests.
- jjawssd 9y agoI did not realize this was considered racism. I never excused anything. Is it true or false that native Americans took part in murderous rituals? It is very unfair to label my post racist. I am certainly not name-calling. The entire argument you presented in response was an ad hominem attack on me instead of refuting anything I mentioned. I am saddened that you are incapable of understanding my point. Please address the specific point I made earlier. Thank you.
- noam87 9y agoThe level of ignorance and /r/iamverysmart-worthy pontificating that's on display in this thread is truly embarrassing. Worse than embarrassing, it's the embodiment of banal evil; because it's precisely this ignorance and blitheness that's enabling the atrocities that continue to go on in South America. For Christ's sake, people, travel -- or read a damn book at the very least before sharing such ill-founded opinions. Except for rare uncontacted tribes, South American natives are actual people you can meet and talk to. Ask them yourself why they choose not to join our wonderful shiny way of life.
- trentmb 9y agoGee mister, I sure hope that I can be as smart as you one day!
- Boothroid 9y agoThis makes my heart ache so much that I can hardly bear to read it. I also feel like I detect a note of insecurity in many of the comments - it's as if the idea that our modern lifestyle and its impacts may be problematic and or in some aspects inferior to pre-modern ways of living is somehow threatening, and must therefore be rejected. I think it's massively ignorant and brutish to view earlier civilisations with such contempt, and collectively suicidal for humanity for us to carry on regardless when the Earth seems to be giving us plenty of signs that we are heading for disaster unless we change.
- pyroinferno 9y agoThese aren't noble-savages, the amount of killings in these pre-modern tribes are horrific. Per-capita they are way beyond any Western Civilization. If you think having disdain for murder is "brutish" then I think you're fucked in the head.
- feralmoan 9y agoTopical, I watched a movie last night that covers a lot of the things you mentioned - Lost City Of Z http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1212428 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1212428 it didn't get great ratings but was good, cinematic and thoughtful imho
- Boothroid 9y agoCheers for the tip, looks right up my street and is on Netflix
- swlkr 9y agoIf you're interested in the idea that primitive people had something there you should read the unabombers manifesto
- mateus1 9y agoI can't put into words how ashamed I am as a Brazilian. Our country is going to hell in a handbasket.
- Simon_says 9y agoNah, it's not going anywhere.
- kafkaesq 9y agoYour countrymen are just playing catch-up, on top of what the European colonialists did for centuries. And not just "settlers" and miners acting on their own - but acting on the direct behalf of, and and funded by their local governments: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/revealing-the-history-of-genocide-against-californias-native-americans http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/revealing-the-history-of-ge...
- darawk 9y agoThey're catching up to where Europe was 200 years ago? Kind of insulting to Brazilians, don't you think?
- kafkaesq 9y agoI actually meant it more in this vein: "Given that the current descent into barbarbarism -- enacted by an outlier minority of their population, in one tiny corner of their country -- is still but a tiny fraction of what the Europeans, Arabs and their local proxies did, and much more as a popular and broadly-supported effort across pretty much the entire globe, across literally tens of generations, from about 500 until about 50 years ago -- as a people and a culture they aren't looking so bad." Barbaric and shameful though it is.
- pmarreck 9y agoIf these are similar to other "uncontacted" tribes I've read about, they seem to react quite violently/aggressively when confronted (it doesn't matter if it's a reaction to fear... if someone's shooting arrows at you first and asking questions later and you have a gun... most people are going to return fire), so if the gold miners said they either had to kill or be killed, I'm inclined to believe them unfortunately.
- papercrane 9y agoTheir self-defense claim is one thing, but it's a whole other thing to brag about it, claim to have a trophy and to have desecrated the bodies.
- pmarreck 9y agoCould be a rationalization to cope with the trauma/horror of having killed someone, similar to "inappropriate" wartime or gallows humor; depersonalizing your victim is one way to avoid the full guilt of what you did and is a common psychological coping mechanism (that's not saying it's good...)
- hsod 9y agoI admire your dedication to the principle of charity
- pmarreck 9y agoI was a Psych major. Apparently the essence of what it taught me was "empathy for others" and "intolerance for bullshit" :) I am now seemingly surrounded by the un-empathetic (and the uncritical-thinking...) Probably the one piece of information that would make one more empathetic is reading up on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribution_bias#Fundamental_attribution_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribution_bias#Fundamental_a...
- papercrane 9y ago
- jjawssd 9y agoWhy is this article considered worthy of being posted on "Hacker News?" I fail to understand how this is at all relevant to "Hackers."
- replayzero 9y agoI saw that as Amazon Prime members...