In mid-December 2015, indigenous social activists protested across Taiwan with urban demonstrations and lighting of solidarity bonfires in rural communities. They were angry about the case of Tama Talum (Wang Guang-lu), a 56-year-old Bunun man slated to begin a 3.5 year prison sentence on December 15. In July 2013, at the request of his 92-year-old mother who wanted to eat traditional country food, he had hunted one Reeve’s muntjac (a small deer) and Formosan serow (a mountain goat).¹ He was arrested and convicted in a Taitung court for illegal weapons possession and poaching. On October 29, 2015, the Supreme Court ruled against his appeal. Tama Talum’s case merits international attention for humanitarian reasons, but also because it reveals deeper human rights issues.

Taiwan’s indigenous peoples (known as Austronesians to anthropologists) have traditionally lived from horticulture and hunting. There are now 546,218 indigenous people in 16 officially recognized tribes. They have an active social movement, a quota of 6 indigenous legislators, a cabinet-level Council of Indigenous Peoples, and their collective rights are enshrined in the Constitution. Systematic violation of their right to hunt, however, remains a concern.

Indigenous Hunting as a Human Right

Indigenous hunting rights are recognized in international customary law, including International Labour Organization Convention 169, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Convention on Biological Diversity, Article 8j of which recognizes the value of indigenous practices and knowledge to wildlife conservation.

Taiwan’s 2005 Basic Law on Indigenous Peoples states clearly in Article 19 that:

Indigenous persons may undertake the following non-profit seeking activities in indigenous peoples’ regions: 1) Hunting wild animals; 2) Collecting wild plants and fungus; 3) Collecting minerals, rocks and soils; 4) Utilizing water resources. The above activities can only be conducted for traditional culture, ritual or self-consumption.

The sticking point is that this law is a Basic Law. In order to be implemented, all relevant laws must be revised. Currently, all hunting in National Parks (nearly 9% of Taiwan) remains illegal. The 1989 Wildlife Conservation Act bans trapping (the most common practice) entirely. Revisions permit hunting only for collective ceremonies upon application of a permit. The Statute for Controlling Firearms, Ammunition and Weapons has been revised to permit indigenous people to possess home-made rifles. Tama Talum was convicted because he did not use a “handmade” rifle and his hunt was not part of collective ritual. This ignores the provision for self-consumption in the Basic Law.

Indigenous Hunting as Life Practice

For indigenous people, hunting is not about killing animals, but rather about sociality and identity. For many young men, hunting is an important coming-of-age ritual and an opportunity for intergenerational transmission of knowledge. Hunting involves dangerous ordeals in ancestral forests, as well as sharing of meat with family and friends. It is spiritual form of communication with ancestors and mountain spirits. Some parents expect prospective sons-in-law to demonstrate their abilities by providing game. Each tribe in Taiwan has traditional legal institutions to regulate hunting. Hunters claim that their institutions successfully conserve wildlife, pointing to the continuing existence of animals as living evidence. Hunting and trapping are part of a larger embodied knowledge of forest animals and plants that would be lost forever if these practices ceased. The forests do not exist outside of human activity. They have been shaped by generations of hunters in ways conducive to animal well-being.

Taiwan’s current legal framework does not take indigenous hunting rights seriously. It condemns indigenous hunters to use “homemade” rifles that can be dangerous to the hunters and their companions. It forbids trapping entirely, even though this is the most common hunting practice. Current definitions of “culture” include only public rituals and ceremonies approved by local governments, without consideration of daily culture or subsistence needs. It does not provide provisions for the implementation and enforcement of indigenous-led hunting management.

This legal framework is also insufficient for conservation. Because indigenous people must hunt clandestinely, it is impossible for them to create effective management regimes. There are few incentives to evict other intruders (including non-indigenous poachers) from traditional territories now under exclusive state jurisdiction. Without sustainable hunting, knowledge and practices important to conservation will be lost; and fewer people will maintain a vested interest in nurturing wildlife habitat. This is a lose-lose situation for hunters and animals alike.

For now, Tama Talum’s sentence should be suspended or pardoned. Taiwan must immediately revise all relevant laws in accordance with the Basic Law. Only then can hunters reaffirm their role as stewards of the forests and establish institutions for effective management of hunting. These are important steps in indigenous rights. Since biodiversity loss is a worldwide crisis, this would also be a gift to the entire planet.

Take Action

Please help us show international support for Talum’s case by signing this petition.

Thank you!

For more information, see:

• Simon, Scott and Awi Mona. 2015. “Indigenous Rights and Wildlife Conservation: The Vernacularization of International Law on Taiwan.” Taiwan Human Rights Journal 3(1): 3-31. (Open Access)
• Simon, Scott. 2013. “Of Boars and Men: Indigenous Knowledge and Co-Management in Taiwan.” Human Organization 72 (3): 220-229.
• Simon, Scott. 2015. “Real People, Real Dogs and Pigs for the Ancestors: The Moral Universe of ‘Domestication’ in Indigenous Taiwan.” American Anthropologist 117(4): early view.

I had learned about Plymouth in school. But it was not until I was poking through the scattered references to Billington [the author’s ancestor] that it occurred to me that my ancestor, like everyone else in the colony, had voluntarily enlisted in a venture that had him arriving in New England without food or shelter six weeks before winter. Not only that, he joined a group that, so far as is known, set off with little idea of where it was heading. In Europe, the Pilgrims had refused to hire the experienced John Smith as a guide, on the theory that they could use the maps in his book. In consequence, as Smith later crowed, the hapless Mayflower spent several frigid weeks scouting around Cape Cod for a good place to land, during which time many colonists became sick and died. Landfall at Patuxet did not end their problems. The colonists had intended to produce their own food, but inexplicably neglected to bring any cows, sheep, mules, or horses. To be sure, the Pilgrims had intended to make most of their livelihood not by farming but by catching fish for export to Britain. But the only fishing gear the Pilgrims brought was useless in New England. Half of the 102 people on the Mayflower made it through the first winter, which to me seemed amazing. How did they survive?

In his history of Plymouth colony, Governor Bradford himself provides one answer: robbing Indian houses and graves. The Mayflower hove to first at Cape Cod. An armed company of Pilgrims staggered out. Eventually they found a deserted Indian habitation. The newcomers—hungry, cold, sick—dug open burial sites and ransackedhomes, looking for underground stashes of food. After two days of nervous work the company hauled ten bushels of maize back to the Mayflower, carrying much of the booty in a big metal kettle the men had also stolen. “And sure it was God’s good providence that we found this corn,” Winslow wrote, “for else we know not how we should have done.”…

Inexperienced in agriculture, the Pilgrims were also not woods-people; indeed, they were so incurious about their environment that Bradford felt obliged to comment in his journal when Francis Billington, my ancestors son, climbed to the top of a tall tree to look around. As Thoreau noted with disgust, the colonists landed at Plymouth on December 16, but it was not until January 8 that one ofthem went as far away as two miles — and even then the traveler was, again, Francis Billington. …

Huddled in their half-built village that first terrible winter, the colonists rarely saw the area’s inhabitants, except for the occasional shower of brass- or claw-tipped arrows. After February, glimpses andsightings became more frequent. Scared, the Pilgrims hauled five small cannons from the Mayflower and emplaced them in a defensive fortification. But after all the anxiety, their first contact with Indianswent surprisingly easily. Within days Tisquantum [and Indian who had previously visited England] came to settle among them. And then they heard his stories.

No record survives of Tisquantum’s first journey across theAtlantic, but arithmetic gives some hint of the conditions in Hunt’s [who had captured Tisquantum] ship. John Smith had arrived with two ships and a crew of forty-five. If the two ships had been of equal size, Hunt would have sailed with a crew of about twenty-two. Because Hunt, Smith’s subordinate, had the smaller of the two vessels, the actual number was surely less.Adding twenty or more captured Indians thus meant that the ship wassailing with at least twice its normal complement. Tisquantum would have been tied or chained, to prevent rebellion, and jammed into whatever dark corner of the hull was available. Presumably he was fed from the ship’s cargo of dried fish. Smith took six weeks to cross theAtlantic to England. There is no reason to think Hunt went faster. The only difference was that he took his ship to Malaga, on Spain’s Mediterranean coast. There he intended to sell all of his cargo, including the human beings.

The Indians’ appearance in this European city surely caused a stir. Not long before, Shakespeare had griped in The Tempest that the populace of the much bigger city of London “would not give a doit [a small coin] to a lame beggar, [but] will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.” Hunt managed to sell only a few of his captives before local Roman Catholic priests seized the rest—the Spanish Church vehemently opposed brutality toward Indians… The priests intended to save both Tisquantum’s body, by preventing his enslavement, and his soul, by converting him to Christianity… In any case,this resourceful man convinced them to let him return home — or, rather, to try to return. He got to London, where he stayed with John Slany, a shipbuilder with investments in Newfoundland. Slany apparently taught Tisquantum English while maintaining him as a curiosityin his townhouse. Meanwhile, Tisquantum persuaded him to arrange for passage to North America on a fishing vessel. He ended up in a tiny British fishing camp on the southern edge of Newfoundland. It was on the same continent as Patuxet [Tisquantim’s home], but between them were a thousand miles of rocky coastline and the Mi’Kmac and Abenaki alliances,which were at war with one another.

Because traversing this unfriendly territory would be difficult, Tisquantum began looking for a ride to Patuxet. He extolled the bounty of New England to Thomas Dermer, one of Smith’s subordinates, who was then staying in the same camp. Dermer, excited by Tisquantum’s promise of easy wealth, contacted Ferdinando Gorges. Gorges, a longtime, slightly dotty enthusiast about the Americas, promised to send over a ship with the men, supplies, and legal papers necessary for Dermer to take a crack at establishing a colony in New England… On May 19, 1619, still accompanied by Tisquantum, he [Dermer] set out for Massachusetts…

What Tisquantum saw on his return home was unimaginable. From southern Maine to Narragansett Bay, the coast was empty – “utterly void,” Dermer reported. What had once been a line of busy communities was now a mass of tumbledown homes and untended fields overrun by blackberries. Scattered among the houses and fields were skeletons bleached by the sun. Slowly Dermer’s crew realized they were sailing along the border of a cemetery two hundred miles long and forty miles deep. Patuxet had been hit [by Western-introduced diseases] with special force. Not a single person remained. Tisquantum’s entire social world had vanished.

Looking for his kinsfolk, he led Dermer on a melancholy march inland. The settlements they passed lay empty to the sky but full of untended dead. Tisquantum’s party finally encountered some survivors, a handful of families in a shattered village. These people sent for Massasoit, who appeared, Dermer wrote, “with a guard of fiftie armed men” — and a captive French sailor, a survivor of the shipwreck on Cape Cod. Massasoit asked Dermer to send back the Frenchman. And then he told Tisquantum what had happened.

One of the French sailors had learned enough Massachusett to inform his captors before dying that God would destroy them for their misdeeds. The Nauset scoffed at the threat. But the Europeans carried a disease, and they bequeathed it to their jailers. Based on accounts of the symptoms, the epidemic was probably of viral hepatitis… Whatever the cause, the results were ruinous. TheIndians “died in heapes as they lay in their houses,” the merchant Thomas Morton observed. In their panic, the healthy fled from the sick, carrying the disease with them to neighboring communities. Behind them remained the dying, “left for crows, kites, and vermin to prey upon.” Beginning in 1616, the pestilence took at least three years to exhaust itself and killed as much as 90 percent of the people in coastal New England. “And the bones and skulls upon the severall places of their habitations made such a spectacle,” Morton wrote,that the Massachusetts woodlands seemed to be “a new-found Golgotha,” the Place of the Skull, where executions took place in Roman Jerusalem.

The religious overtones in Morton’s metaphor are well placed. Neither the Indians nor the Pilgrims had our contemporary understanding of infectious disease. Each believed that sickness reflected the will of celestial forces… Until the sickness Massasoit had directly ruled a community of several thousand and held sway over a confederation of as many as twenty thousand. Now his group was reduced to sixty people and the entire confederation to fewer than a thousand. “The Wampanoag,” wrote Salisbury, the Smith historian, “came to the obvious logical conclusion: ‘their deities had allied against them.’”

The Pilgrims held similar views. Governor Bradford is said to have attributed the plague to “the good hand of God,” which “favored our beginnings” by “sweeping away great multitudes of the natives . . .that he might make room for us.” Indeed, more than fifty of the first colonial villages in New England were located on Indian communities emptied by disease. The epidemic, Gorges said, left the land “without any [people] to disturb or appease our free and peaceable possession thereof, from when we may justly conclude, that GOD made the way to effect his work.”

Much as the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which killed tens of thousands in one of Europe’s richest cities, prompted spiritual malaise across Europe, the New England epidemic shattered the Wampanoag’s sense that they lived in balance with an intelligible world. On top of that, the massive death toll created a political crisis. Because the hostility between the Wampanoag and the neighboring Narraganset thad restricted contact between them, the disease had not spread to the latter. Massasoit’s people were not only beset by loss, they were in danger of subjugation.

After learning about the epidemic, the distraught Tisquantum first returned with Dermer to southern Maine. Apparently concluding he was never going to meet Rowcraft, Dermer decided in 1620 to make another pass at New England. Tisquantum returned, too, but not with Dermer. Instead he walked home—the long, risky journey he had wanted to avoid… Tisquantum was seized on his journey home, perhaps because of his association with the hated English, and sent to Massasoit as a captive.

As he had before, Tisquantum talked his way out of a jam. This time he extolled the English, filling Massasoit’s ears with tales of their cities, their great numbers, their powerful technology. Tisquantum said, according to a colonist who knew him, that if the sachem “Could make [the] English his Friends then [any] Enemies yt weare to[o]strong for him”—in other words, the Narragansett—“would be Constrained to bowe to him.” The sachem listened without trust. Within a few months, word came that a party of English had set up shop at Patuxet. The Wampanoag observed them suffer through the first punishing winter. Eventually Massasoit concluded that he possibly should ally with them — compared to the Narragansett, they were the lesser of two evils. Still, only when the need for a translator became unavoidable did he allow Tisquantum to meet the Pilgrims.

Massasoit had considerable experience with Europeans—his father had sent Martin Pring on his way seventeen years before. But that was before the epidemic, when Massasoit had the option of expelling them. Now he told the Pilgrims that he was willing to leave them in peace (a bluff, one assumes, since driving them away would have taxed his limited resources). But in return he wanted the colonists’ assistance with the Narragansett.

To the Pilgrims, the Indians’ motives for the deal were obvious. They wanted European technology on their side. In particular, they wanted guns. “He thinks we may be [of] some strength to him,”Winslow said later, “for our pieces [guns] are terrible to them.”

In fact Massasoit had a subtler plan. It is true that European technology dazzled Native Americans on first encounter. But the relative positions of the two sides were closer than commonly believed. Contemporary research suggests that indigenous peoples in New England were not technologically inferior to the British—or, rather, that terms like “superior” and “inferior” do not readily apply to the relationship between Indian and European technology.

Guns are an example. As Chaplin, the Harvard historian, has argued, New England Indians were indeed disconcerted by their first experiences with European guns: the explosion and smoke, the lack of a visible projectile. But the natives soon learned that most of the British were terrible shots, from lack of practice—their guns were little more than noisemakers. Even for a crack shot, a seventeenth-century gun had fewer advantages over a longbow than may be supposed. Colonists in Jamestown taunted the Powhatan in 1607 with a target they believed impervious to an arrow shot. To the colonists’ dismay, an Indian sank an arrow into it a foot deep, “which was strange, being that a Pistoll could not pierce it.” To regain the upper hand, the English set up a target made of steel. This time the archer “burst his arrow all to pieces.” The Indian was “in a great rage”; he realized, one assumes, that the foreigners had cheated. When the Powhatan later captured John Smith, Chaplin notes, Smith broke his pistol rather than reveal to his captors “the awful truth that it could not shoot as far as an arrow could fly.”

At the same time, Europeans were impressed by American technology. The foreigners, coming from a land plagued by famine, were awed by maize, which yields more grain per acre than any other cereal. Indian moccasins were so much more comfortable and water-proof than stiff, moldering English boots that when colonists had to walk for long distances their Indian companions often pitied their discomfort and gave them new footwear. Indian birchbark canoes were faster and more maneuverable than any small European boat. In 1605 three laughing Indians in a canoe literally paddled circles round the lumbering dory paddled by traveler George Weymouth and seven other men. Despite official disapproval, the stunned British eagerly exchanged knives and guns for Indian canoes. Bigger European ships with sails had some advantages. Indians got hold of them through trade and shipwreck, and trained themselves to be excellent sailors. By the time of the epidemic, a rising proportion of the shipping traffic along the New England coast was of indigenous origin.

Reading Massasoit’s motives at this distance is a chancy business. But it seems likely that he did not want to ally with the foreigners primarily for their guns, as they believed. Although the sachem doubtless relished the possibility of additional firepower, he probably wanted more to confront the Narragansett with the unappetizing prospect of attacking one group of English people at the same time that their main trading partners were other English people. Faced with the possibility of disrupting their favored position as middlemen, the Narragansett might think twice before staging an incursion. Massasoit, if this interpretation is correct, was trying to incorporate the Pilgrims into the web of native politics. Not long before Massasoit had expelled foreigners who stayed too long in Wampanoag territory. But with the entire confederation now smaller than one of its former communities, the best option seemed to be allowing the Pilgrims to remain. It was a drastic, even fatal, decision.

Tisquantum worked to prove his value to the Pilgrims. He was so successful that when some anti-British Indians abducted him the colonists sent out a military expedition to get him back. They did not stop to ask themselves why he might be making himself essential, given how difficult it must have been to live in the ghost of his childhood home. In retrospect, the answer seems clear: the alternative to staying in Plymouth was returning to Massasoit and renewed captivity.

Recognizing that the Pilgrims would be unlikely to keep him around forever, Tisquantum decided to gather together the few survivors of Patuxet and reconstitute the old community at a site near Plymouth. More ambitious still, he hoped to use his influence on the English to make this new Patuxet the center of the Wampanoag confederation, thereby stripping the sachemship from Massasoit, who had held him captive. To accomplish these goals, he intended to play the Indians and English against each other.

The scheme was risky, not least because the ever-suspicious Massasoit sent one of his pniese [a warrior-counselor], Hobamok, to Plymouth as a monitor… Sometimes the two men were able to work together, as when Hobamok and Tisquantum helped the Pilgrims negotiate a treaty with the Massachusett to the north. They also helped establish a truce with the Nauset of Cape Cod after Bradford promised to pay back the losses caused by their earlier grave robbing.

By fall the settlers’ situation was secure enough that they held a feast of thanksgiving. Massasoit showed up with ninety people, most of them young men with weapons. The Pilgrim militia responded by marching around and firing their guns in the air in a manner intended to convey menace. Gratified, both sides sat down, ate a lot of food, and complained about the Narragansett. Ecce Thanksgiving.

In the first of what I hope to be several reviews of ethnographic and documentary films, I want to write about Hu Tai-li’s excellent film Returning Souls. This film will be of interest to anyone teaching about museum anthropology, repatriation, and indigenous rights. Filmed over eight years, the story it covers goes back forty years to a typhoon in 1958 which destroyed an indigenous ancestral house in the Amis village of Tafalong, about forty minutes south of where I live in Taiwan.

While Amis are generally egalitarian, the owners of this house, the Kakita’an family, had a special place in the village, and their house “is the only recorded structure with carved pillars” among the Amis (from the study guide – PDF). While aristocratic families and carved pillars are common among the Paiwan, they are not otherwise known among the Amis.

From the study guide:

With carvings depicting dramatic tales of a big flood, a glowing girl, marriage between siblings, shaman’s descending to earth, patricide, and the origins of headhunting, the Kakita’an house became the most famous, most intriguing example of Amis architecture.

In the past, the Kakita’an family had rights to the land in Tafalong and was responsible for holding rituals to venerate heads they had hunted as well as their ancestors. …While the heir of the Kakita’an family of the matrilineal Ami tribe was a woman, her brother presided over the rituals performed in the house. The uniqueness of the Kakita’an house made it a focus of the Japanese colonial government (1895 – 1945), which was determined to stamp out all indigenous headhunting and related rituals. The government pushed the Kakita’an family out of the house and gave the rights to both house and land to a public foundation. In 1935, the house was named a historic site, provisions were made for its maintenance, and it was turned into an exhibit. The structure was the only traditional Amis ancestral house that had not been demolished, so to the Amis, it had unique cultural significance.

When the house was destroyed by typhoon the ancestral pillar was taken to the Institute of Ethnography (IOE) at Academia Sinica, where Dr. Hu now works. [Full disclosure: although I am not affiliated with IOE, I do work with her as a member of the Taiwan Association of Visual Ethnography, which she founded.] The pillars stayed at IOE without incident until 2003, when an elementary school teacher in Tafalong wrote a letter requesting that the pillar be returned to the village. As the film documents, however, that’s not what happened…

From a magazine article about the film (emphasis added):

With the help of the village shaman, Kating Hongay, they soon decided that the panels would be better protected at the institute, but also that the Kakita’an family would bring home the souls of their ancestors believed to be living in the panels by rebuilding the ancestral house on its original site and carving new panels.

This decision began the reconstruction project, and Hu’s documentary, which follows the steps of the restoration, intertwined with narratives of Amis legends and the history of the Kakita’an family.

As the project unfolded, the Amis specialty of communicating with their ancestors through a shaman was also resurrected.

This process of returning the souls living in the pillar, rather than the artifact itself, as well as the restoration project, constitute the bulk of the film. It would be interesting enough if it ended there, but there film also documents internal divisions within the village regarding land use, the role of the Kakita’an family, and the threat posted to the community by the dead souls of their ancestors. The film provides a rich and sensitive look at a long and messy process, doing exactly the kind of thing that ethnographic film does best.

I mentioned earlier that for many people ontology was a major theme at AAAs. Well now the good folks at Cultural Anthropology have published the papers from the Politics of Ontology Session. Short. Sweet. Ontologytastic. Most of what happens at the AAAs doesn’t live on in any meaningful way, or else is published years afterwards. It’s amazing, frankly, to see such relevant stuff from such high-calibre people get thrown up on the Intarweb.

Speaking of high-calibre, Museum Anthropology Review has published a ginormous double issue on digital repatriation and the circulation of indigenous knowledge. Its an amazing collection of papers that help get the word out about the cutting edge of digital repatriation projects which are out there. Hats off to the organizers.

There are also many new less scholarly, more general-interest pieces out now. Limn, an art magazine/scholarly journal hybrid founded by our own Chris Kelty, published its fourth issue on Food Infrastructures. Yum. There is also a new issue of Anthropology of This Century out as well as a new number of Popular Anthropology.

I wish I could recommend specific articles out of all these journals, but frankly I’m swamped — and eager to hear what you all have to say. Anything in here you’re particularly keen to read? Or what would you recommend, having read some of this stuff? The Internetz wants to know.

Just over a month ago a Peruvian indigenous federation circulated remarkable video footage showing about a hundred isolated (so-called “uncontacted”) Mashco-Piro Indians just across the river from a Piro indigenous village along the Rio de las Piedras in Peru. They  appeared to be asking for food and trade goods like rope and metal tools. The Piro and Mashco-Piro languages are close enough to allow communication. Hoping to avoid direct contact and the possibility of disease contagion, forest rangers at Monte Salvado floated a canoe laden with bananas across the river. After a tense three-day standoff, the Mashco-Piro eventually disappeared back into the forest. No one is quite sure why the Mashco-Piro — who have so steadfastly avoided such contact until recently — suddenly showed up. Many suspect that illegal loggers active throughout the region have disrupted their usual migration routes.

In late 2011, a different group of Mashco-Piro living near the border of Manu National Park shot and killed Shaco Flores, an old Matsigenka friend of mine, with an arrow. Having lived among the Piro for many years and learned the Piro language, Shaco had been patiently communicating and trading with the Mashco-Piro for over twenty years, always maintaing a safe distance but slowly drawing them closer with his gifts, food and conversation. But something happened on that fateful day in late November: perhaps the Mashco-Piro were spooked by Shaco’s appearance with several relatives at the manioc garden on a small river island where he had been allowing the Mashco-Piro to harvest his crops; perhaps there was internal disagreement among the Mashco-Piro whether or not to accept Shaco’s long-standing offer to bring them into permanent contact. We may never know.

Just a few days earlier, a Spanish ornithologist had been staying at Shaco’s house and photographed a small group of Mashco-Piro across the river through a birding scope. It is possible that the powerfully built, somewhat bearded man pictured in these photographs is the same one who fired the single arrow that killed Shaco. After Shaco’s death, these sensational photographs, like the Mashco-Piro video clips this year, went viral across the internet, briefly drawing the attention of international media outlets including the BBC, MSN, Huffington Post and even Fox News. Our overly connected, globalized world is fascinated with stories about “uncontacted” peoples, especially if those stories involve violence.

Today the Mashco-Piro are entirely nomadic hunters and gatherers who keep no gardens and make no permanent houses, just lean-to palm shacks under the forest canopy, sometimes woven from living, standing palm saplings. Yet they are hardly throwbacks to the “Stone Age,” as some media outlets present them. In fact, the Mashco-Piro are every bit as modern as, well, the automobile and the rubber tire. In the late 19th century, before John Boyd Dunlop invented the pneumatic tire and Henry Ford drove the first “horseless carriage” out of his shed in Detroit, the Mashco-Piro inhabited the upper Manu River in settled agricultural villages. In 1894, the infamous “King of Rubber” Carlos Fermin Fitzcarraldo, hauled a steamship across a small hillock into the Manu River basin and opened this isolated region to rubber tappers. This historical event was immortalized (and heavily fictionalized) by Klaus Kinski’s signature performance in Werner Herzog’s film, “Fitzcarraldo.” After the “Mashco” (as they were then called) resisted Fitzcarraldo’s incursions, his men slaughtered them in a gory battle that was said to have left the river water undrinkable from so many corpses (see Shepard et al. 2010). Apparently, surviving Mashco-Piro took to the woods and have maintained a nomadic lifestyle ever since, hunting and gathering in several distinctive local groups throughout a wide territory between the Piedras and Manu Rivers in Madre de Dios, Peru.

It is hardly appropriate to call such peoples “uncontacted,” since their very isolation occurred in the aftermath of a particularly violent form of contact. For this reason, I coined the term “indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation” in 1996, when I wrote an open letter to Mobil Oil warning the company as well as the Peruvian authorities and several indigenous federations of the many dangers of oil exploration along the Piedras River, where the Mashco-Piro are known to circulate. Then again, “voluntary isolation” may also be another kind of misnomer, given their forced, almost refugee-like status. But the concept of “voluntary isolation” caught on in Peru and elsewhere in Amazonia, emphasizing the important fact that most such groups are not Stone Age innocents, isolated and left behind by Progress, unaware of modernity and all its wonders and discontents. Rather, the Mashco-Piro and other groups have chosen ongoing isolation as a conscious strategy for survival, and have actively resisted  repeated attempts by missionaries, tourists, film crews and even well-meaning indigenous neighbors to establish “first contact.” In addition to the cultural erosion and personal indignities recently contacted groups usually endure, they also inevitably suffer severe, often fatal epidemics of viral diseases, including the flu. Amazonian groups like the Mashco-Piro who have been isolated since the turn of the 20th century essentially re-live (and often die from) the great flu pandemic of 1918, and all its virulent permutations since then, when they enter (or re-enter) “contact.”

Aside from questioning popular notions about “primitive” nomadic societies, the recent appearance of the Mashco-Piro at Monte Salvado asking for food brings up vexing issues about the ethics of isolation and contact. In Peru’s close neighbor, Brazil, the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) and its predecessor, the Indian Protection Agency (SPI), throughout much of the 20th century pursued an aggressive strategy of locating and contacting isolated indigenous groups who were dangerously close to (or in the way of) expanding frontier zones. The tragedy of this official policy became especially apparent during Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s, as rapid road construction and colonization accompanying the “Brazilian miracle” devastated huge swathes of forest and threw hitherto remote indigenous groups like the Cinta Larga, Waimiri-Atroari, Arara, Surui, Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau and others into apocalyptic situations of demographic and cultural collapse. In 1987 FUNAI reversed this policy under a new “Department of Isolated Indians,” focusing their efforts on locating, demarcating and protecting territories where isolated groups live  in order to avoid contact as long as possible. Contact, carried out by teams with long-time field experience, is considered a final, emergency option if a particular group is in imminent threat of conflict with outsiders. Such was the case in 1996 when a FUNAI team contacted a small group of the warlike Korubo (known locally by the quaint moniker of “head smashers”) in the vast Javari River indigenous reserve, close to the Peruvian border. This group had apparently split off from the main population in the center of the reserve and moved dangerously close to the reserve’s border, entering into conflict with local non-indigenous populations. FUNAI decided to contact this one group, giving them vaccinations, health care and other assistance but maintaining them in a state of partial isolation to this day.

In Peru, however, there is no such agency as FUNAI with the funding, institutional presence and field experience (however tragically earned) necessary to carry out such contact operations and protect recently contacted groups. In the past, missionary groups have typically been the ones to handle (and often initiate) contact situations in Peru. Yet neither missionaries of various denominations nor the anthropological team of Manu National Park were able to respond quickly or effectively enough to the Nahua (Yora) contact on the Mishagua river in 1984-1985, leading to the death of nearly half the group (Shepard et al. 2010).

The Peru-Brazil border region has perhaps the world’s largest concentration of isolated indigenous groups, and is also beset by numerous problems associated with illegal logging, gold mining and drug trafficking, rapid deforestation along the new Interoceanic (Trans-Amazon) Highway, and a boom of oil and gas exploration and extraction. FUNAI has long sought institutional partnerships with the Peruvian government to deal with these often overlapping problems across the porous, mostly invisible border, but so far little progress has been made. The indigenous federation in Madre de Dios province, FENAMAD, has taken on the role of recognizing and defending Peru’s isolated indigenous populations in the face of self-serving denials by loggers, oil and gas companies and even government agencies themselves as to the very existence of such groups. FENAMAD, like FUNAI, supports a fundamental policy of “no contact”, respecting such peoples’ apparent choice of isolation.

But what if the Mashco-Piro, for whatever internal reasons or external pressures, return to Monte Salvado to ask for food and gifts in the future? What of the risks of flu contagion, or worse, as these exchanges continue and perhaps intensify? In addition to the risks of of contact or near-contact to isolated groups’ health, Shaco’s tragic death underscores the risks that isolated groups can pose to local populations. Peruvian protected area management plans, anthropological impact studies, and oil exploration projects in the Madre de Dios region and elsewhere now often include “contingency plans” for dealing with isolated indigenous groups. The improvised yet apparently effective (for now) response to the tense situation at Monte Salvado shows that this process of reflection and planning has paid off; the forest rangers, rather than succumbing to the usual paternalistic instinct to give not just food but clothes, matches, and so on to the “poor naked savages,” took the precaution of floating their food gifts across in a canoe, reducing the chance of direct disease contagion. Yet what would happen if a Mashco-Piro were to come down with a cold? Is there an emergency medical-anthropological-indigenous team in Peru that could be put into action on short notice to contain an epidemic outbreak before it decimates the group? How could Peru take better advantage of the experience of FUNAI’s Department of Isolated Indians in neighboring Brazil to prepare itself for the real and possibly imminent contingencies of contact with the Mashco-Piro and other isolated groups?

I don’t claim to have the answers to these difficult questions, but I do hope this posting will provoke useful debate.

Glenn Shepard is an anthropologist, ethnobotanist and film-maker now working at the Goeldi Museum in Belém do Pará, Brazil. He has done field research in Amazonian Peru and Brazil as well as in Mexico, Asia and the Middle East. He writes on topics ranging from shamanism to human ecology to indigenous modernity. He blogs at “Notes from the Ethnoground” and is on Twitter @TweetTropiques.