As British mining company Vedanta Resources ploughs ahead with plans to open a massive new mine on tribal land, we invite you to protest outside the firm’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) next week.

Vedanta (through a subsidiary named Sterlite) intends to build a huge bauxite mine in Niyamgiri, Orissa. The Niyamgiri Hills are the home of the Dongria Kondh tribe.

If the mine goes ahead it will destroy the Dongria Kondh and desecrate their most sacred site. Mining in this location risks polluting and drying up the many streams and rivers that flow from the mountain, which thousands of families depend on.

The battle to save Niyamgiri is currently being fought in the Supreme Court in Delhi. Although the company does not yet have permission for the mine, they have built a refinery which has already displaced some of a neighbouring Kondh tribe from their villages.

The Dongria have vowed to protect their forests and mountain. Two spokesmen from the area are traveling to London to protest at the AGM.

The Dongria Kondh need your help. Please join us on Thursday.

To Mr. Mereilles, a government official in charge of monitoring isolated Indians on Brazil’s western frontier, The Observer article must have been even more of a shock than the astounding photographs themselves. In it, he is wrongly alleged to have misled the world. His letter of correction is below, including the sections, in red, that the Observer chose to leave out in publication.

Dear Editor,

Your article (”Secret of the ‘lost’ tribe that wasn’t”, June 22) completely distorts the work I have been doing on behalf of the Brazilian government for the last two decades, to defend the isolated Indian groups of Acre state, Brazil.

I find it very surprising that you did not talk to me before publishing an inaccurate article that suggests I misled people about the uncontacted tribe whose photos were published around the world.

I have not ‘admitted’ that the tribe was known about before we took the photos of them. I have always made that perfectly clear. The statement we released together with the photos contains a statement from me that ‘In this region there are four distinct isolated tribes, that we have monitored for twenty years’.

Your writer is confusing ‘uncontacted’ ‹ that is, no contact with outside society ‹ with ‘undiscovered’. No-one who works in this field would ever describe the many isolated tribes in the Amazon as ’undiscovered’, as we have a good idea where most of them are. But that does not mean that we make contact with them – quite the contrary, we are monitoring their territory to make sure no outsiders can enter.

Your article, by suggesting there was something dishonest about the photos, has made our job harder, and will be used by the Indians’ many enemies.

Yours sincerely,

José Carlos dos Reyes Meirelles Jr,
FUNAI Coordinator of the Ethno-environmental protection zone, Envira River, Acre, Brazil

The damage that this article has done is difficult to measure, yet we can be sure that it has set back the fight for tribal peoples’ rights. It sits proudly at the summit of journalistic irresponsibility.

Despite this, The Observer maintains the original article, without any corrections, on its website, acting as a reference to anyone hoping to ‘prove’ that the uncontacted tribe photographed from the air in early 2008, wasn’t.

The threat of ‘copy and pasting’ doesn’t sound like the most pressing concern for tribal people – not compared to mega-dams, gold-mining, illegal loggers and racism, anyway.

But what if it’s false or damaging information that’s being copied and pasted?

That’s precisely what happened recently after a misleading article by Peter Beaumont in The Observer about the recently published photos of an uncontacted tribe in Brazil near the Peruvian border.

Newspapers and radio stations worldwide started reporting the photos as a ‘farce’, ‘fraud’, ‘fake’ and ‘hoax.’ Nothing could be further from the truth.

The fallout from the Beaumont article has been chronicled by well-known Brazilian journalist, Altino Machado. Machado is from Acre, the remote Brazilian state where the photographed tribe lives, and has worked for some of Brazil’s major newspapers.

‘Peter Beaumont copied what he had read and drew conclusions about an issue he doesn’t know anything about,’ Machado writes in an article for Terra Magazine, a Brazilian publication, noting in passing that Beaumont is a ‘specialist on the Middle East.’

But worse, Machado writes, was still to come. Beaumont’s article was read by journalists all around the world and, after a lot more copying and pasting, newspapers, radio stations and blogs published or broadcast stories based on it, without checking their facts.

Machado remarks that this ‘disinformation’ and the media’s ‘traps’ would have been welcome news to the Peruvian government and the loggers who are invading uncontacted tribes’ territory in Peru.

And why wouldn’t it? The spread of such ‘disinformation’ makes it only more difficult to have the uncontacted tribes’ existence recognised and their land effectively protected from the loggers by the government. On top of that, it undermines the work of Survival and many other organisations pushing to make that a reality.

Read Machado’s article in Spanish and in Portuguese. 

  Julie Christie at a Survival demonstration

Last year Survival asked me to narrate a short film about the plight of uncontacted peoples living in some of the most remote parts of the world. I’ve long been a supporter, and thought this would be one way that I could make a valuable and lasting contribution.

I was unprepared for just how deeply moved I would be by the footage Survival had put together, and the intimate stories of these vulnerable peoples struggling to survive. Amongst the remarkable scenes filmed by Survival researchers, one above all has stayed with me. A pitiful group of just six individuals, the last survivors of a once-proud tribe called the Akuntsu, sit forlornly in a forest clearing.

Having witnessed the massacre of all the other members of their tribe by cattle ranchers desperate for their land, their lethargy and utter despondency is hardly surprising. Yet still they rouse themselves to perform a shuffling dance of welcome. Heartbreaking.

Words seem woefully inadequate to convey their despair; but this short piece of film strikes at the heart of their story, helps us to understand and moves us to act. Survival is appealing for support to create a film unit, to ensure scenes like this reach many more people.

This need not be overly expensive; Survival researchers gather a wealth of video footage when visiting tribal communities, but it takes time and resources to edit, produce and distribute a film like Uncontacted Tribes.

Already this film has generated worldwide interest. For example, a newspaper in India recently gave one of our DVDs to all its readers. This has been one of many fantastic opportunities to get our message across using film, but of course there are cost implications.

With more resources, Survival could produce numerous films showing the reality of life for many of the world’s tribes; the deforestation of their homes, the sickness and disease they suffer as a result of invasions of their land, but also their dignity and endurance.

Survival’s goal is to get more people to see and understand more about tribal peoples. Such a groundswell of support will make it impossible for governments to sweep tribes aside and deny them what is rightfully theirs.

Tragically, it is too late for the Akuntsu; there simply is no way back for such a tiny group of survivors. But for every story like theirs, there are others – because of you – that are more encouraging.

Next year will be Survival’s 40th anniversary. I have been a supporter for most of that time and have seen just how many peoples Survival has helped. In the 1980s, the Yanomami were facing a bleak future, following invasions of their land by goldminers.

In fact more than a fifth of the tribe were wiped out. Decades of campaigning by Survival resulted in an historic victory, with almost 10 million hectares of rainforest secured for the tribe. In the words of Davi Kopenawa, Yanomami leader and shaman, ‘Without Survival, we’d all be dead’.

I’m proud to have been a part of the Uncontacted Tribes project, and I hope this film – and those that follow – will help make the world more aware, and help to secure the future of tribal peoples for generations to come.