“If this is true:

-it’s sad that they are now fearful of some new ‘force’ out there in the world
-please leave them alone and never freak them out like that again
-they are my new sustainability heros.
-the dark person’s skin may be dyed? in mourning? shaman?
-the big, older hut is communal/ceremonial?
-Imagine the wisdom in their basic core values
-they have thousands of years of knowledge alive in their culture
-native plants
-horticulutre
-animal kingom
-medicinal practices
-spirituality
-earth & cellestial knowledge and legends

undoubtedly freaked out about the fly over and will be forever fearful.”

See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/30/uncontacted-tribes-discov_n_104290.html

Another thing I find surprising is that, while there are active discussions on some anthro blogs and elsewhere, there’s only one comment on the Daily Mail piece. As I had been “isolated” from the whole debacle, I was assuming it was a new piece, not one from May 29. Maybe they moderate out comments they don’t like, on the Daily Mail site.

Contact with Native peoples along the mid-Atlantic coast and in the interior was not an event, but a series of contact events, which took place at differing times in differing places. More important than the event or events of contact was the process of contact …

I think it is also worth thinking about the fact that a group may have a long history of interaction with other groups and then a long period of isolation. In the context of the Eastern Woodlands I think the Seminole are the textbook case. I lived in Guatemala during the last couple of years of the civil war there and at the time there were communities purposefully removed from interaction with mainstream Guatemalan society in order to escape military repression. They were certainly skittish about contact with outsiders but they were hardly uncontacted. (Anyone interested in free African/African diaspora communities in the Americas can recognize what was going on there.) Outside of the Americas I think North Korea would fit into this broad category. I think an interesting research question us whether these two proposed kinds of isolation—the pre-contact as opposed to the post-contact—are qualitatively different. For example, while most contemporary North Koreans have never seen a whiteman it certainly seems possible that they have a living family member that was shipped out of the country during the war as a laborer. I would expect that such a person would have a different view of the world than would his/her grandchild that had only known life in the DPRK.

I hope my post hasn’t been too rambling. What I am trying to say is that while I agree that would-be allies of so-called uncontacted peoples should perhaps be more thoughtful in how they frame their lobbying efforts it would also seem worthwhile for social scientists to put some time into the disambiguation of social phenomena that we tend to lump together but that may
be, due to historical context, categorically distinct.

Why can’t we go with that story: protecting the environment, wildlife, and the local people’s ways of life against the shattering impact of wreckless resource extraction to feed petroleum addiction? Why do we have to stoop to the whole ‘they think the plane is a giant bird or spirit’ and ‘their way of life was unchanged for 10,000 years’ cannard?

I wonder if you haven’t begun (probably intentionally) to answer the question? Faced with a choice between the extraction, export, and sale of our most precious and rapidly exhausting commodity – oil – and the preservation of an ethno-environment (I like that term, thanks FUNAI), the people who read the newspapers quoted will feel torn.

But by placing this story in the context of first contact, in which fearless Indiana Jones types return to the first movie’s spear-shaking savages and finally make them one with our world, the conversation about resources, choices, and respect can be happily ignored, and protests on behalf of the tribes (or horrors, from the tribe itself) has begun to be defanged