When the story about the “lost Amazon tribe” or the newly “discovered tribe” hit the news, complete with deeply painted bodies pointing arrows threateningly up into a camera lens, I shook my head. The media ran with it and the people ate it up. The idea that people who already existed could be discovered only when mainstream, Euro-North American media found them, wasn’t anything new, but that didn’t make it any less disturbing. Now the news is that the whole thing was a hoax. But even the context of this “outing” of reality is filled with distortions and stereotypes ranging from the typical noble savage to appropriation of people’s very presence.

The photographs of the tribe living on what is now the Brazilian- Peruvian border were released to the media by José Carlos Meirelles, a member of the Brazilian Indian Protection Agency, Funai, with the idea that if people thought there was a yet tribes to be “found”, with that contact threatened by the logging industry, that people would come down harder on the logging industry. The idea was that these “unknown” tribes deserved to be saved, perhaps more than those already known. The story raised the idea of the exotic and “savage” as it perceived through a Western lens, as worthy of being saved compared to tribes already “discovered” and perhaps adulterated.

Meirelles admitted that the tribe was first known about almost a century ago and that the apparently chance encounter that produced the now famous images was no accident. ‘When we think we might have found an isolated tribe,’ he told al-Jazeera, ‘a sertanista like me walks in the forest for two or three years to gather evidence and we mark it in our [global positioning system]. We then map the territory the Indians occupy and we draw that protected territory without making contact with them. And finally we set up a small outpost where we can monitor their protection.’

The idea of being monitored so that the “others” can be saved is disturbing and reminded me of conversations that were had this past weekend at the Allied Media Conference, where we as independent media makers being forced to ask, when are we telling other people’s stories, denying them agency in their name?

But then Meirelles made a decision to go against the no-contact policy held by his organization, and fly over the territory where the tribe lives.

But he is determined to keep the tribe’s location secret – even under torture, he says. ‘They can decide when they want contact, not me or anyone else.’

But didn’t he already decide? Didn’t the organization already decide?

Via / The Guardian UK