The last stone-age Indians: life for an isolated tribe deep in the amazon rain forest hasn't changed in thousands of years. Can it survive?

• Author: Schemo, Diana Jean
• Position: Brief Article

For Domingo Neves de Souza, it was only a half-hour's walk to the edge of the unknown. Two years ago in September, he ventured out from the Brazilian rubber plantation where he lived and pushed deep into the Amazon to go fishing with his two daughters and three of their friends. Hidden in the thick forest, de Souza had long been told, were naked Indians who lived just as they had for thousands of years, eating what the forest grew and hunting with bow and arrow. But for the 33-year-old rubber-plantation worker, these Indians were an invisible presence, felt more than seen. Until that day, when they stepped out from the trees.

"Papa, there are people coming," de Souza's daughter, Francisca, 14, had yelled as five Indians ran toward them. "Run, my girl, they'll kill you," de Souza cried. The arrows flew. One hit his left side. Another pierced his back. As Francisca later reported, she knew as she was fleeing that she'd never see her father alive again.

An hour later, a posse of plantation workers headed out to the spot. But the Indians that Francisca and the other children described had vanished, as if absorbed back into the forest. Who could they be? Were they indios bravos--"wild Indians"--as the locals call isolated tribespeople?

THE FIRST SIGN OF DISCOVERY

Stories of the incident eventually reached Sydney Possuelo, 59, the Brazilian government's leading authority on isolated Indians. Possuelo traveled to the area where the murder occurred, in the far western state of Acre, but not to solve the crime. He was no police detective, nor did he have much sympathy for ambushed pioneers. He knew that from Brazil's first days, white settlers had ruthlessly slaughtered Indians, burning their villages and abducting their children to work as slaves. Possuelo's interest lay in discovery; a murder by unclothed Indians has often been the first sign of a previously uncontacted Amazon tribe. If isolated people were indeed hiding nearby in the forest, Possuelo wanted to find them--to offer the tribe protection, for as long as possible, from the modern world.

Anthropologists believe the Amazon shelters the world's largest number of still-isolated Indians. Since the 1970s, Brazil's government has counted 50 rain-forest sites with signs of indigenous settlement, many of them spotted by air. Possuelo believes these traces indicate the presence of about 15 tribes that have never been studied or, in some instances, even identified by scholars.

During his 40 years as a sertanista, or Indian tracker, Possuelo has located seven such tribes himself. And he argues that virtually every Indian band touched by Brazilian society has been destroyed as a result. Rather than benefiting from the medical and technological advances of civilization, they have withered from disease, slavery, alcohol consumption, and the greed of Brazilians. Throughout this century, even well-meaning whites have destroyed tribe after tribe...