http://www.worldontheweb.com/2008/06/04/evangelizing-uncontacted-tribes/

Evangelizing uncontacted tribes

Written by Daniel Devine
June 4, 2008

devine0604Last month, Indian affairs officials from the Brazilian
government photographed from the air an Amazonian tribe that seems to have
had little or no contact with the modern world. Pictures show men, women
and children staring up from thatched huts and men painted with yellow and
red attempting to scare off the airplane flying above them.

The flyover is the latest development in a controversy over “uncontacted”
indigenous tribes and whether governments should prohibit outsiders from
crossing paths with them. Groups like Survival International say about 100
tribes around the world have avoided or cut off any contact with outsiders,
and half of them live in Brazil or Peru. The government of Peru has pledged
to investigate the existence of uncontacted tribes on its side of the
border, and to find out if illegal logging is driving them from their
native lands as some allege. Disputes over land encroachment are central to
indigenous issues: The French oil company Perenco is involved in a lawsuit
in Peru that will determine whether it can drill in a remote jungle area
inhabited by natives.

Actress Julie Christie is helping Survival International promote an
isolation policy toward tribal groups. Survival claims tribal lands should
be protected from logging and from outsiders who could introduce foreign
sicknesses to the natives. (An unfamiliar virus such as a flu bug can
overpower and kill a significant portion of a tribe’s population.)

Last March, representatives of the British television company Cicada Films
were accused of unwittingly introducing an epidemic that left four
Matsigenka Indians dead while the filmmakers scouted locations for the
Discovery Channel’s “World’s Lost Tribes” reality show. Cicada Films denies
causing any such outbreak. Brazilian activist Sydney Possuelo, featured in
a 2003 National Geographic story, once favored modern contact with tribes
but changed his mind after seeing the sicknesses and cultural challenges
indigenous people face as a result.

Survival International doesn’t exactly express a positive attitude toward
America, which it lists among its 2007 “terrible ten” list of abusers of
tribal peoples’ rights for being one of four nations that voted against the
UN’s “Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.” The UN Declaration,
adopted in September of 2007, grants broad national rights to natives and
contains language that could cause problems for yet another group Survival
isn’t positive about: missionaries.

New Tribes Mission seeks to establish indigenous churches around the globe,
but Venezuela stopped the group’s work among indigenous groups in 2005,
when, as WORLD reported, President Hugo Chavez denounced the agency in a
speech and accused it of spying for the U.S. and exploiting indigenous
people. (Hundreds of indigenous Venezuelans later marched in protest of
Chavez’s speech.)

It’s hard to understand how providing medical care and literacy is
exploitation, especially among indigenous groups where the life expectancy
of men and women is lower than average and suicide rates among youth are
alarmingly high, but New Tribes and other mission organizations may face
increasing opposition as governments like Venezuela’s and Brazil’s restrict
outside access to tribes. In the process, those governments seem to be
promoting the ideology of the “noble savage” and assuming it’s in the best
interests of indigenous people to have no access to the modern world, or to
the gospel.