Credit: Nuestro Stories
The world as a whole has gone through hundreds upon thousands of years of colonization that has spread itself from one country to the next.
Somehow, though, despite the best efforts of generations worth of predecessors, there exist Indigenous tribes, still uncontacted by the modern world. These tribes have held out against oppression, colonization, and assimilation and have managed to maintain a life directly connected to those of their ancestors who came from the same land thousands of years prior.
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We take time today to honor some of those tribes, and their continued resistance against the degradation of their culture. While most of the uncontacted tribes are located along the border of Peru, Brazil, and Bolivia, there is one tribe outside of the Amazon whose culture and traditions have been preserved.
The Ayoreo Tribe of Paraguay
The last tribe outside of the Amazon to remain untouched by the modern world. There are about 100 members of the Ayoreo that live in the ever-dwindling vegetation of the Chaco forest. What was once hundreds upon hundreds of acres of land has continued to suffer at the hands of deforestation, leaving the area around the Ayoreo in a constant state of recession. On top of the deforestation, cattle farming has greatly impacted the area in which they live, as much of their ancestral areas were snatched during land grabs. The Ayoreo had to officially file for a land claim in 1993. Yet, thirty years later, most of the land has not been returned and is still in the hands of private owners.
While the Ayoreo tribe maintains as the only tribe outside of the Amazon, there are quite a few tribes that exist within the area that remain accountable to the Indigenous ways of their ancestors without influence from the societies that have formed around them.
The Varied Tribes of the Amazon
Most of the tribes located in this region maintain a reasonably nomadic lifestyle where borders are not in existence, antithetical to the societies around them. Moving from area to area, country to country, as needed based on weather patterns, agricultural and food-based needs.
Beyond that, there is very little that is known about the tribes of the Amazon, the Nahua, the Matsigenka, Isconahua, and Nanti being among them.
What is known is that any time a group has attempted to contact them, they have maintained a clear line that they want nothing to do with their “contemporaries.” Considering the way that it’s turned out for so many of the Indigenous tribes of the world, no one can blame them.
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