Peace for the Soul

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The Most Isolated Man on the Planet

 

He's alone in the Brazilian Amazon, but for how long?

By Monte Reel Posted Friday, Aug. 20, 2010, at 7:08 AM ET

The most isolated man on the planet will spend tonight inside a leafy palm-thatch hut in the Brazilian Amazon. As always, insects will darn the air. Spider monkeys will patrol the
treetops. Wild pigs will root in the undergrowth. And the man will
remain a quietly anonymous fixture of the landscape, camouflaged to the
point of near invisibility.

 

That description relies on a few unknowable assumptions, obviously, but they're relatively safe. The man's isolation has been so
well-established—and is so mind-bendingly extreme—that portraying him silently enduring another moment of utter solitude is a practical guarantee of reportorial accuracy.

 

He's an Indian, and Brazilian officials have concluded that he's the last
survivor of an uncontacted tribe. They first became aware of his
existence nearly 15 years ago and for a decade launched numerous
expeditions to track him, to ensure his safety, and to try to establish
peaceful contact with him. In 2007, with ranching and logging closing in
quickly on all sides, government officials declared a 31-square-mile
area around him off-limits to trespassing and development.

 

It's meant to be a safe zone. He's still in there. Alone.

History offers few examples of people who can rival his solitude in terms of
duration and degree. The one that comes closest is the "Lone Woman of
San Nicolas"—an Indian woman first spotted by an otter hunter in 1853,
completely alone on an island off the coast of California. Catholic
priests who sent a boat to fetch her determined that she had been alone
for as long as 18 years, the last survivor of her tribe. But the details
of her survival were never really fleshed out. She died just weeks
after being "rescued."

 

Certainly other last tribesmen and -women have succumbed unobserved throughout history, the world unaware of their
passing. But what makes the man in Brazil unique is not merely the
extent of his solitude or the fact that the government is aware of his
existence. It's the way they've responded to it.

 

Advanced societies invariably have subsumed whatever indigenous populations
they've encountered, determining those tribes' fates for them. But
Brazil is in the middle of an experiment. If peaceful contact is
established with the lone Indian, they want it to be his
choice. They've dubbed this the "Policy of No Contact." After years of
often-tragic attempts to assimilate into modern life the people who
still inhabit the few remaining wild places on the planet, the policy is
a step in a totally different direction. The case of the lone Indian
represents its most challenging test.

 

A few Brazilians first heard of the lone Indian in 1996, when loggers in the western state of
Rondônia began spreading a rumor: A wild man was in the forest, and he
seemed to be alone. Government field agents specializing in isolated
tribes soon found one of his huts—a tiny shelter of palm thatch, with a
mysterious hole dug in the center of the floor. As they continued to
search for whoever had built that hut, they discovered that the man was
on the run, moving from shelter to shelter, abandoning each hut as soon
as loggers—or the agents—got close. No other tribes in the region were
known to live like he did, digging holes inside of huts—more than five
feet deep, rectangular, serving no apparent purpose. He didn't seem to
be a stray castaway from a documented tribe.

 

Eventually, the agents found the man. He was unclothed, appeared to be in his mid-30s (he's now in his late 40s, give or take a few years),
and always armed with a bow-and-arrow. Their encounters fell into a
well-worn pattern: tense standoffs, ending in frustration or tragedy. On
one occasion, the Indian delivered a clear message to one agent who
pushed the attempts at contact too far: an arrow to the chest.

 

Peaceful contact proved elusive, but those encounters helped the agents stitch
together a profile of a man with a calamitous past. In one jungle
clearing they found the bulldozed ruins of several huts, each featuring
the exact same kind of hole—14 in all—that the lone Indian customarily
dug inside his dwellings. They concluded that it had been the site of
his village, and that it had been destroyed by land-hungry settlers in
early 1996.

 

Those kinds of clashes aren't unheard of: Brazil's 1988 Constitution gave Indians the legal right to
the land they have traditionally occupied, which created a powerful
incentive for settlers to chase uncontacted tribes off of any properties
they might be eyeing for development. Just months before the agents
began tracking the lone Indian, they made peaceful first contact with
two other tribes that lived in the same region. One tribe, the Akuntsu,
had been reduced to just six members. The rest of the tribe, explained
the chief, had been killed during a raid by men with guns and chainsaws.

 

If you go to Rondônia today, none of the local landowners will claim any knowledge of these anecdotal massacres. But most aren't afraid to
loudly voice their disdain over the creation of reserves for such small
tribes. They will say that it's absurd to save 31 square miles of land
for the benefit of just one man, when a productive ranch potentially
could provide food for thousands.

 

That argument wilts under scrutiny, in part because thousands of square miles of already-cleared
forest throughout the Amazon remain barren wastelands, undeveloped. The
only economic model in which increased production absolutely depends on
increased clearing is a strictly local one. The question of who'd
benefit from clearing the land versus preserving it boils down to two
people: the individual developer and the lone Indian.

 

The government agents know this, which is why they view the protection of
the lone tribesman as a question human rights, not economics.

 

He eats mostly wild game, which he either hunts with his bow-and-arrow or traps in spiked-bottom pitfalls. He grows a few crops
around his huts, including corn and manioc, and often collects honey
from hives that stingless bees construct in the hollows of tree trunks.
Some of the markings he makes on trees have suggested to indigenous
experts that he maintains a spiritual life, which they've speculated
might help him survive the psychological toil of being, to a certain
extent, the last man standing in a world of one.

 

But how long can his isolation last? I get Facebook updates telling me what people half a
world away are eating for breakfast. Corporations and governments are
pushing deeper and farther than ever in search of bankable resources.
How can it be that no one has flushed this man out already? In 2010, can
anyone realistically live off the grid?

 

Some Brazilians believe that the rapid spread of technology itself might protect his solitude,
not threaten it. The agents who have worked on the lone Indian's case
since 1996 believe that the wider the story of the man's isolation
spreads—something that's easier than ever now—the safer he'll be from
the sort of stealthy, anonymous raids by local land-grabbers that have
decimated tribes in the past. Technologies like Google Earth and other
mapping programs can assist in monitoring the boundaries of his
territory. Instead of launching intrusive expeditions into the tribal
territories to verify the Indians' safety, Brazilian officials have
announced they will experiment with heat-seeking sensors that can be
attached to airplanes flying high enough to cause no disruption on the
ground.

 

I first heard of the lone Indian a little more than five years ago, when I was the South America correspondent for the Washington Post and was interviewing a man who headed the federal department responsible for protecting isolated tribes i.... He mentioned the man as an aside, giving me a rundown of the latest
attempt to force contact with him—the expedition that ended with an
agent getting shot in the chest with an arrow.

 

I traced a huge star and three exclamation points in the margin of my notebook as he moved onto another subject. Those flags—don't forget to come back to this!—were pointless, because I couldn't stop thinking about the lone man and those daredevil expeditions to contact him.

 

Now, what I keep coming back to is a little different: the lone man and the unprecedented restraint the agents are showing in choosing not
to repeat history.

 

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Comment by Rosmarie Heusser on July 25, 2013 at 6:43am

A good example of finally respect and protect the indigenous world. - 

Comment by Béatrice LATEUR LACROIX on September 6, 2010 at 11:19am
Waves of Love for this man. I hope he'll live peacefully on his way.
Love and Peace for all Beings.
Comment by tsering youdon on August 29, 2010 at 7:24am
courage and perheps he might be happiest person in this world too
Comment by Qais M. Yousef on August 29, 2010 at 6:58am
Liked this kind of life.
Wish I could do like him.
Thanks Eva for telling us.
Comment by Imelda Maguire on August 28, 2010 at 9:21pm
What a surprising, hopeful story for mankind. To live off the grid is learned by example. He survives without technology, without interference with his privacy still his own decision.

Thank you for posting this message to us all in order to develop further our own personal humanity.
Comment by Moonwaters on August 28, 2010 at 3:18am
Respect actually being shown to someone so different to us ... amazing and long overdue. Maybe humans can still learn compassion & peace ... mmmmmmm ......
Comment by Patricia L Allen on August 27, 2010 at 2:40pm
finally a respect for privacy & lifestyle...bravo for him!!!!

Quote of the moment:

"PEACE
NOT WAR
GENEROSITY
NOT GREED
EMPATHY
NOT HATE
CREATIVITY
NOT DESTRUCTION
EVERYBODY
NOT JUST US"

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