Sometime in early January 2005, a photograph of a lone man standing on a beach aiming a bow and arrow toward a camera, made international headlines. In 2018, the Sintelese would again appear in the media when an American missionary was shot after repeatedly trying to contact the tribe, who live in voluntary isolation on North Sentinel Island. Some years later, men from the Mashco Piro tribe were spotted on a riverbank in Peru.
Each of these events is momentous, but the sum marks a pattern: mounting pressure on the world’s forest is pushing uncontacted peoples into increasing, and often deadly, encounters with outsiders, argues a recent report by Indigenous rights organisation Survival International. The report titled ‘Uncontacted Indigenous Peoples: at the Edge of Survival’, provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date estimate of uncontacted Indigenous groups worldwide, calculated at 196 living across South America, Asia and the Pacific. The majority — 95 percent — live in the Amazon, and all groups risk extinction by unchecked extractive industries, drug trafficking and mission activities.
Extractive industries are the greatest threat
Extractive activities are, by far, the most widespread threat faced by uncontacted peoples—affecting at least 96 percent of them, the report finds. Logging, mining and agribusiness pose the highest risks. Increasingly, these activities are also controlled by criminal gangs who willingly murder Indigenous people opposing them. The border regions of the Amazon between Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela and Bolivia, which are key routes for drug traffickers, are particularly dangerous for uncontacted peoples.
While extractive industries are threatening everyone through their role in ecological destruction, uncontacted peoples are disproportionately impacted. These groups are mostly nomadic hunter-gathers, all of whom live in forests, and some on islands in total isolation or very limited contact with outsiders. The land and forest are their source of food, shelter, medicine, clothing and spiritual nourishment. When activity – legal or illegal – begins in their territories, the threat is existential. Even without violent confrontations, the mere act of making contact can lead to the death of entire groups.
A Nambikwara shaman from western Brazil who lost more than 90 percent of his people after contact told Survival: ‘My father said that before the whites came, we hardly had any illnesses … At the time of the road, everyone got flu and measles and everyone died.’ The Nambikwara were almost entirely wiped out when a highway was built through their territory, bringing contact with outsiders and deadly diseases to a previously uncontacted population. Their fate demonstrates how even more seemingly benevolent infrastructural projects in or near uncontacted peoples territories can be deadly. These include politically endorsed dams, roads and railways, which threaten at least 35 uncontacted groups in South America, warns the report.
All contact is deadly contact
Threats to Indigenous land, whether by guns, false certificates, or decrees of law, continue to be underpinned by what Survival describes as ‘racist and colonialist’ stereotyping of Indigenous people as ‘primitive’ or ‘stone age’ in need of development. Such rhetoric, the report argues, provides convenient moral cover for land theft and resource extraction.
Throughout the twentieth century forced contact remained commonplace, especially when in pursuit of the holy trinity: civilization, Christianity or commerce. In Brazil, where the legal protection of uncontacted peoples is one of the strongest, forced contact missions were led well into the 1980s, based on the assumption that indigenous peoples were in ‘need’ of integration. Attitudes across South America began to shift in the 1980s and 90s, beginning with Brazil’s codification of no-contact policies in 1987. Today, many countries in the region have some of the strongest legal protections for uncontacted peoples, though implementation and enforcement remain weak, the report warns.
Yet, the colonial logic that underpinned forced contact has by no means disappeared. It continues to shape government policy in Asia and the Pacific and is invoked by companies looking to legitimize extractive operations on uncontacted people’s land. A shocking example comes from 2023, when French mining company, Eramet, operating on the lands of the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa in Indonesia is quoted in the report saying: ‘Today, even in vast areas like Amazonia, these populations do not really exist.’ Such a statement is not only a blatant denial of the facts but also a convenient fiction for a company whose profits depend on the emptiness of Indigenous land.
Whether justified using overtly racist stereotypes or more subtle pursuits of ‘development’ and ‘progress’, contact for uncontacted peoples is always deadly, and often genocidal. The report finds that such genocides today are frequently less visible, or even intentionally hidden; increasingly they are carried out by companies who operate in uncontacted territories despite the known risks: for example, the Brazilian company Eneva who is drilling for oil and gas near an uncontacted people recently spotted in Brazil, or Canales Tahuamnu logging on Masho Piro’s land in Peru. As one genocide scholar quoted in the report argues, ‘there can be no mitigating pleas of innocence when protagonists know what the outcome will be.’
Profit-seeking drives every threat
Uncontacted peoples are facing multiple and overlapping threats, but the report identifies a clear common dominator. ‘The overwhelming impetus behind threats…is the rush to explore their lands and resources for profit’, states Survival. Perhaps more surprising is the inclusion of sustainability and ‘green’ transition activities in this list of profit-driven industries accelerating the theft and destruction of uncontacted peoples land.
One such example cited in the report is carbon-credit projects, which typically involve a company funding an initiative intended to store or absorb carbon such as tree planting to offset emissions generated elsewhere. Beyond other well-documented criticisms, the logic of these schemes is the exact opposite of how uncontacted peoples relate to the environment. Carbon-offsetting follows a market logic in which land is only protected once it can generate profit. At the same time, the idea of allowing pollution at the source in exchange for promised regeneration elsewhere, drives land appropriation, since the ‘elsewhere’ is rarely empty and frequently home to endemic species and Indigenous populations who are displaced in the name of a ‘greater greener good.’
By contrast, for uncontacted peoples the environment is not a commodity to be bought or sold; it is essential to survival, and care for it is embedded in their daily practices and beliefs. This reliance on the land means uncontacted tribes hold rare ecological knowledge and are some of the greatest stewards imaginable. The Yanonmami in Brazil and Venezuela, for example, use around 500 plant species in their daily lives; nine of these are used solely for fishing, including for the creation of a non-toxic poison that briefly stuns fish, allowing them to be lifted from the water into woven baskets. In 2019, Yanonmami women introduced a newly-discovered fungus species to the world, given the scientific name Marasmius yanonmami.
“We know how to take care of nature because it is our mother and we don’t want another carbon credit contract, because it is just another way to take us away from our sacred lands,” explains an Indigenous activist quoted in the report.
Uncontacted people want to be left alone
When undisturbed, uncontacted peoples thrive. Even from the limited knowledge available about these modern hunter-gatherer populations, it is clear why: they eat fresh fish, meats, fruits, and vegetables, work relatively short hours, and live in habitats with clean air and water, while holistic cosmologies and rich cultural practices support their emotional and spiritual wellbeing. Yet, there is still a failure to understand that their decision to remain in isolation is an exercise of self-determination, not ignorance.
Most uncontacted groups know something – and often quite a lot – about outside society. Many have also experienced contact in the past, and their decision to remain isolated is shaped by these typically deadly encounters. ‘When I lived in the forest, I had a good life…Now if I meet one of the uncontacted Awá in the forest, I’ll say, ‘Don’t leave! Stay in the forest. … There’s nothing in the outside for you,’’ Wamaxuá, an Awá man first contacted in 2009 told Survival.
The report presents these details not to romanticize uncontacted people’s lives, but to show governments, companies and individuals whose actions continue to threaten their existence, that they are worthy of learning from, or at the very least should be respected as valid and valuable alternatives. This means upholding the principle of no contact and their rights to land. After all, there is much to learn from their self-sufficiency and resilience in times of ecological crisis when many proposed alternatives continue to reproduce the same harms.
As one Indigenous Guardian printed in the report points out: ‘They think that Indigenous people aren’t developing. Why would we need to develop if we’re already developed in our own way? […] Why don’t we go and develop them?’
This article was changed from “The report presents these details not to romanticize uncontacted peoples lives, but to show governments, companies and individuals whose actions continue to threaten their existence, to recognize that they are worthy of learning from, or at the very least should be respected as valid and valuable alternatives” to “The report presents these details not to romanticize uncontacted people’s lives, but to show governments, companies and individuals whose actions continue to threaten their existence, that they are worthy of learning from, or at the very least should be respected as valid and valuable alternatives” on 22/1/2026.
