48 Scientific American, February 2019
J
modern Western world reached this remote area. The legends
tell of a clan of fierce warriors who painted stripes on their bod-
ies, pierced their noses and ate their enemies before fleeing
down a Caquetá tributary called the Bernardo River into the wil-
derness around the 19th century to escape the white man. The
Carijona and the 14 other tribes that inhabit the lands that bor-
der the territory of the uncontacted group regard their isolated
neighbors with a mixture of awe and fear; they envy the purity of
the tribe’s culture and believe its shamans to be so close to
nature that they can control the elements.
Nobody knows how many of these secluded people now re -
side in this jungle sanctuary—estimates range from 50 to 500.
But encroachment by outsiders would threaten their way of life—
in fact, their very existence. Perea and his peers are working to
prevent intrusion. I have come to Curare to see how they are
helping their uncontacted neighbors maintain their solitude in
an increasingly connected world.
Anthropologists, activists and government officials have long
debated how best to protect such uncontacted tribes in the
Amazon and elsewhere. Because they have been living in isola-
tion, they have little or no immunity to diseases common among
JHONATTAN ANDRES
EREA SQUINTS THROUGH
the blinding Amazonian sunlight into a wall
of jungle. He steers the tiny motor powering
his wood longboat through a tributary of
Colombia’s mighty Caquetá River and putters
up to a muddy bank. Hopping onto a barely
discernible path, the twentysomething
member of the Carijona tribe beckons five
others, including me, to follow. Then he
disappears into the green, amid a cacophony
of unseen birds, monkeys and insects. The
vegetation is so dense and the dark, musty path
so twisting that for a few moments, it seems
to those of us behind Perea that the jungle has
swallowed our young guide whole. Until we
emerge from the trees a few minutes later to
find him standing before a shimmering salt
lake. Perea is gazing intently into the distance.
“This is as far as we are allowed to go,” he says.
“There’s a swampland beyond this. According
to legend, that swampland divides us physically
and spiritually.” Then he points solemnly across
the lake. “That way,” he says. Somewhere out
there. “That is where they are.”
“They” are the mysterious tribespeople who reside as close as
six miles from the invisible boundary that marks the beginning
of their territory here in the Curare–Los Ingleses Indigenous
Reserve in southeastern Colombia. Unlike the Carijona and the
other tribes that live on the periphery of this territory, which
extends into the neighboring Río Puré National Natural Park
and other areas, this enigmatic group has had virtually no expo-
sure to modern civilization. Indeed, it has actively sought to
avoid any contact with the outside world. Its members survive
much as they have for millennia, naked in the jungle, hunting
with poison-tipped arrows and blow darts, using stone axes to
fell trees and bamboo knives to cut their food.
Some of Perea’s tribe call these men and women “our broth-
ers living in a natural state.” Other locals call them the “Tiger
People.” (There are no tigers in South America, but the word
tigre is sometimes used to refer to local jaguars.) It is a nick-
name passed down through the generations from a time before
the missionaries, the rubber barons and all the trappings of the
IN BRIEF
An estimated 100 tribes around the world live in
isolation. Contact with outsiders can be disastrous,
often exposing them to deadly pathogens.
Scholars and policy makers have long debated how
to protect these uncontacted groups. In Colombia,
indigenous people are defending their neighbors.
Their work could pave the way for safeguarding
perhaps as many as 17 other uncontacted tribes that
are thought to live in the Colombian Amazon.
Adam Piore is a freelance journalist. His last article
for I Y _ [ d j _ Ò Y 7 c [ h _ Y W d examined the movement to
bring evolution back to the classroom.
1
© 2019 Scientific American
