February 2019, ScientificAmerican.com 53ries of the elders are very, very long. For example, the origins of
animals and the origin of crops,” he noted. “So we listened to all
the stories, and part of the challenge was to summarize them.”
The report was followed by a chorus of low, deep-throated mm-
hmms from the elders and the rest of the maloca, a traditional
way of showing their appreciation or support for a point.
Other speakers raised the issue of sustainability of the re -
serve’s flora and fauna. When a tribal elder reported on the re -
sults of an investigation into the illegal killing of a pregnant
tapir in an area where the tribe had restricted hunting, an angry
debate broke out over how large a fine or how much volunteer
work to impose on the guilty parties as a penalty.
Eventually the topic turned to the battle to keep interlopers
out of the reserve. Even without development, the threats to the
location and the isolated tribespeople that live there are many. In
2015, before the peace accords, Colombian authorities intercept-
ed two American evangelical missionaries south of Río Puré who
were attempting to contact and convert the isolated tribes to
Christianity, seemingly indifferent to the danger that contact
might pose to their targets—and to themselves.
From the east, illegal gold-mining barges, crossing in from
Brazil, are a constant concern. Drug traffickers and bandits,
meanwhile, have made intermittent appearances in some areas
of Curare itself—and some fear their presence might actually
in crease as the insurgent demobilization progresses. In 2016
members of a dissident faction of the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia (FARC), unhappy with the peace accords,
en tered the reserve. Toting their weapons and slogans, they
convinced the teenage son of a Curare community elder to run
away with them.
To monitor these threats and help respond to them, ACT
staffers supplement the tribal on-the-ground patrols with mod-
ern technology. From offices in Bogotá and Virginia, ACT staff-
ers comb through reams of satellite imagery, searching for signs
of illegal barges and deforestation while looking for isolated
tribal dwellings. (The images are provided free of charge by U.S.
commercial satellite provider DigitalGlobe, and the quality and
resolution improve by the year: it is now at 30 centimeters, clear
enough to examine a banana leaf from space.)
ACT staffers also confer regularly with partners in the Na-MEMBERS of the indigenous communities in and around the
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