Photograph by João Castellano for The New York Times The New York Times Magazine 37
The Amazon forest is nearly the size of the
contiguous United States. It spreads into nine
countries but lies mostly in Brazil. Within Bra-
zil, a fi fth of it has been set aside for the use
of Indigenous groups. Through a deliberative
process involving extensive cultural surveys,
those lands have been divided among several
hundred reserves that collectively cover close to
a half-million square miles, an expanse greater
than the states of New Mexico, Colorado, Utah
and Arizona combined. The largest reserves are
the size of midsize European countries. There
are more than 200 distinct Indigenous groups,
the largest of which number more than 20,000
people, and the smallest in the hundreds. Alto-
gether, according to a 2010 census, they number
about 800,000 people, if ‘‘Indigenous’’ is narrow-
ly defi ned. Among the hundreds of groups are
at least 60 like the one believed by government
agencies to exist within Ituna-Itatá: extreme-
ly isolated or ‘‘uncontacted’’ bands that under
Brazilian law are given special protections. The
special status of such peoples, along with illegal
land-grabbing and catastrophic deforestation,
have made Ituna-Itatá a political fl ash point in
the struggle between those who would preserve
the Amazon and those who would exploit it.
The number of isolated peoples in the Ama-
zon is not known, but it is most likely in the
low thousands. For lack of contact, those who
are said to inhabit Ituna-Itatá have not been
counted or named by the government. Indeed,
if they exist, they are so furtive that they may not
realize that they inhabit their own offi cial pre-
serve. Nonetheless, like all Indigenous groups
in Brazil, they are overseen and aided (in this
case from a careful distance) by a branch of the
Ministry of Justice known as FUNAI (Fundação
Nacional do Índio) that is roughly equivalent to
the United States Bureau of Indian Aff airs and
is staff ed by civil servants, some with a taste for
adventure, but none to be confused with the
hard-charging agents of IBAMA.
FUNAI is the agency that created Ituna-Itatá.
The reserve is wedged between two larger
and older reserves whose people — the Kay-
apó Xikrin to the southeast, the Asurini to the
southwest — occupy established villages and
are attuned to the modern world. As early as
the 1960s, some among them mentioned that
an unknown group might be living in the wild
interfl uvial forests where they sometimes hunt-
ed. Though Brazil was still in the grip of a mil-
itary regime at the time, it was beginning to
move away from policies of forced assimilation
and toward cultural accommodation. Nonethe-
less, for decades afterward FUNAI did nothing
largely because of the area’s isolation. It was
assumed that if uncontacted people lived there,
the immensity of the surrounding forests would
provide them with natural protection.
By the mid 2000s, however, the situation had
changed. After three decades of national eff ort,
Above: Edward Luz in the small settlement of Vila Mocotó.one of the principal trans-Amazonian roads, a
brutal 2,500-mile-plus east-west axis known
as BR-230, was largely built, passing about 100
miles to the north. It was unpaved for long
stretches and sometimes became impassible
in the rainy season, but it ushered in a large
new population of settlers who were devas-
tating the forests on an unprecedented scale.
The consequences to the global environment
— exacerbating global warming and reducingbiodiversity — were already known. From the
vantage point of Ituna-Itatá, the land-grabbing
was approaching inexorably upriver along the
Xingu, propelled by the economic boom that
resulted from the construction near Altamira
of a large hydroelectric dam. The Asurini and
Kayapó Xikrin were protected by the reserves
that FUNAI had staked out for them, but people
from both groups continued to speak about fur-
tive Indigenous peoples in the adjacent forests.Opening pages: Deforestation in Ituna-Itatá.