The world's most endangered tribe, an indigenous people of Brazil living in the eastern Amazon on the border with Peru

News24xx.com -  The Awá, or Guajá, are an indigenous people of Brazil living in the eastern Amazon rainforest. There are approximately 600 members, and 100 of them still have no contact with the outside world. Now, they became the world's most most endangered tribe.

The group are at constant loggerheads with companies aiming to clear Amazonian trees from their territory for economic gain.

Even in the still largely untouched expanses of rain forest straddling Brazil's western border with Peru, isolated groups must live on the run to escape the depredations of the illegal logging in addition to gold prospecting and now drug trafficking, too.

They have been pushed to the brink of extinction by European colonists who enslaved them and ranchers who stole the land they need to survive.

National Geographic reported in their October issue that indigenous rainforest groups are confined to a shrinking forest core, and the Awá are especially vulnerable. 

And yet, they live in complete harmony with their jungle home. Most Awá families adopt several wild animals as pets and remarkably, the women have been to breastfeed them until they are fully grown.   

Some Awa have moved to protected villages near to their roots in the forest, maintaining a settled lifestyle to escape friction with the toils of the modern world.

But, they still hunt with bows and arrows, still gather wild honey and babassu nuts, and still rely almost entirely on the bounty of the primal forest and its sources of water. 

The Brazilian government has stepped in to protect and preserve the group, but before this not many people had spent real time with the Awá.

Originally living in settlements, the Awá adopted a nomadic lifestyle around 1800 to escape sudden attacks and invasions by Europeans. 

During the 19th century, they came under increasing attack by settlers in the region, who cleared most of the forests from their land- a problem that sustains to this day. 

From the mid-1980s, some Awá moved to government-established settlements. However, for the most part, they were able to maintain their traditional way of life of living entirely off their forests in nomadic groups of a few dozen people, with little or no contact with the outside world.

In 1982, the Brazilian government received a loan of US$900 million from the World Bank and the European Union. One condition of the loan was that the lands of certain indigenous peoples, including the Awá, would be demarcated and protected. 

However, the Brazilian government was extraordinarily slow to act on its commitment. It took 20 years of sustained pressure from campaigning organisations such as Survival International and, earlier, the Forest Peoples Programme before, in March 2003, the Awá's land was finally demarcated.  
 

 

 

 

NEWS24XX.COM/DEV/RED