BRAZIL: Amazon | Iguazu Falls | Bahia | Pantanal | Rio de Janeiro

Brazil 1999

People & Settlements


Amazonians
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Amerindian girl

Amazonian childen

Amazonian childen

Amazon boy

Amazonian childen

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Cattle Pasture

Cultivation

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Ariau Towers Lodge

Amazonian home

Amazonian home

Amazonian home

Amazonian home

Cultivation

Boat

Boat

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Floodplain agriculture

Cultivation

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Clearing for cultivation

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Ruins

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Cattle pasture



PHOTOS BY SUE WREN


Kaiapo Indians in the Brazilian Amazon



Kaiapo boy



Kaiapo shaman in the Amazon



Silver dollar fish in the market



Kaiapo mother and child



Kaiapo indians dressed in ceremonial costumes



Kaiapo medicine man



Amazon shaman



Kaiapo father with child in the Amazon



Kaiapo shaman



Kaiapo shaman in the Amazon rainforest




PHOTOS BY RENDA G.

Dugout

Catfish

Villager with Plecostomus



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The Amazon's indigenous people

The Amazon has a long history of human settlement. Contrary to popular belief, sizeable and sedentary societies of great complexity existed in the Amazon rainforest [2005 article | Amazon Civilization Before Columbus]. These societies produced pottery, cleared sections of rainforest for agriculture, and managed forests to optimize the distribution of useful species. The notion of a virgin Amazon is largely the result of the population crash following the arrival of the Europeans in the sixteenth century. Studies suggest that 11.8% of the Amazon's terra firme forests are anthropogenic in nature resulting from the careful management of biodiversity by indigenous people. However, unlike current cultivation techniques, these Amazonians were attuned to the ecological realities of their environment from five millennia of experimentation and understood how to sustainably manage the rainforest to suit their needs. They saw the importance of maintaining biodiversity through a mosaic of natural forest, open fields, and sections of forest managed so as to be dominated by species of special interest to humans.

Many of these populations existed along whitewater rivers where they had good means of transportation, excellent fishing, and fertile floodplain soils for agriculture. However, when Europeans arrived, these were the first settlements to be affected since Europeans used the major rivers as highways to the interior. In the first century of European presence, the Amerindian population was reduced by 90%. Most of the remaining peoples lived in the interior of the forest: either pushed there by the Europeans, or traditionally living there in smaller groups.

The period of time from Pizarro's conquest of the Incan empire until the end of the Brazilian rubber boom around the beginning of the first world war. The Spanish and Portuguese, in the name of the Catholic religion with blessing from popes, started the bloodshed. For centuries, indigenous populations suffered greatly from gross brutality and atrocities.

AMERICAN FOREST PEOPLES TODAY

Today, despite the population decimation, natives peoples still live in American rainforests, although virtually all have been affected by the outside world. Instead of wearing traditional garb of loin cloths, most Amerindians wear western clothes and many use metal pots, pans, and utensils for everyday life. Some groups make handicrafts to sell to the boatloads of tourists that pass through, while others make a routine trip to the city to bring foods and wares to market. Almost no native group obtains the majority of their food by traditional nomadic hunting and gathering. Nearly all cultivate foods with hunting, gathering, and fishing serving as a secondary or supplementary food sources. Usually a family has two gardens: a small house garden with a variety of plants, and a larger plantations which may be one hectare in area planted with bananas, manioc, or rice. These plantations are created through the traditional practice of slash and burn, a method of forest clearing that is not all that damaging to the forest if conducted in the traditional manner.

Today almost no forest Amerindians live in their fully traditional ways. Perhaps only a few small groups in the Amazon basin can still claim to do so.

Indian social mobilization of American indigenous peoples has attained the highest organization of any rainforest region. Forming ethnic organizations is one way to protect themselves, their culture, and their precious natural forest resources. Amerindians have faced a long, bitter battle against development of their land by outsiders and today these organizations monitor these incursions on their lands.

Today Brazil is slowly taking steps to recognize indigenous land rights. 62% of all indigenous land claims, covering 11% of Brazil (100 million hectares-396,000 square miles) have been demarcated as permanent legal title for native peoples. The process has been slow, but Brazil has plans to turn more land over to the indigenous population.





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