BRAZIL: Amazon | Iguazu Falls | Bahia | Pantanal | Rio de Janeiro |
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Brazil 1999
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Recommended travel guides on Brazil: The Amazon's indigenous people 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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