Travel: Searching the Amazon for 'The Unconquered' tribes

Wednesday, October 19, 2011  

"After receiving his first assignment for National Geographic Magazine, an article about the efforts of a Brazilian activist named Sydney Possuelo to protect and document the uncontacted tribes of the Amazon, Scott Wallace was in such a hurry to get to the jungle that he forgot his boots. A week after receiving a phone call at his home in New York, Wallace was under the canopy headed for a patch of jungle that few Westerners had entered and fewer had left.

The Unconquered, Wallace's book about his attempt to find a tribe known only as the flecheiros or "People of the Arrow," has more in common with time travel narratives than typical travelogues: Wallace brings the reader into a world populated by peoples with no conception of the world beyond their jungle, a world that is not merely flat, but very small. This lost world is under siege by loggers, miners and poachers and Possuelo's mission to protect the tribe without destroying it by making contact, which has historically led to disease and cultural degradation, is both quixotic and understandable."

Get the Story:
Searching The Amazon For Uncontacted, Unconquered Tribes (The Huffington Post 10/19)

Also Today:
Peru takes action to protect uncontacted tribes (Survival International 10/19)