May 30, 2008: Uncontacted Indigenous People

[DanaC]

The record on contacting such tribes suggests that the dangers of wiping them out in a handful of years is higher than the risk of them simply dying out uncontacted. The very fact that they've successfully avoided the modern world without dying out of dyssentry or simple infections suggests that they're doing fine without us.

[Undertoad]

I'm noticing that only things that affect the entire tribe are meaningful in these arguments; and if individuals die of dysentery, inevitable where there's lack of clean water supply, or of infection, inevitable without antibiotics, they are irrelevant.

[Flint]

And I wonder what their philosophical interpretation of someone dying from dysntery is, considering that if it's as likely as you say it must be (assuming they don't have their own medicinal practices) they might just deal with it as a fact of life. People are born, people die. We're assuming that they are as incapable of dealing with this reality as we are.

You can't assume that they place a value on the chronological span of an individual human life in the same way we do; and you can't say they would be wrong for doing that. You can't apply your own moral constructs as a justification for taking action in order to standardize their SOPs.

[smoothmoniker]

The moral weight of a preventable death is in no way contingent on the social group's ability to "deal with it as a fact of life."

[Undertoad]

If it's the needs of the tribe that are important, our tribe's need to assimilate them outweighs their tribe's need to preserve their culture.

[Coign]

What I don't get is why everyone against contacting them seems to makes the argument that they don't need a Starbucks or Nikes.

I am not talking about introducing an LCD TV and Paris Hilton. I am suggesting we try and teach them about the dangers they face. Let them know that they will most likely not be able to live there forever because loggers are coming and they may not survive that conflict.

Oh and by the way, this technique is called washing and keeping clean. It means you can be healthier.

If Og never shared the wheel with his neighbor because he was looking out for cultural preservation where would we be today? I put by vote behind enlightenment. I would not want a culture that keeps me ignorant.

I try to stop thinking of us all as separate cultures. Human culture conflict is why we have a war in the middle east. (Not the US's war, I am talking between the local tribes already there that the US, for good or for ill, is trying to stamp out.)

Culture is pleasant when it is in a museum, it is bad when you think someone is trying to take it from you and need to kill over it. Or in this case troll over it.

I have traveled to Brazil twice, and once western Europe and once Eastern Europe. I would be just as happy living in most of the places I have been. No two democratic nations have ever gone to war with each other. (Officially anyways. There have been some "topples.")

I repeat, culture is nice when it can be appreciated. It is hell when it is all you are.

[Sundae]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

I'm noticing that only things that affect the entire tribe are meaningful in these arguments; and if individuals die of dysentery, inevitable where there's lack of clean water supply, or of infection, inevitable without antibiotics, they are irrelevant.

If individuals are dying of dysentry or infection they they just join the bottom of a very long list of people globally who do so every day. It's likely this tribe has access to cleaner water than the children who scavange for a living on the rubbish heaps of Peru.

[Flint]

Originally Posted by smoothmoniker

The moral weight of a preventable death is in no way contingent on the social group's ability to "deal with it as a fact of life."

This is true...if assuming a philosophical view of death as a "bad" thing. The temptation is to assume that everyone shares your worldview. And worse, if they don't, that you can say their view is "wrong" and yours is "right". I suppose you could say that this you are invoking something immutable; but I could also say "No, you aren't." Then we'd have a disagreement. The resolution to the disagreement isn't to just say you're "right" and I'm "wrong".

[spudcon]

If we could drop a hologram in their midst, and speak to them in Og language, and just show them what they're missing without editorializing, then they could make their own decisions. I don't see any of those things happening in the immediate future, so empirical evidence says they're screwed.

[jinx]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

I'm noticing that only things that affect the entire tribe are meaningful in these arguments; and if individuals die of dysentery, inevitable where there's lack of clean water supply, or of infection, inevitable without antibiotics, they are irrelevant.

Inevitable? They don't have access to charcoal for their dysentery? No antibiotics at all? What about honey? Carob powder? Garlic?

Isn't it inevitable that half to most will die when they are contacted by foreigners?

[smoothmoniker]

Originally Posted by Flint

This is true...if assuming a philosophical view of death as a "bad" thing.

If we can't agree that a preventable death is a bad thing, then I'm reasonably certain that we have no meaningful common ground from which to discuss anything of importance.

In which case, OMG, can you BELIEVE that David C won American Idol! LOL

[Sundae]

How is it preventable Smooth?

[Flint]

Originally Posted by smoothmoniker

If we can't agree that a preventable death is a bad thing, then I'm reasonably certain that we have no meaningful common ground from which to discuss anything of importance.

You're so certain that your position is the correct one that you're not stopping to think about what I'm saying.

Is every preventable death the absolute right thing under every circumstance? Take a minute to ponder that.

What about a life unnaturally prolonged by life support machines or massive doses of toxic medications? What if the person is braindead? Then you have a QUALITY OF LIFE issue.

There is a trade-off to save that life. It isn't 100% right all the time; it isn't beyond discussion.

A "preventable death" means one thing to you, but it opens a big can of philosophical worms. Firstly, you can't prevent death. It's a part of life; there's a death for every birth. This is the natural order. You can DELAY death, but by what means? You will always bring about a set of related consequences.

The question is whether the trade-off is worth it, and you can only answer that question for yourself. You aren't a spokesperson for UNIVERSAL moral constructs.

[TheMercenary]

[Sundae]

Interestingly, it seems to be the forum's liberals who advocate - or at least suggest - leaving them alone. No-one has yet addressed the issue that they are in a remote location, with no money and nothing viable to trade, so how will the modern world benefit them? Oh of course, they suck off the Government teat. It's odd to hear those with more right wing views than me espouse that. Trouble is, both Brazil & Peru's teats are pretty hard to locate. If they ever had any milk it is long gone. If these people become a citizen of either of these countries they could have a far more dangerous life. And in my mind, that means they are probably - of course I can't say for sure - better off not being contacted.

Where would they end up otherwise - in Peruvian "society"? Unlikely. And this is not a country with a safety net for those at the bottom of the heap. In this "civilisation" people starve, people die, people work 12 hour days. And yes, I donate money to try to help this situation. I'm not impervious to pointless death.

From The Independent in 2006 - credit Johann Hari.
I doubt much has changed.

It's a long article which I found very interesting when I read it last year. I've only included some highlights here but if they interest you I urge you to read the rest.

I - The Lives of the Rubbish-Children
Thirty-five miles north of Lima, Peru's dusty, lusty capital city, the rubbish of nine million people is dumped in a vast valley. I stand at its entrance watching the trucks arrive and leave, trying not to breathe in the stench of everyday household waste as it gently rots. A constant black writhe of flies covers every moist surface. Skinny dogs wander around with proprietorial confidence, snarling at fat English strangers. (OK, me.) And the children who live in these great glaciers of rubbish are silently picking through it, as they do all day, every day, searching for something to sell.

"Señor, it is not safe to enter the dump," I am advised. This is, notoriously, where Peru's criminals come when they want to get lost, a no man's land beyond the remit of the police. But on the inside it is strangely silent, as children sift and crawl with stern concentration. My guide wants me to meet Adelina, one of the child workers who lives and toils here. We walk through a maze of rubbish - I try not to look at the bloated black rats I have been warned about - until we come to a space fenced off with large rusting metal sheets and other cobbled-together trash. I bang on the metal and wait. Eventually a sheet is pulled back, and the sound of oinking emerges from behind a little girl.

Adelina is eight but from her small frame it's hard to believe it. She has dried scraps of something around her mouth and a soiled dress that I am later told is her best, the one she dressed up in specially to meet the gringo journalist. I step in, on to a crunchy carpet of rubbish. There are old rubber ducks black with dirt, detergent containers, hair curlers, rotting food, broken bottles coating the floor. The pen is filled with little pigs and geese and chickens, with the "house" - another few steel sheets - at the back.

Her mother is out. She is always out. She leaves at six o'clock in the morning to work in the next dump down - it's too busy here - and doesn't get back until after Adelina is asleep. The child explains that her own job is to peel the bottle labels off and put them in a sack. They, too, can be used. As for her father, he left long ago. "I see him sometimes but he doesn't want me to talk to him." There is no running water here. They have to buy it in expensive barrels from a water man who comes once a week. It stands in the corner, open, with a thick film of dirt and dead insects on its surface. There is no sewage system either. They throw their faeces out in the rubbish, where other children slip in it. I ask her how often she eats. "Twice a day," she says, unconvincingly, adding, "I don't like to eat every much anyway." She quickly changes the subject by trying to pick up a filthy-white goose from her Noah's Ark for me to stroke.

Adelina has never left this rubbish dump. Its walls are the walls of her consciousness. Three children have already died here this year by falling into the trash. Even more have been pricked by hypodermic needles - somebody thinks they were chucked out by the hospital - and cut on broken bottles. The children, it seems, are as disposable as the trash they pick through.

Families began to settle here in the mid-1980s, as they ran from the civil war in the highlands of Peru, where a deranged Maoist insurgency had risen up to create a "pure" Communist state in Peru and the government suppressed it with extreme violence. The poverty-sunk refugees, wandering in search of a livelihood, discovered that there was a market for delving into the rubbish and finding something - anything - to sell on to be recycled. Now the business is highly refined, with every part of a Coke bottle - the lid, the label, and the bottle itself - being stripped into separate piles by gangs of children and sold to different trash dealers. A sack of bottle lids can now fetch the glorious sum of 3p. A few years ago there were complaints about the families living here by the national media. They were considered a "national embarrassment" to Peru, so instead of being dumped in one immense pile, the rubbish is now placed into walled perimeters. The river of trash was dammed, but this dissuaded nobody. The families soon burrowed into these compounds, where I watch them now.

These children are being poisoned every time they breathe in. The dump is next to an informal lead factory, which belches out sickly fumes that are the only relief from the smell of rot. Sport Relief, a British charity, paid for blood tests on a random sample of children here, and found them to have four times the safe amount of lead in their blood. The epidemic of headaches, nosebleeds, fevers and drastic weight loss (from an already low starting point) among the kids suddenly became clear. Sebastiano, an 11-year-old boy I find playing marbles, tells me what this means. Every morning when he wakes up, his throat is burning and his chest is tight. "I just have to wait until it goes away," he says. "I feel angry because I can't play with my friend. You can't do anything until it passes." With that, he picks up his marbles and scampers off.

I see some children stuffing rubbish into a sack, but their father tells me not to speak to them. He doesn't mind, he explains politely, but his wife is around, and she's a crack addict and might stab a stranger talking to her kids.

In their little shack nearby, I find Francisca Rodriguez and Rogelio Marquez - a couple both aged 60 - reminiscing about the good old days when the dump was less crowded. "We are founders of this community," Francisca says. "When we came here [in the 1980s], everything was just rubbish." But those halcyon days are gone. So many people have crowded into the dump, she says, that prices for collected items have been driven down. Francisca and Rogelio worry about providing for the two children they have unofficially "adopted", nine-year-old Tajo, whose mother abandoned him, and 11-year-old Felipe, whose parents died. "I hope we live a few more years to provide for them, because we have no family to take them if we die," she says. At 60, they have already beaten the life expectancy for this rubbish-city.

At the back of their "house" there is a great pile of rotting rubbish that they have selected as valuable - plastic bottles, cardboard, paper. The children flick through some of the celebrity magazines that have been thrown from the rich world into theirs. Before I leave, Francisca excitedly shows me the best things they have found over the years. She brings out a murky set of scales, discarded, most likely, by some old grocer's shop. "We would never sell this," she says. "It is an antique."