Brazil Found the Last Survivors of an Amazon Tribe. Now What?

Bruno Jorge/Pirpkura Documentary

Pakyi and Tamandua are the final known isolated members of the Piripkura people. They are posing a tricky challenge for Brazil.

By Jack Nicas and Manuela Andreoni
The journalists spent more than a year, including two trips into the Amazon rainforest, to report this article.

Aug. 19, 2023
There was virtually nothing but rainforest for miles, and then the government agents spotted it: a makeshift shelter, the fire still smoldering. There were two sets of footprints, two machetes and two spots for hammocks.

“He was just here,” said one of the agents, Jair Candor, crouching beneath the shelter in June as his partner snapped photographs. Mr. Candor had spent 35 years searching for a man who did not want to be found — and this time, he just missed him.

That man, Tamandua Piripkura, has lived his life on the run. Not from authorities or enemies — though plenty of people would like to see him dead — but from modernity.

Tamandua is one of the last three known survivors of the Piripkura people, an offshoot of a larger Indigenous group that once spread across a large swath of the forest. He has lived isolated, deep in the Amazon rainforest, his entire life, believed to be about 50 years.

His partner in isolation had long been his uncle, Pakyi, as they trekked through the forest, nude and barefoot, with little more than machetes and a torch. (The third survivor, a woman named Rita, left the land around 1985 and married into another tribe.)



Jair Candor kneels in the rainforest beneath a cluster of thatched brush.
Jair Candor, an agent from Brazil’s Indigenous agency, inspects a shelter that he believes was used by Pakyi and Tamandua, the final known isolated members of the Piripkura tribe.Credit...Victor Moriyama for The New York Times

More:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230819091005/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/19/world/americas/brazil-amazon-tribe-piripkura.html