- A comprehensive global report on uncontacted Indigenous peoples, published Oct. 27 by Survival International, estimates that the world still holds at least 196 uncontacted peoples living in 10 countries in South America, Asia and the Pacific region.
- About 95% of uncontacted peoples and groups live in the Amazon — especially in Brazil, home to 124 groups. Survival International says that, unless governments and private companies act, half of the groups could be wiped out within 10 years.
- Nine out of 10 of these Indigenous groups face the threat of unsolicited contact by extractive industries, including logging, mining and oil and gas drilling. It’s estimated that a quarter are threatened by agribusiness, with a third terrorized by criminal gangs. Intrusions by missionaries are a problem for one in six groups.
- After contact, Indigenous groups are often decimated by illnesses, mainly influenza, for which they have little immunity. Survival International says that, if these peoples are to survive, they must be fully protected, requiring serious noncontact commitments by governments, companies and missionaries.
“My children died. My mother died. My husband died. My brothers, my sisters, my aunts and uncles. I saw the bones sticking out of their rotting corpses inside the longhouse. We were too weak to bury them. I was left alone with my two baby brothers. All my family died, and all we got in return were a few machetes.”
This story comes from a Matis Indigenous woman living in Brazil and speaking to an anthropologist in the 1990s. Her people were almost wiped out in the years after they were initially contacted by outsiders in the 1970s. Loggers and wildcat miners brought in diseases, mainly influenza, against which the Matis had little resistance.
Testimonies like this one from the Matis Indigenous woman convinced Survival International of the urgent need to campaign to safeguard the collective rights of the Indigenous, tribal and uncontacted peoples of the world, whom the human rights organization says must be left alone and fully protected.
On Oct. 27, the NGO published a 300-page report, Uncontacted Indigenous Peoples: at the Edge of Survival, documenting the past and looming threats posed by contact and offering up the experiences of numerous Indigenous peoples whose lives have been uprooted, disrupted and forever changed by contact. It states: “In particular, the rush by extractive industries and agribusiness to seize the resources of uncontacted peoples risks their total annihilation.”
Survival International notes that uncontacted Indigenous peoples face myriad overlapping threats. According to the human rights group’s report, extractive industries, including logging, mining and oil and gas drilling, threaten 90% of uncontacted groups, one-third are terrorized by criminal gangs, including drug traffickers, while agribusiness puts a quarter of uncontacted groups at risk. Government-backed development projects threaten 38 peoples in total, while missionaries trying to contact various groups are putting one in six at risk. Even sustainable industries pose a threat, says the report, which offers nickel mining for electric vehicles as an example.
The report offers testimonials of past and current harms: Alex Tinyú, an Indigenous Nukak man from Colombia, was a child when his territory was invaded by missionaries, settlers and armed groups in the late 1980s. “My people, the Nukak, lived in peace in our territory — hunting, fishing and gathering as we had done for generations. But everything changed with contact,” the report quotes him as saying. “When the settlers arrived, they brought with them diseases we didn’t know about. Many Nukak got sick and were taken to hospitals.” More than half of his people died from disease and violence.
Shocorua, an Indigenous Nahua person from Peru, recalls how his uncontacted group was impacted by oil exploration by the Anglo-Dutch transnational company Shell in the 1990s. His words are highlighted in the report: “My uncle and cousins died as they were walking… they started to cough, they got sick and died right there in the forest. Some were small children. They put all the bodies in a big hole and everyone was wailing and crying.” About half the Nahua died within just years.
Indigenous pleas not to be contacted
In its new report, Survival International says years of rigorous research aided the NGO in identifying at least 196 uncontacted Indigenous groups, now living in 10 countries in South America (188 groups), Asia (six groups) and the Pacific region (two groups). Brazil is home to the highest number, totaling 124 groups.
The report warns that unless governments and companies act decisively now, almost half of those groups could be wiped out within 10 years. It cites instances of uncontacted Indigenous groups whose human rights and lands are currently under assault and who urgently need protection from ongoing threats.
Daniel Aristizabal, secretary of the International Working Group for the Protection of Indigenous Peoples Living in Isolation and Initial Contact (IWG-PIACI), told Mongabay that, although he couldn’t endorse Survival International’s claim that most uncontacted Indigenous groups could be wiped out in ten years because he didn’t have enough information, it was clear to him the world is at a tipping point:
“If they cease to exist, the last groups of [uncontacted Indigenous] people that bring meaning to this Earth in opposition to globalization and capitalism will have perished,” Aristizabal said. “It’s humanity’s last chance to show empathy for the other. We owe it to their struggle to respect their decision [to remain isolated]. It’s our last chance not to interfere.”
One such threatened group, the Hongana Manyawa people, includes an estimated 500 individuals inhabiting forest on the island of Halmahera, Indonesia. Those forests have been invaded by mining companies. In April 2023, Survival International launched a campaign against nickel mining operations on Halmahera that it says were impacting the Hongana Manyawa territory.
A Hongana Manyawa man, who left the forest, argues fervently that his people should be fully protected from contact. In 2024, he told Survival International anonymously that, “Since the time of their ancestors, the Hongana Manyawa have been living in the rainforest. When [my uncontacted relatives] are connected to the rainforest, they are connected to the universe. They don’t want to be connected with the outside world.”
Ngigoro, another formerly uncontacted Hongana Manyawa man, also spoke out in 2024: “The rainforest is our home, it’s where we live. The company has been destroying our rainforest and this is all that’s left. We will not give our land to anybody. This is the rainforest that our parents and ancestors have been living in. This place is ours. We will not let you take our land from us. Stop stealing it from us.”
Despite such pleas, outside pressures threaten to shatter the Hongana Manyawa’s isolation. Local militias have said they are “at war” with the Indigenous group and launched armed incursions into their forest to kill or kidnap people. The government’s Social Affairs Ministry has a “Remote Indigenous People’s Program” (KAT), which, according to Survival International, still operates on the basis that contact and assimilation of uncontacted peoples is in everyone’s interest. In response, the government says its policies are contributing to the “empowerment” of the communities.
From the 1960s to the 1980s, KAT worked to forcibly contact and settle the Hongana Manyawa, whom they described as “culturally backward,” according to the report. Over the years, KAT succeeded in evicting many from their ancestral rainforest, thereby exposing them to diseases that caused widespread suffering and death. There are no records of how many people died in total, but in one small resettlement area, inhabited by a couple hundred people, around 50-60 are reported to have died in just two months.
The surviving Hongana Manyawa refer to this time as “the plague.” Then, in 2015, a local government representative called for more resettlement attempts, describing the Hongana Manyawa’s forest way of life as being “of the stone age” and urging that they instead needed “a decent life,” according to the report.
Currently, a major threat is posed by the Indonesia Weda Bay Industrial Park (IWIP) — a rapidly growing nickel processing hub being set up by a consortium of mining companies, with China’s Tsingshan Holding Group holding the majority stake at 51.3%, along with the French mining and metallurgical group Eramet holding a 37.8% stake, and PT Antam Tbk, an Indonesian state-owned enterprise, with a 10% stake.
That consortium is the major force presently driving nickel mining on the island. The operation overlaps a large area of Indigenous territory, and many uncontacted Hongana Manyawa are now on the run from bulldozers, excavators and potentially security forces, according to Survival International.
But, despite years of ongoing pressure, the Hongana Manyawa refuse to vacate their forest home. They’ve received vocal support from Indigenous relatives and allies on the island, from elsewhere in Indonesia and around the world, which is achieving results. One mining company has withdrawn from the project, while some potential buyers have expressed support for the Hongana Manyawa, with some Indonesian politicians also speaking out.
‘We don’t want outsiders in our forests’
Another group highlighted in the report and needing immediate protection is the Shompen Indigenous group inhabiting the rainforest of Great Nicobar Island, India. Most Shompen are uncontacted, and divided into at least two large groups and many clans.
Some Shompen have already suffered catastrophic population loss due to diseases brought by outside settlers and they don’t want further contact. One Shompen woman, with uncontacted relatives, said in 2019: “Don’t come into our forests and cut them down. This is where we collect food for our children and ourselves. We don’t want outsiders in our forests.”
But the Indian government has other plans. It aims to transform the island with a vast infrastructure program, turning Great Nicobar Island into the “Hong Kong of India.” If the Great Nicobar Project goes ahead, huge swaths of the Shompen’s rainforest home will be destroyed and replaced by a mega-port, city, international airport, power plant, military base, industrial park and a huge surge in population.
The Shompen face cultural annihilation if this project goes ahead, according to Survival International. Their rainforest will be destroyed, their land occupied by settlers, their sacred river system ruined and pandanus trees, one of their most important food sources, lost. The Shompen’s ability to survive, and entire way of life, faces collapse.
The government presents the Great Nicobar Project as a high priority for its “strategic significance and national security.” While the Shompen have lived in harmony on their island for some 10,000 years, the project could now wipe them out entirely.
In February 2024, a group of 39 eminent genocide scholars from around the world wrote to the Indian government voicing their view that going forward with the Great Nicobar Project would amount to the genocide of the Shompen.
Genocide scholar Mark Levene in a printed document argues that “there can be no mitigating plea of innocence when the protagonists know what the outcome will be.” He says that even if a company doesn’t intend to kill uncontacted people, if it nevertheless operates on uncontacted peoples’ land, then its “responsibility will not be at one remove from a genocidal outcome but a matter of direct and knowing responsibility.”
Message to the modern world
Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, an Indigenous leader from northern Brazil, is tragically aware of the cost of contact; nearly a quarter of the Yanomami perished as the result of the illegal invasion of their land by wildcat miners in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the foreword to the Survival International report, he writes:
There are many uncontacted Indigenous peoples. I don’t know them, but they have the same blood as us, my relatives who live in the forest and have never seen the non-Indigenous peoples’ world. We all breathe the same air.
They are suffering just like we are. The napë [non-Indigenous people] are always wanting more and destroying nature looking for natural resources. …
Uncontacted peoples are in their homes because they chose those places! They are not starving! They have food to eat, game to hunt and fruits like açaí and bacaba to collect from which to make juice. …
I want to help my uncontacted relatives. I don’t want them to be sad, to suffer. We, the peoples of the forest, have never suffered, but now we are suffering because the city people are destroying the beauty of our forest and they’re coming closer, building roads, clearing the way for outsiders to enter and occupy our lands.
Banner image: Dozens of Mashco Piro people appeared on a riverbank in Peru in 2024, just a few miles from logging concessions. The Mascho Piro are Indigenous nomadic hunter-gatherers who inhabit Manú National Park in the Madre de Dios region of Peru. They have in the past actively avoided contact with outsiders. Image courtesy of Survival International.
Citations:
Survival International: Uncontacted Indigenous Peoples: at the Edge of Survival, (Oct. 27, 2025).
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