The Awá are a nomadic people from the Gurupi region of the Maranhão state of Brazil. Known as the Guajá or the Wazaiara — “the owners of the hair garments” — they are a separatist group that, in the 1800s, became wanderers to escape the violent persecution of Portuguese colonists. Currently, nearly one-quarter of the hunter-gatherer group has never met an outsider. To accommodate their wandering, they form groups of no more than 30. Spread out over three small, isolated villages, the community of just 450 seek to survive as they have traditionally done.
Illegal logging threatens this, however. Despite a court order that all loggers must leave the Awá’s four protected territories, the loggers remain. In one territory, more than 36,000 hectares of forest cover have been removed. Logging trucks enter and leave the territories night and day, and the loggers exceed the Awá by a factor of 10.
“The Awá talk about hearing chainsaws and their game being scared away,” Alice Bayer, from Survival International — an Indigenous rights group, told BBC News. “They find when they go to hunt there are less animals there because of all the noise.”
Illegal logging is a major issue in the Amazon rainforest. Between 60 and 80 percent of all logging in Brazilian Amazon is considered illegal, according to Greenpeace International. Many companies seek tropical lumber — in part due to its low cost per unit and the lack of enforced legislation on harvesting — for construction use and plywood fabrication in the United States, Japan and the European Union.
Typically, according to Greenpeace, these illegal harvesters would forge permits, exceed the limitations on legal permits, ignore legal species limitations, commit illegal harvesting under the front of a legal operation or simply poach from protected lands, as is the case with the Awá.
“We’re very worried, more and more, that the Awa are going to find less food in the forest and become dependent on government handouts in the end,” Bayer said. “If their forest is being destroyed they will end up living on handouts and lose their way of life.”
In the 1960s, geologists discovered one of the richest reserve of iron ores in the world on Awá land, leading to the steady intrusion of outsiders into the remote region. The establishment of a railroad track to the Carajas mine — funded by a 1982 World Bank grant — in the Awá territory led to an influx of miners, loggers, herders, settlers and charcoal burners. In 1992, the World Bank funded a land demarcation program in Maranhão, but the land was not recognized until recently, as local politicians pushed the court to segregate the Awá from the rest of the population, who has engaged in attacking them.
Due to the remoteness of the region, however, the court has little actual authority or available force to enforce the court order.
“If the settlers are evicted and the areas are protected, they should be fine,” Bayer said. “We have lots of other examples of Indigenous people in Brazil who do have protected areas and their numbers are recovering and they are doing very well. It doesn’t really take that much.”
The Brazilian National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) estimates that there are 77 isolated Indigenous tribes in the Amazon. Only 30 has been found, so far.