10 – Jackson Whites
- The 1700s, the final hours in Europe’s colonisation of North America’s East Coast when all tribe people from the Atlantic to the Mississippi were documented and catalogued
- Then, New York in 1790, an unheard of tribe of Native Americans waltzed out of the forest like they hadn’t even existed before that point
- Wars had raged, wars against natives and yet the Jacksons had avoided it all
9 – The Akuntsu
- This is an indigenous tribe from Rodonia, Brazil, and like the Awas they’re facing extinction
- They’re a group of hunter-gatherers that supplement their diet with swidden agriculture, but a group of ranchers found their camp and massacred their people, then covered up the remains with bulldozers to hide the evidence – because otherwise the land would be closed as an indigenous reserve and unavailable for logging or ranching
- Only 5 members survive today, and it’s generally believed their people will not survive with so small a number
8 – The Jarawa
- These guys live on the Andamanese Islands, and like with a lot of these other tribes their numbers barely exceed 300
- For a long time they resisted contact with humans until 1997 when they visited a local community – then immediately got sick with the measles
- Sadly, the Jarawas are today a tourist attraction where hundreds flock to view and photograph their tribe as they go about their daily lives – even though government regulations prohibit this
7 – The Sentinelese
- These are distant cousins of the Jarawans, a culture shrouded in mystery on a small island off India, located in the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Islands
- Every time people have tried to get close to this island, the Sentinelese send back hundreds of arrows and spears, so it’s difficult to gauge their numbers though we’ve made several attempts to contact them
- It’s rumoured their people have lived there for many tens of thousands of years, directly descended from the first humans to leave Africa
6 – The Mayoruna People
- These are an indigenous tribe of the Peruvian and Brazilian Amazon, one whose ancestral lands are currently threatened by logging and poaching from modern society
- During the 1900s, they were deeply untrusting of the Peruvian government since warfare saw their villages hit by napalm and the link, but in 1969 they accepted missionaries into their community
- According to the missionaries, the Mayoruna people see the physical and spiritual world as entities present throughout the world, ones that assist in technical aspects of hunting game