A tribe of one

Deep in the Amazon rain forest, a lone Indian dodges loggers and ranchers to sustain an ancient way of life. He’s even saved a few arrows for those who are trying to help him.

The rumor was a wild one, and it seized Marcelo dos Santos and Altair Algayer with the power of a primary myth: There’s an Indian living in the woods around here. He wears no clothes. Get near him, and he vanishes. He is utterly alone.

Dos Santos and Algayer knew a lot about elusive Indians. They were sertanistas, members of a uniquely Brazilian profession that is part jungle explorer, part ethnologist, and part bureaucrat. As employees of Funai—the Brazilian government agency charged with protecting indigenous interests and cultures—their specialty was “uncontacted” Indians, those tribes that remain isolated from modern man. Their territory was Rondonia, a heavily forested area that had been largely undeveloped before the government opened it to agriculture in the early 1980s. After that, loggers and ranchers began streaming in, creating pastureland that was eating into the forest from all sides.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Just a few months earlier, dos Santos and Algayer had made first contact with an isolated tribe of Kanoe Indians that had been reduced to five survivors. Shortly after that, they found another tribe, the Akuntsu, with only six members living several miles from the Kanoe. They’d gotten the land for those tribes declared off-limits to development. And for that, the loggers and ranchers viewed dos Santos and Algayer just as suspiciously as those two viewed the loggers and ranchers.

But this rumor, of a single Indian on his own in the jungle, was too compelling to ignore, even though the rumor’s trail led them to the type of logging operation they preferred to avoid.

Dos Santos and Algayer, careful to sneak past the logging company’s boss, found the company cook. “Yeah, I’ve seen him,” the cook told them, “and I know where he lives. Do you want to see?”

Two years later, dos Santos and Algayer were knee-deep in an obsession. Their Funai team had made a series of trips to the area since the initial foray with the logging cook. On that first hike, dos Santos and Algayer had found a hut big enough for just one person. But it had been abandoned several months before, judging by the evidence they found. On subsequent expeditions, team members found more single-person huts. Each contained a deep hole dug inside the hut, too narrow to kneel down in—a befuddling feature, because no other tribes in the region were known to do this. But the huts had all been recently abandoned. Just when it seemed the trackers were getting close to the Indian, he’d move somewhere else.

Now, at the peak of the dry season in 1998, the team was convinced the Indian was nearby.

Algayer, clutching a rifle in one hand, led the team down a lightly beaten path. Behind him walked dos Santos, video cameraman Vincent Carelli, and Pur