Featured Image Credit: G.Miranda/FUNAI/Survival
Topics: News, World News
Gerrard Kaonga
Stunning drone photographs have shown a brief snippet into the lives of uncontacted people living in tribes around the world.
The images, taken by G. Miranda for Survival International, show birds-eye views of tribes people - including the Sentinelese - in a remote part of India, North Sentinel Island, as well as photos showing Amazon tribes in Brazil near the Javari River valley by the Peru border.
A video compiling photographs of these uncontacted people has been viewed more than 3.5 million times since being posted on the Death Island Expeditions YouTube page in 2018.
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The video shows small settlements and homes, as well as tribes people. Some images show the tribes people armed with bows and arrows and looking directly at the drone or photography equipment.
Some YouTube users highlighted how important it was to have images like this and how vastly different lives these people live compared to the rest of the world.
“It blows my mind how different our lives are. The fact that they don't even know about the existence of grocery stores, factories, phones, social media, everything that makes our society what it is. It's so surreal,” one user wrote.
“They live in a whole different world of their own. Their own history, stories, language, way of life, routines, traditions.,” another said.
FUNAI, the National Indian Foundation, is the Brazilian government body that establishes and carries out policies relating to uncontacted policies relating to indigenous people.
It is also responsible for some of the drone images seen in the video.
The pictures of the uncontacted tribes people of Brazil were taken in 2008, according to a report by Survival International, a human rights organization.
“We did the overflight to show their houses, to show they are there, to show they exist,” said uncontacted tribes expert José Carlos dos Reis Meirelles Júnior.
“This is very important because there are some who doubt their existence.”
In 2008, Meirelles also noted how the uncontacted tribes of the region were in danger from illegal loggers in Peru which could result in conflict.
“What is happening in this region [of Peru] is a monumental crime against the natural world, the tribes, the fauna and is further testimony to the complete irrationality with which we, the ‘civilized’ ones, treat the world,” he said.
A new documentary has also been released today (October 13) that delves into the tragic circumstances that saw a missionary, who met the Sentinelese people, killed.
Directed by Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss, the documentary film, The Mission, 'explores the death of American missionary John Allen Chau, who was killed in 2018 by arrows while attempting to make contact with the tribe.