The Last Member of an Uncontacted Tribe

Not long ago, in the forest in the Brazilian state of Rondônia, a man who was around sixty years old settled into a handmade hammock inside his small thatched hut, stretched his legs, and died. His last breath, like almost every other moment of the previous twenty-six years of his life, was witnessed by no one. He was the last surviving member of an uncontacted Indigenous tribe.

The man’s story, or the fraction we know of it, began in 1996, when Brazilian officials heard rumors of a lone tribesman said to be on the run from loggers who were venturing ever deeper into the forest. During the next nine years, members of FUNAI—Brazil’s federal bureau of Indigenous affairs—launched a series of expeditions to try to peacefully contact him, and to protect him from the men who were rapidly clearing trees for cattle ranches and soybean farms. The lone man lived in small huts woven from thatch and palm fronds; as loggers inched closer, he’d abandon one hut and build a new one, deeper in the forest. Inside each of the structures, he always dug a rectangular hole about four-and-a-half feet deep, over which he often strung a firm hammock. Those pits inspired the name they gave him: “indio do buraco” or “the Indian of the hole.”

The attempts at peaceful contact failed. The first time a small team from FUNAI confronted him directly, the man retreated to his hut. For two hours, the team members tried to convince him that they were friendly. They offered gifts—seeds, a machete, corn. The whole time, he aimed an arrow at them through a hole in the wall of the hut, saying nothing, refusing to emerge. On two separate expeditions, the team brought along members of one of the closest neighboring tribes—the Kanoê, a group that itself had experienced its first prolonged contact with the outside world just a year before. But their attempts at communication went nowhere, and they concluded that the lone man likely spoke a different Indigenous language. The final attempt to make contact, in 2005, ended when the man shot a FUNAI member with an arrow in the chest; it missed his heart, but nicked his lung.

Marcelo dos Santos, a former FUNAI agent, led the first expeditions to try to make contact with the man. After those prolonged standoffs, dos Santos tried to convince the Brazilian government to abandon its efforts to force contact. In 1998, he addressed a letter to the Justice Ministry, which oversees FUNAI. “We feel embarrassed by our insistence in trying to contact him,” dos Santos wrote. “The face of the Indian—always sullen, anxious, worried and permanently silent—has made it clear to us that he wants to be left alone.”

Dos Santos believed that the government should protect the man by protecting his land. He proposed the creation of an Indigenous reserve of about thirty square miles, which would be declared off-limits to trespassing and development. For years, dos Santos and his colleagues waged a fierce bureaucratic battle to preserve the land. Local ranchers threatened their lives, and regional politicians worked to strip them of their jobs. But, in 2006, a Justice Ministry decree stated that the lone man, as “the only remnant of his culture and ethnic group,” could legally be considered “a people,” and therefore qualified for a protected reservation. The Tanaru Indigenous Territory, named for a nearby river and with a population of one, was officially demarcated.

FUNAI built a monitoring station on the edge of the man’s territory. The agents no longer tried to force contact, but they wanted to make their presence known, in case the man ever decided to initiate contact with them. At least once a year, they conducted a “proof of life” excursion into his territory, just to lay eyes on him, to make sure he was alive and well.

I first visited the monitoring station in 2006, shortly after it was established, as part of my reporting for “The Last of the Tribe,” a book that I published in 2010 about the man and the efforts to protect him. At the time, an official named Altair Algayer, who’d worked alongside dos Santos on the initial expeditions and who’d also fought to establish the reservation, supervised the area. During one of our early conversations, he explained to me that, deep down, he hoped that the man could continue to live free from contact with the modern world. He also nursed the contradictory hope that they might meet one day. This was a man that Algayer had spent years thinking about, fighting for, empathizing with. Maybe, eventually, this lone survivor might come to the conclusion that he could no longer make it on his own—that he needed assistance, needed to lean on someone else. Algayer dreamed of being there for him in his final days, to shoulder just a little bit of the load the man had carried completely alone for so many years. To ease his passing out of this life.

It wasn’t to be.

In the annals of human history, there are very few individuals, if any, known to have experienced the depths of solitude that the lone man endured. For at least twenty-six years, he spoke to no one. Other than those tense standoffs with the FUNAI agents, it’s believed that he had no contact with anyone else. We can’t know for sure, but it’s possible that he never laid eyes upon anyone besides the agents in all those years.

Perhaps the closest historical equivalent to his case is that of the Lone Woman of San Nicolas, a Native American woman spotted in 1853 by a group of otter hunters on an island off the coast of California. Eighteen years earlier, the rest of her tribe had been brought to the mainland by Catholic missionaries, but she had been left behind. Upon being “rescued,” she was moved into a Catholic mission and christened with the name Juana Maria. Seven weeks later, she developed dysentery and died. The details of her life and survival were never fully fleshed out.

We do have a fairly good idea how the indio do buraco spent his days, thanks to the expeditions of dos Santos and Algayer. On one journey, Algayer fell into a pit that had been camouflaged by leaves; he narrowly escaped being impaled by sharpened spikes that the lone man had embedded in its bottom, to kill wild game, like the tusked boars that are abundant in his territory. Near his abandoned huts, the FUNAI agents found cooking fires and traces of some of the animals—turtles, armadillo, caiman—that he’d eaten. In clearings where he’d lived for extended periods, they discovered patches of corn and manioc that he’d planted and cultivated. The forest where he lived is full of animals and fruit trees, and the weather is generally mild. But to survive there so long, in complete isolation, strikes me as almost miraculous.

Dos Santos and Algayar had made contact with the Kanoê and another tribe, the Akuntsu, in 1995, a few months before they began looking into rumors about the indio do buraco. Those tribes had been reduced to four and seven members, respectively; accompanied by Algayer, I was able to spend time with the survivors inside their protected reservations. The eldest member of the Akuntsu was the tribe’s shaman, a man named Konibu. His life in the forest was hard. Five years after first contact, a storm ripped through the reservation, and a tree fell on top of one of the huts, killing a fourteen-year-old girl and shattering Konibu’s femur. Following Konibu’s instructions, the other tribe members tried to treat his injuries with herbal medicines and compresses. After two days, they gave up and trekked through the forest to a FUNAI encampment, where team members were able to place a satellite call to Algayer. At 4 A.M., Algayer commenced the seven-hour journey from his home to the tribal village. He and four other people carried Konibu in a hammock for five hours through the forest to the FUNAI camp, and then drove five more hours to a hospital. It was Konibu’s first trip in a motorized vehicle, and his first time outside of the forest. Twelve pins were set in his leg. If he had lived alone, like the indio do buraco, he would have died from his injuries within days.