One older woman on foreground cutting plants with big knife and other women collecting cuttings on the background. All dressed in bright color tops and skirts made of grass.
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Why this once isolated tribe took up cell phones and social media

Indigenous peoples in the Amazon are using modern technology to defend their land—and their way of life. “We want the world to see us so they can help us.”

In the Javari Valley, one of the most isolated regions of the Amazon in Brazil, Kanamari women harvest manioc, a tuber that’s a staple of their diet. The Kanamari mostly live off the land, but they and the forest that sustains them are threatened by outsiders eager to reap the Amazon’s natural resources.
Photographs byLynsey Addario
As told toRachel Hartigan
December 7, 2023
9 min read

The Javari River splits Brazil and Peru as it flows deep into the Amazon forest. The only signs of human life along the waterway are the occasional boat or dock on the Peruvian side. On the Brazilian bank, government signs warn that this is Javari Valley Indigenous land, a reserve that’s home to the highest concentration of isolated Indigenous peoples in the world. Outsiders are forbidden to enter, but the lure of abundant minerals, timber, and wildlife is impossible for many to resist.

Women and children bathing in murky water by the green wall of the forest.
The Brazilian government first contacted the Kanamari in 1972, but the tribe likely encountered rubber tree tappers much earlier. Although decades of contact has affected many aspects of their lives, people in the village of São Luís still do most things communally, from fishing to taking a dip in a swimming hole located on a tributary of the Javari River. The villagers are curious about their more isolated neighbors, including one tribe that lives only 10 miles away in the forest. Hunting parties sometimes spot signs of them but don’t attempt to communicate. Still, several Kanamari expressed a wish for a drone to see how their neighbors live.

Some 6,000 people are known to live in the reserve, an area of nearly pristine forest roughly the size of Portugal. But that number accounts only for members of seven tribes who have established contact with the outside world. I’ve come to see how these people, who live on an embattled frontier, are faring as illegal logging, fishing, and mining chip away at their ancestral home.

Dancing young people and children.
Young people face off in a game similar to rugby but with dancing and chanting. A type of pineapple serves as a ball, and the game often culminates in a wrestling match.
Woman in cobalt blue bra and bidded skirt with headdress of feathers affixing feather headdress on little boy.
Teresa Kanamari, wife of Chief Mauro Kanamari, adorns her grandson Permelo in a headdress and paint.

The village of São Luís sits about 200 miles up the Javari River from the town of Atalaia do Norte. It’s home to 200 or so Kanamari people, who have granted me and a film crew permission to visit. For eight days we live in their tidy settlement of wooden stilt houses, rising when Chief Mauro Kanamari (the Kanamari take the tribe’s name as their last name) blows a horn. We accompany the women as they harvest manioc, or cassava, and the men as they hunt and fish.

What we witness, again and again, are people who, worried about violent incursions into their forest, are increasingly finding new ways to defend their land and their way of life.

Young man with tattooed face taking picture with cell phone.
The young in São Luís are raised traditionally, though a few, such as João Kanamari, are sent to the town of Atalaia do Norte—nine hours away by boat—for additional education. João uses his cell phone to document the village’s anti-poaching and logging patrols, as well as to communicate with other Indigenous communities and share snapshots on social media. 

“There used to be only a few illegal invaders, fishermen, and loggers who took wood from our territory,” Chief Mauro tells us. “Now they are more with every day.”

For the Kanamari, the forest is their parent who supplies everything. Logging and other natural resource extraction threaten their parent’s health and their own livelihood. But it’s dangerous to oppose such activities. In 2022 Brazilian Indigenous advocate Bruno Pereira and British journalist Dom Phillips were brutally murdered on another river in the region, allegedly by order of the head of a criminal fishing network. “I’ve personally received many threats,” says Chief Mauro.

Still, the Kanamari refuse to allow these encroachments to go unchallenged. They’ve joined forces with FUNAI, Brazil’s Indigenous affairs agency, and UNIVAJA, a union of the Indigenous groups in the Javari Valley, to organize vigilance patrols and push back against the outlaw loggers. FUNAI supplies radios and fuel for a motorized boat, but the Kanamari’s weapons—bows and arrows and small-caliber guns—are no match for those of the intruders. By necessity, their philosophy is to be nonconfrontational but to report what they find.

Burning dry grass and children adding more fuel to the fires at sunset.
Kanamari children watch over small fires. The villagers employ traditional slash-and-burn agricultural methods to clear land and dry vegetation, as well as to rejuvenate the soil. Evidence indicates that Indigenous people have been cultivating the Amazon for more than 10,000 years.
View from above at the log rafts with people navigating them in the river.
A barge consisting of poached wood from the Amazon floated openly down the Javari River near São Luís, likely destined for a sawmill. Usually such barges travel at night, but Addario and her team saw three on the river in broad daylight. 

“We used to confiscate this wood, but now, since they’re coming in greater numbers, we’ve become afraid,” says Chief Mauro. “When you go to the city, then you’re marked for assassination.”

João Kanamari, Chief Mauro’s 20-year-old nephew, documents the patrols on his cell phone and shares the information on social media. In his late teens he was sent to Atalaia do Norte to learn Portuguese and serve as an interlocutor between his people and the rest of the world.

Man carrying a heavy large cluster of berries.
To harvest acai  berries, a nutrient-rich part of the tribe’s diet, Romario Kanamari (at front) climbed a palm tree with a machete in his mouth, leaving the tree mostly intact. 
Man working on a large log on redwood.
A worker slices a log at a sawmill in Altamira, Pará state, in northern Brazil. 

“We want the world to see us so they can help us,” João says. “We are out here on these dangerous waters patrolling our territory, not just for us but also for you. The Amazon is our government, our father, and our mother. We can’t survive without her, and, from what we all now understand, neither can you.”

Woman cooking while other family members resting on bare floor board.
Teresa serves food to her family. The Kanamari cook with metal pots and rely on headlamps when light grows dim—there’s no electricity in São Luís—yet many customs remain mostly unchanged. That’s how they’ve adapted: old ways with modern tools.
“I don’t cover conflict just to cover it. I cover it because I think the stories within that conflict need to be told,” photographer Lynsey Addario says. The Pulitzer Prize winner has told those stories through her camera in places from Afghanistan to Iraq. Author of the bestseller It’s What I Do, Addario became an Explorer in 2020 and received the National Geographic Society’s Eliza Scidmore Award for Outstanding Storytelling in 2022.
The nonprofit National Geographic Society, working to conserve Earth’s resources, helped fund this article.

This story appears in the January 2024 issue of National Geographic magazine.

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