Is it moral to leave tribes alone in the modern world?

[mids2019]

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/dec/22/exclusive-photographs-reveal-first-glimpse-of-uncontacted-amazon-community-massaco

Never really understood the reluctance for more intervention with remote people when they are citizens of Brazil and are therefore under the same laws as the rest of the Brazilian populace, have the same right to healthcare, education etc. Also they should have the right to vote in Brazil's democrqcy.

It just feels like a human zoo and sits badly with me.....

Good old white coloniser symdrome!

They are citizens of Brazil though and as such as subject to the laws and process of that country, albeit that isnt happening.

Thats light saying you could have a sect in this country who have their own way of administering or dealing with justice/a murder/a rape. Thats not the way it should be.

Indigenous communities have a right to not have any interference from those on the outside, contact with the outside world could prove deadly as they will have no defence from diseases carried by those on the outside of their communities.

Brazil decided to enact the policy of preventing contact after previous attempts to contact them nearly wiped out many tribes through disease. You should read a little.

You can't compare a group of people who have never had contact with modern society with a group of people who know exactly what modern society is like, and who have chosen to remove themselves from it in order to get away with certain things, though. They're two very, very different things.

Yes I agree with that, I remember an awful programme where I was cringing through a lot of it, Kate Humble went to live with or visit some tribe somewhere, and got herself involved with a dispute where she was trying to calm it down or trying to mediate or something like that and I thought 'its none of your business' and she was clearly shocked at how horrible people were being or something like that, I cant quite remember the details, almost as if she thought this sort of thing didnt happen among non westernised/non modernised groups.

Yes true.

Out of interest are you under the impression that indigenous peoples dont use alcohol and drugs? They might not come in pill or bottle form but people over thousands of years have developed substances to get high/sedated on, its what humans do!

But does advanced healthcare eradicate all pain and suffering?

Modern lifestyles have led to disease people suffer from. They want and think modern medicine cures all but it doesn't.

Maybe these tribes don't have the same illnesses and therefore don't need the same medicine.
Maybe they better accept the circle of life?

Maybe they have natural medicines that work for them?

You are making a judgement based on our knowledge of our world. It isn't their world or their experience or their knowledge.

My parents made medical decisions for me that cause me lifelong daily pain. One was to address a purely cosmetic minor abnormality. I wish they hadn't made them.

My point is that all parents in all societies make medical decisions for their children. This tribe have that same right.

Really?

Did covid not teach you we can't prevent the massive of a virus novel to communities from wiping them out?

Even with our western medicines and vaccines.

By 'we' who do you mean, the UN or similar institutions who decide that rape, murder, child abuse is wrong/immoral

There arent different standards of human rights dependent on where you are in the world, or there shouldnt be anyway.

A child in the tribe has just as much right to be protected from sexual abuse (as one example) as a chld next door to you surely

My point is that all parents in all societies make medical decisions for their children.

Spot on.

Some people don't vaccinate.

JW don't generally accept blood transfusions.

We choose to turn off life support machines when doctors advise.

I'm sure there's many more.

The rest of the world is doing such a fine job in that regard eh.
What if there is no wild child abuse? Why do peole asaume there is? Maybe it's like anywhere and elders punish perpetrator?

Why would you assume there isnt abuse, rape, murder, control, given it seems to be universal human behaviour. Why would these people be any different

And no, elders didnt punish this sort of behaviour until modern laws made it punishable and even then, as you rightly say, the world is not doing well in this area. Look at the commetns by the mayor in the case of the woman raped and drugged by her husband. A shrug and 'its not that serious'

Why would indigenous men be any different?

I just don't think it's as simple as that.

The idea that these people are worse off than us, and being assaulted or denied basic freedoms is just supposition - we have no idea either way. But what we do know, is that by interfering and imposing our existence onto them, we could very well wipe them out completely.

It's not about their children having less rights than "ours" in the west, it's about whether we have the right to intervene in how other people choose to live, without any solid evidence, all the while knowing the massive risks involved (death).

I am Brazilian.
Contact was a disaster for indigenous tribes.
To start they have no antibodies for our diseases, colds wiped out whole tribes.
I have 2 relatives that worked with indigenous people in the field, one of them once told me that what you have in the Amazon is : indians, farmers, gold miners, drug dealers ,religious missionaries and the army trying to keep some kind of order.
The farmers and gold miners want the indigenous tribes land and systematically kill them. The drug dealers ditto. The missionaries managed to wipe out complete tribes with their kind gifts of used clothes, that were full of virus that they had no defence against.
There is a lot of discrimination against the native tribes, it's horrible to see how many people talk about them.
I saw at the beginning of this year some groups of them that came to a massive political protest to Brasilia ( the capital of Brazil) and they were a pitiful sight, completely beaten by 500 years of colonisation.
They are better left alone and protected from contact with people that to this day still go with guns to exterminate them.
The government policy is correct.

Why would indigenous men be any different?

Why wouldn't they? We have no idea and shouldn't assume that they behave in a certain way based on how men in our society choose to behave. Some tribes may be led by women, for all we know - many are, after all.

I dont actually think people should intervene, Im playing devils advocate to some degree here but Im finding the blanket 'oh they probably live better unhindered lives than the nasty westerners' a bit sickening and naive.

The vast vast majority of the world has similar behaviours from its human inhabitants, there is no reason to suggest these people are different, which means there will be significant abuse and victims of the most disadvantaged of their group (those with LD, MH, women, children etc etc), why some are really struggling to recognise that I dont know.

Oh, I agree with you there @soupfiend for sure.

I didn't assume any, i said wild.
There is overall really little protection in our world as well. There is punishment for perpetrators which can act as deterrent.

And yet in "our world" perpetrators have lived in plain sight abusing others who stayed silent until they died.

That's with our apparent judicial system etc.

It's so arrogant to assume our way is better.

Different - yes.

Better - unknown.

Similar - probably. Although also different I very much doubt many things do differ fundamentally. I very much doubt it's better or worse. I very much doubt they don't have the same problems in their society as we do.

But our way of dealing with it isn't perfect. So to suggest we impose it on indigenous people is so arrogant.

Im not suggesting we impose it on anyone or 'our' (and who are you talking about by the way) way is better, Im countering arguments that seem to imply that within uncontacted and indigenous peoples throughout the world, there wouldnt be those issues.

Of course there would be and I have no idea what Brazil's record on dealing with violent or sexual crime is, or protecting the mentally ill or disabled, but neither does anyone know what the record of those tribes supporting the vulnerable is either.

I think that western hospitals are objectively better than tribal medicine (and that I'd much rather live under Parliament than the Taliban). The reason I'm not dead is due to the excellent consultants at Chelsea & Westminster. But being realistic, the option isn't "top London teaching hospital" vs "brewing bits of bark" is it - if they were integrated into mainstream Brazilian society they would probably not be at the top end of it, and the bottom end is really, really poor.

There's also the fact that integrating them into society, even with access to top notch medicine, would likely still kill them.

The reason Brazil has stopped tribes from being contacted anymore is because that contact wiped out so many previous "contacted" tribes.