Tropical rainforests have long been home to Indigenous peoples who have shaped civilizations and cultures based on the environment in which they live. Great civilizations like the Mayas, Incas, and Aztecs developed complex societies and made important and lasting contributions to science.
African Forest Peoples
2019 note: for this section, references to "African forest peoples" generally refers to the traditional practices and way of life for a subset forest-dependent people who live in tropical forests, rather than farming communities (typically Bantu or Sudanic in ethnicity) that live in villages in forests. It's important to recognize that the context of these communities has been changing rapidly over the past 20 years due to a variety of factors.
Today the African rainforest is home to some of the most celebrated traditional tribal peoples, the so-called "Pygmies" of the Ituri forest in northern Congo. The tallest of these people, known as the Mbuti, rarely exceed five feet (1.5 m). Besides the Mbuti, there are three other major rainforest peoples of Africa: the Aka (Central African Republic and northern Congo), the Baka or BaAka (southern Cameroon), and the Twa (central Congo river basin). Together, as of 2000, these groups accounted for some 130,000 to 170,000 forest dwellers distributed over a large area of forest, resulting in a low population density.
African forest people tend to be distinctly smaller than non-forest people, with the "Pygmies" being the most extreme example. Their small stature is thought to enable them to move about the forest more efficiently than taller peoples. Additionally, anthropologists have argued that their smaller body mass allows pygmies to dissipate their body heat better.
Traditional life of African forest peoples
African forest peoples live in bands that range in size from 15-70 people depending largely on the availability of game, trading relationships with outside communities, the prevalence of disease, and the extent of forest area. These groups are traditionally nomadic, moving to new parts of the forest several times during the year and carrying all their possessions on their backs. Their nomadic lifestyle allows the group to move in response to resource availability. This approach, coupled with low population densities and lack of encroachment from outsiders, has traditionally allowed wildlife populations to recover after a group has abandoned an area.
When African forest peoples establish a temporary camp, they typically clear any undergrowth, small trees, and saplings, leaving the canopy-forming trees intact. Under the cover of the canopy, the forest dwellers are protected from the tropical sun and maintain habitat for honey-producing bees and game. By leaving the canopy intact, the area can quickly recover when they leave. Their huts superficially resemble Central Arctic Inuit igloos, with a domed latticework formed of saplings and walls of shingled tree leaves.
Most African forest people traditionally spend much of the year near a village where they trade bushmeat, honey, and labor for manioc, vegetables, metal goods, and fabric. According to anthropologists who've studied the dynamics between forest peoples and villagers, it's common for a forest family to establish a symbiotic relationship with a settled village family. These relationships between a single forest family and a single village family can persist for generations.
Gender roles in African forest communities are traditionally distinct. The women do most of the gathering, using baskets they carry on their backs. Men concentrate on hunting and honey collection. Honey is often the forest product most prized and highly sought after by the Mbuti and other forest peoples. The Mbuti will climb high into the canopy to reach the honey-containing beehives. When they reach the hive, the climbers burn wood which produces smoke that stuns the bees, enabling the Mbuti collect honey.
African forest peoples rely on hunting to secure their primary source of protein. Each forest group has their own approach to approach to hunting. For example, the Efe people hunt their prey almost exclusively with bows and arrows. Other groups use both bows and arrows and nets to capture their prey.
The BaAka are perhaps the best known net hunters. BaAka men arrange the into a semi-circle to form a wall, up to one kilometer in length. BaAka women flush game into the nets where the men use spears to kill the animals.
While African forest peoples have generally lived within the carrying capacity of the local ecosystem, the increasing commercialization of the bushmeat trade is altering the sustainability of hunting practices. Bushmeat demand is surging in villages, urban centers, and even overseas markets. African forest peoples are sometimes hired as trackers for elephant poachers or commercial hunters for mining and logging camps.
AFRICAN FOREST PEOPLES TODAY
The small number (in proportion to the sub-Saharan population) of forest people are highly threatened by destruction of their homelands, the influx of outsiders, and official government policies to disrupt their forest traditions through forced settlement.
As of the early 2000s, no legal land titles had been granted to African forest peoples by Central African governments. Meanwhile deforestation, forest degradation, expansion of logging roads, and rising rural populations have increased pressure on forest peoples. Logging is especially problematic because logging settlements and roads open tracts of previously inaccessible forest to rapid colonization. Logging camps not only bring colonists, but also introduce pathogens to the forest people who lack immunity to outside diseases.
Changes in rural Central Africa are resulting in rapid erosion in the culture of forest peoples. Beyond land use change, encroachment of outsiders into forest areas is changing the traditional dynamics between Mbuti and other groups with their neighbors. The customary practices of forest people — like hunting and collection of non-wood forest products — are today often criminalized by local authorities and governments.
Forest Peoples in Asia
Asia is by far the most populous region on earth, and population pressures have pushed people into forested lands where they have drastically altered the lives of the few remaining forest peoples.
According to anthropologists, the original inhabitants of Southeast Asia were dark-skinned, "frizzy-haired", broad-nosed "Australoids" (the term historically used by anthropologists), some of whom moved into Australia. They were hunters, not farmers, but nonetheless used a wide variety of plants for food, medicinal remedies, and other purposes. These peoples since have been pushed into the extreme reaches of the rainforest by waves of immigration. Today the original peoples of Asian rainforests are found only in remote parts of forests of the Malay peninsula, Borneo, the Andaman islands, the Philippines (Palawan island), and New Guinea.
The Australoids were pushed farther into the forest by the arrival (about 7,000 years ago) of the Proto-Malays from India and Burma who had distinctly different physical features that anthropologists historically termed "Caucasoid". These peoples were predominantly farmers and pioneered the domestication of plants. From 5,000 to 3,000 years ago, the Deutero-Malays arrived from southern China. They have physical features that anthropologists historically termed "Mongoloid" and today are the dominant people of Southeast Asia; though few are considered "rainforest peoples" in the conventional sense, living in settled communities where they rely on agriculture for most sustenance.
Because of demographic trends in Asia, including rapid population growth in recent centuries, most rainforest peoples in the region have shifted away from traditional lifestyles and customs.
ASIAN FOREST PEOPLES TODAY
As noted earlier, traditional nomadic forest peoples of Asia are few in number today because of historic migrations, encroachment on their traditional lands, and assimilation into "mainstream" rural societies.
The shift away from traditional forest-dependent ways of life has been accelerated by government policies in the region.
Some of the few remaining groups are directly threatened by the Indonesian transmigration program, which is working to move millions from crowded Java, Bali, and Sulawesi, Sumatra, Borneo, and Papua [on the island of New Guinea]. The stated goal is to reduce population pressures from highly populated central islands and to develop outer islands through road, communication, and city construction. The people who suffer most from this program are the original inhabitants of these outer areas. The program has resulted in great deforestation for fuelwood and building materials for colonists' needs. In addition, the program has contributed to stirring up the anti-Indonesian feelings of those residents of the lands conquered by Indonesia during its aggressive expansion campaign of the late 1960s. In East Timor, for example, tensions between the Indonesian military and locals who desire independence led to violence and eventual UN intervention. Large-scale logging throughout Indonesia, especially in Borneo and New Guinea [New Guinea news], has displaced thousands of tribal peoples.
Indonesia's official transmigration program is now waning, but informal transmigration is still occurring through development schemes, especially in the plantation sector, where workers are brought from one part of Indonesia to another to work on timber plantations and oil palm estates. In fact, these projects sometimes generate animosity by using imported labor rather than employing local workers. These conflicts are especially apparent today in Indonesia New Guinea (mostly West Papua) and Indonesian Borneo (Kalimantan).
American Forest Peoples
The American rainforests were once home to some of the world's most developed civilizations of antiquity including those of the Incas (Andes), Mayas (Central America), and Aztecs (Central America). These peoples created vast metropolises and made great developments in agriculture and the sciences. However all this changed with the arrival of Europeans in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
An estimated 7-10 million Amerindians (the term for American Indigenous peoples) lived in American rainforests, half of them in Brazil, at the time of European arrival. When Pizarro arrived in Peru, more land was under cultivation and more food was being produced in the Andean region than today. The grandest civilizations with expansive cities, wealth of gold, and technological achievements, existed in the Andes, though many Amerindians also lived in the Amazon.
The Amazon has a long history of human settlement. Contrary to popular belief, sizable and sedentary societies of great complexity existed in the Amazon rainforest [Amazon Civilization Before Columbus]. These societies produced pottery, cleared sections of rainforest for agriculture, and managed forests to optimize the distribution of useful species. The notion of a virgin Amazon is largely the result of the population crash following the arrival of the Europeans in the sixteenth century. Studies suggest that 11.8 percent of the Amazon's terra firme forests are anthropogenic in nature resulting from the careful management of biodiversity by Indigenous people. However, unlike those using current cultivation techniques, these Amazonians were attuned to the ecological realities of their environment from five millennia of experimentation, and they understood how to sustainably manage the rainforest to suit their needs. They saw the importance of maintaining biodiversity through a mosaic of natural forests, open fields, and sections of forest managed so as to be dominated by species of special interest to humans.
Many of these populations existed along whitewater rivers where they had good means of transportation, excellent fishing, and fertile floodplain soils for agriculture. However, when Europeans arrived, these were the first settlements to be affected, since Europeans used the major rivers as highways to the interior. In the first century of European presence, the Amerindian population was reduced by 90 percent. Most of the remaining peoples lived in the interior of the forest: either pushed there by the Europeans or traditionally living there in smaller groups.
From Pizarro's conquest of the Incan empire until the end of the Brazilian rubber boom around the beginning of World War I, the Spanish and Portuguese, in the name of Catholicism with the blessing of popes, continued the long tradition of abuse against these people—one that would be continued by colonists, rubber tappers, loggers, ranchers, and land developers.
AMERICAN FOREST PEOPLES TODAY
Today, despite the population decimation, natives peoples still live in American rainforests, although virtually all have been affected by the outside world. Instead of wearing traditional garb of loin cloths, most Amerindians wear western clothes, and many use metal pots, pans, and utensils for every day life. Some groups make handicrafts to sell to tourists, while others make routine trips to the city to bring foods and wares to market. Almost no native group obtains the majority of its food by traditional nomadic hunting and gathering. Nearly all cultivate crops, with hunting, gathering, and fishing serving as a secondary or supplementary food source. Usually a family has two gardens: a small house garden with a variety of plants, and a larger plantation which may be one hectare in area planted with bananas, manioc, or rice. These plantations are created through the traditional practice of slash and burn, a method of forest clearing that is not all that damaging to the forest if practice in the traditional manner where forest is used on a rotational basis and allowed to regenerate prior to re-clearing.
Today very few Amerindians live in their fully traditional ways, although there remain dozens of "uncontacted" groups living in remote parts of Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Paraguay, and possibly Ecuador and Bolivia. Uncontacted tribes are generally small bands that have splintered off tribes that have contact with the outsider world. In Brazil, Peru, and Colombia, these groups are granted substantial territories to enable them to continue living in isolation should they choose. However, conflict is still known arise between outside parities and these groups. In Brazil, invasion of lands belonging to uncontacted tribes is generally illegal — trespassers are usually cattle ranchers, loggers, miners or drug traffickers. In Peru and Ecuador, there are allegations of incursions into Indigenous territories by oil and gas developers that have won exploration licenses from the government.
Other tribes having varying degrees of interaction with Western/urban culture. Some operate cattle ranches and have larger farms, while others live somewhat traditionally on reservations.
Indian social mobilization of American Indigenous peoples has attained the highest organization of any rainforest region. Forming ethnic organizations is one way Indigenous groups have been better able to protect themselves, their culture, and their natural forest resources.
Brazil
More than 500,000 Brazilians classify themselves as Indigenous, according to a 2006 census by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). FUNAI, the country's Indigenous affairs bureau, estimates there are 67 uncontacted Indigenous groups in the country.
Brazil therefore has the largest number of Indigenous forest people living in traditional ways. It also has what are perhaps the strongest protections for Indigenous rights, which were enshrined under the country's 1988 constitution. These include rights to their traditional ways of life and possession of their "traditional lands", which are recognized through a legal demarcation process as "indigenous territories".
As of 2010, Indigenous territories covered about 22 percent of the Brazilian Amazon or about one million square kilometers. Additional claims are pending approval, although in 2012, Brazilian Congress moved to give more control to mining and agroindustrial interests in determining whether demarcation of new Indigenous territories would proceed.
Although demarcated lands are legally protected, in practice, they are sometimes not respected. There are numbers cases of Indigenous territories being invaded by illegal loggers and ranchers. For example Marãiwatséde, a territory belonging to the Xavante in Mato Grosso, has been nearly entirely destroyed by outside ranchers and land speculators.
Colombia
Indigenous groups in the Colombian Amazon long suffered deprivations at the hands of outsiders. First came the diseases brought by the European Conquest, then abuses under colonial rule. In modern times, some Amazonian communities were virtually enslaved by the debt-bondage system run by rubber traders: Indians could work their entire lives without ever escaping the cycle of debt. Later, periodic invasions by gold miners, oil companies, colonists, and illegal coca-growers took a heavy toll on remaining Indigenous populations. Without title to their land, organization, or representation, Indigenous Colombians in the Amazon seemed destined to be exploited and abused.
But new hope would emerge in the 1980s, thanks partly to the efforts of Martin von Hildebrand, an ethnologist who would help Indigenous Colombians eventually win control over 260,000 square kilometers (100,000 square miles) of Amazon rainforest—an area larger than the United Kingdom.
Von Hildebrand first visited the Colombian Amazon in 1970, spending four months living amongst remote Indigenous communities. He found them exploited by rubber traders and deprived of basic human rights. Indigenous communities were in decline as youths abandoned their homeland for towns and traditional knowledge was lost with each passing elder.
Living with tribes during the 1970s, von Hildebrand learned of the traditional land management practices of Indigenous societies as well as their philosophies of co-existing with the rainforest. He helped free communities from the tyranny of rubber and started developing an education system for the Indigenous. Inspired to help them win title to their territory and therefore greater autonomy, von Hildebrand joined the Colombian government in 1986, as Head of Indigenous Affairs and adviser to President Virgilio Barco Vargas. In government von Hildebrand helped push through legislation that would lead to the establishment of 20 million hectares of collective Indigenous territory—a move that would become a fundamental part of the country's 1991 constitution.
Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Venezuela, the Guianas
Background information for the current status of forest tribes and Indigenous groups is in development. In the meantime, some recent articles are available here.
Forest People Today
Tropical rainforests have supported humans since ancient times. Although forest life cannot be described as easy, these peoples have built their lives around the surrounding forest and its systems. Consequently, they are a great storehouse of the knowledge about the forest. They know the medicinal properties of plants and understand the value of the forest as an intact ecosystem. As forests fall, these Indigenous peoples lose their homes and culture. Conflicts with settlers, who also bring disease and domestic animals, has resulted in the decline of the native population in many areas.
In the past, commercial firms, settlers, and governments developed forest lands without the permission of the original Indigenous inhabitants. Even today, in countries like Brazil and Bolivia, private interests illegally encroach on the lands of native peoples.
Sometimes, tribal groups are given the choice whether to allow their lands to be developed or left in a natural state. If developed, Indigenous people generally expect that they will receive some of the benefits of "civilized" life, including better education for their children, to health care, and infrastructure like roads and electricity, and money. Other times, the group may choose to keep their more familiar, natural lifestyle in the forest by rejecting development. More often, an Indigenous group is split between the two choices. These rifts are sometimes exploited by outsiders to secure access to Indigenous lands.
For example, in Papua New Guinea in the 1990s, some Bahineimo people chose to sell off their land to logging firms. After the agreement was signed, it emerged that many of the signatures were forged and the government suspended the deal. Similarly, in Ecuador, oil companies worked to influence high-ranking members of Indigenous organizations to secure oil development rights on native lands.
"Divide and conquer" tactics are frequently used to factionalize Indigenous organizations, weakening their power and capitalizing on the traditional animosity between tribal groups. Indigenous groups end up battling one another instead of developers.
Sometimes Indigenous leaders are deceived into signing contracts that grant extraction or conversion rights on their lands. Because the formal "ownership" of land can be a foreign concept in traditional Indigenous communities where land, natural resources, and material objects are considered communal property and responsibility.
Historically, the governments of tropical countries have often sided with companies over the interests of Native peoples. In the past, this has at times resulted in land seizure and forced displacement of Indigenous communities. Some countries still do not formally recognize Indigenous land rights.
Even when not faced with land-grabbing or displacement, many Indigenous communities are today assimilating into non-Indigenous society. This process can lead to the abandonment of traditional culture and accompanying loss of traditional knowledge.
Among younger members of Indigenous communities, the "pull" of life outside the village can be strong. But the transition can be challenging, especially in places were Indigenous peoples face discrimination or are unprepared for the culture shock of moving to a city.
The new rainforest dwellers
Increasingly "rainforest people" describes colonists who have recently emigrated to rainforest areas. Reasons for emigration vary, but are usually economic, fueled by opportunities to get work or land.
Colonization can increase conflicts over land, especially in areas where colonists claims or activities overlap with Indigenous reserves. For example, violence is rife in the Amazon.
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