Bureaucratic delays and funding shortages stall plans to carve out a forest reserve for the uncontacted Indigenous group on the southern fringe of the Brazilian Amazon

In 2024, agents of the National Foundation for Indigenous Peoples ( Funai ) walked more than 60 miles through rainforest on the southern fringe of the Brazilian Amazon on a mission to monitor and help protect a group of Indigenous people who had no contact with the modern world.

What they found was a small basket freshly woven from leaves, a child’s footprints on the bank of a creek, and tree trunks hacked open hours before to extract honey. There were huts abandoned a year before that were sinking into the forest floor, and brazil nut pods discarded around old campfires. They were all signs that the Pardo River Kawahiva people were there.

Bureaucratic delays and funding shortages stall plans to carve out a forest reserve for the uncontacted Indigenous group on the southern fringe of the Brazilian Amazon

In 2024, agents of the National Foundation for Indigenous Peoples ( Funai ) walked more than 60 miles through rainforest on the southern fringe of the Brazilian Amazon on a mission to monitor and help protect a group of Indigenous people who had no contact with the modern world.

What they found was a small basket freshly woven from leaves, a child’s footprints on the bank of a creek, and tree trunks hacked open hours before to extract honey. There were huts abandoned a year before that were sinking into the forest floor, and brazil nut pods discarded around old campfires. They were all signs that the Pardo River Kawahiva people were there.

Bureaucratic delays and funding shortages stall plans to carve out a forest reserve for the uncontacted Indigenous group on the southern fringe of the Brazilian Amazon

In 2024, agents of the National Foundation for Indigenous Peoples ( Funai ) walked more than 60 miles through rainforest on the southern fringe of the Brazilian Amazon on a mission to monitor and help protect a group of Indigenous people who had no contact with the modern world.

What they found was a small basket freshly woven from leaves, a child’s footprints on the bank of a creek, and tree trunks hacked open hours before to extract honey. There were huts abandoned a year before that were sinking into the forest floor, and brazil nut pods discarded around old campfires. They were all signs that the Pardo River Kawahiva people were there.