Page 37 - Demo

37THE VANISHINGSchultes admitted that he was in a desperate bid to rush and record as much as he could about the botany and healing practises of Chiribiquete%u2019s plant life and people, before they vanished forever.But where was this danger coming from? Chiribiquete%u2019s remoteness had long benefited the location. With no roads leading to the epicentre, both wildlife and indigenous people have remained undisturbed and undiscovered. Rare species thrived in the untouched wilderness and the unusual landscape features remained unexplored.But this bubble of protection is not as straightforward, or as historically tidy as it might first appear. The rubber boom in the late 19th century caused havoc and destruction to both local people and their homes, in the most devastating of ways. Village wide massacres, missionaries, enslavement and infections against which their bodies had no defences, wiped out large numbers of innocent people.Several indigenous communities retreated deeper into the jungle and avoided all contact with outsiders. This was until as recently as 1981, when a U.S. evangelical group called New Tribes Mission, penetrated Using gifts of machetes and axes, the missionaries lured some Nukak families to their jungle camp. The Nukak%u2019s emergence from decades of isolation, set in motion a downward spiral leading to the deaths of hundreds of from respiratory infections, malaria, malnutrition, violent clashes with land grabbers and dispersal of the survivors. In total, more than half of the entire population were destroyed. In 1993 thanks to campaigning in Colombia by ONIC (National Indigenous Organization of Colombia), and others, amplified internationally by Survival, the Nukak Reserve was created, and then expanded in 1997 to encompass almost 1 million hectares of forest. As the last indigenous people to be contacted by mainstream society, and one of the last nomadic tribes in the country, in 2009, sadly the Nukak were declared one of at least 32 tribes in Colombia believed to be at %u2018imminent risk of extinction%u2019, according to the country%u2019s national indigenous peoples%u2019 organization, ONIC.It is only in the last 30 years or so that the indigenous populations began a process of %u201crecovery%u201d of their identity, and through the creation of %u201cresguardos%u201d (indigenous reserves), were able to ensure respect for their territory.