[A-List] Brazil: Awa resistance

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Brazil's last hunters tell settlers to leave jungle
By Leyla Linton
The Independent
13 March 2003

Brazil's last hunter-gatherer Indian tribe, the Awa, handed a
40,000-signature petition to the Brazilian government yesterday, demanding
the removal of illegal settlers from their land.

After a 20-year campaign, the mapping-out and marking of their land into a
reserve, ordered by a judge last year, has been completed, but loggers and
ranchers remain.

Fiona Watson of Survival International, an organisation that supports tribal
peoples, said: "Now this demarcation has finished, the Brazilian authorities
have to protect the area and stop the killing of the Awa." An industrial
project

Only 300 Awa still remain and about 60 live uncontacted in nomadic groups in
the Eastern Amazon. To'o, an Awa leader, said: "We live in the depths of the
forest and we are getting cornered as the whites close in on us. Without the
forest we are nobody. Without the forest, we will be extinct."