The last 200 members of their tribe

February 23, 2012 4:27 PM

Funny that I'm linking to Huffington Post (uffington horse?) and not the other way around... But this blog post about the last members of the Maijuna tribe in the Amazon is amazing.
posted by punkbitch (10 comments total)

I am unamazed, both by the one-sentence-per-paragraph style of writing and by the complete lack of explanation about what this conservation plan actually involves. As best I can tell from looking at the group's website, they leverage property rights as a conservation tool but set up the legal and administrative structures to allow them to be held in common by tribal groups rather than making them individually saleable; the benefit being that tribal landholders then stand on an equal footing with commercial entities within a country's legal system, rather than being the precarious beneficiaries of an exceptional interest whose scope can be legislatively narrowed at the behest of other economic lobbies.
posted by anigbrowl at 4:41 PM on February 23, 2012 [1 favorite]

In normal circumstances, should the Huffington Post link to you?
posted by perhapses at 4:54 PM on February 23, 2012 [2 favorites]

I read this as "the Marijuana tribe" and got momentarily worried that there were "last members". I shouldn't read the Internets when I'm stoned.
posted by twoleftfeet at 4:54 PM on February 23, 2012 [3 favorites]

Anybody who's interested in the hunter-gatherer cultures of Brazil and the gradual process of their extinction through contact with westerners should read Claude Lévi-Strauss' memoir Tristes Tropiques. Sontag called it one of the great books of the 20th century, and I don't think that's an exaggeration.
posted by strangely stunted trees at 4:58 PM on February 23, 2012 [2 favorites]

Your right, perhapses, my phrasing was a bit awkward. I suppose I was taking a jab at HuffPost for being notorious content aggregators. But no, I am not a content producer. So, no.
posted by punkbitch at 5:36 PM on February 23, 2012

Take that as a lesson, kids. Put the bong down before pressing the post button.
posted by crunchland at 7:24 PM on February 23, 2012

when Amadeo is gone, so too will go millennia of cultural knowledge, of ancestral wisdom, and of beautiful stories.

What a terrible, avoidable loss. It seems there's always enough money to send to Peru or digging up pyramids built by long-dead civilizations. And yet, for the living, nothing. Any word short of insane seems inadequate.
posted by Twang at 7:35 PM on February 23, 2012

I admit that I skimmed pretty quickly through both, but I see no relationship between the two links in the FPP. Am I missing something?
posted by asnider at 7:55 PM on February 23, 2012

Am I missing something?

this post is baffling and i am baffled.
posted by elizardbits at 8:03 PM on February 23, 2012

I think "Uffington horse" every time I hear "Huffington Post" too.

Non sequitur, but I just followed a bunch of links from that Guardian article and was oddly pleased to learn that some people in 1999 cut a new white horse on the site of an only slightly older one, built by shoemakers, that had become overgrown.

Now I'm off to read the actual link you posted.
posted by tangerine at 8:11 PM on February 23, 2012 [1 favorite]