Members of the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa tribe in Indonesia have been filmed recently confronting developers who tear up their forest.

Logging and mining operations on the Indonesian island are now penetrating the rainforest of uncontacted Hongana Manyawa people.

  • livus
    21•1 year ago

    Destruction of the surrounding environment isn’t the only problem facing the Hongana Manyawa. Their isolation from the wider world means they have little to no immunity to the common diseases we regularly come across in the industrialized world, meaning their population could easily be decimated by an infection, IFLScience reports.

    • @APassengerEnglish
      3•1 year ago

      The Hongana Manyawa are an uncontacted tribe whose name means “People of the Forest” in their language. There are an estimated 300 to 500 uncontacted members of the tribe, as well as 3,000 Hongana Manyawa people who were contacted in the 1980s and maintain some contact with the wider world.

      But there was no mention of these thousands of people being decimated…

      I’m not a fan of environmental degradation or basically stealing land from a tribe that appears to have been there since… Ever.

      I’m just trying to distinguish fact from something that hits slightly off.

      • livus
        3•1 year ago

        @APassenger it’s just poor reporting. Of course the contacted ones would already have been decimated back in the 1980s.

        Lack of immunity to diseases from other areas is a very common phenomenon, so there’s no reason to think this would be different.

        A quick google found me this:

        As with uncontacted tribes the world over, forced contact has proved disastrous for the Hongana Manyawa. They were immediately exposed to diseases to which they had no immunity – from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, terrible outbreaks of diseases which the Hongana Manyawa refer to as “the plague” affected the newly-settled villages, leading to widespread suffering and even death.

        “We had many different diseases when first settled, some of the sickness led to deaths, some people had fever that went on for days and nights and endless coughing for days and even weeks.” - Hongana Manyawa man

        They were nomadic and the Indonesian government relocated them. Source.