There is a man out there with his
family who does not pay taxes, not even road tax. It might have something to do
with no roads around, no primary school, no bin collection, no police force, no
hospital, and surviving off nature is a way
of living as dying is a part of life. They live in deep in the jungles of Brazil, safe from their kind, civilised man, for now. What they still can take from their earth
and other species is replenished and never runs out, and that finely tuned
interdependence that still hums, does not depend on them anymore but depends on
us; and the medicines that are extracted from the plants around them and the
honed skill of hunting, handed down by their ancestors, had and still is there
to keep them safe and to guarantee their future; a guarantee that is now
running out of time alongside their habitat. All they want above all is to be
left alone and are truly the last of the free people.
It is more than their survival and that
way of life that is at stake, it is ours, for this tribe represent the Celtic
warriors we once were, the native American way of life that once was, who
roamed the plains along with the buffalo that fed and clothed their bodies.
They have the values of the Inuit’s in the frozen north and are the cousins of
the aboriginal in Australia in the hot south. These other indigenous tribes
that still exist today are there to remind us too of where we came from and
where we are going, and what they have always known about the environment, and
how to sustain it, we have long forgotten. It is a dangerous ignorance.
Our footprints once followed
from theirs, but that journey today is so obscured that what we need to live is
outweighed by what we want, enshrined in a lifestyle that cannot sustain
itself. Its driving engine is of fear that feeds ultimately on itself.
If there is hope, the wider world has
to ensure that all indigenous tribes, where they still manage to survive,
always remain a free people in order for us to have a chance to know and
learn from them, or to know what natural freedom ever was.
Barry Clifford
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