The Unconquered Quotes

“For all the illusions of freedom our society promotes, rarely do we have the chance to step outside it long enough to gain some distance. Beyond the fatuous talk about liberty and the price our founders paid for it, I wondered: How free were we if we’d become so dependent on the comforts produced by industry that we couldn’t do without them?”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“What enabled tribes to prosper in isolation from the global economy was a healthy and intact environment from which they derived their livelihood. In protecting the isolated tribes, as Possuelo had said, he was protecting enormous stretches of primeval forest.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“In northeastern Australia, the introduction of steel axes by missionaries among Yir-Yoront aborigines led to the complete collapse of their ancient culture within a generation. Trade relations disrupted, taboos violated, myths shattered, age and gender roles overturned—such is the transformative power of our technology. Our guns, our germs, and our steel. It was enough to make you think twice about leaving a single machete for the Arrow People. CHAPTER 17”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“Once you make contact,” he’d told me, “you begin the process of destroying their universe.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“Apprenticing themselves to the birds and animals they hunted, tribesmen could mimic with startling precision the cries, mating calls, or songs of just about every creature in the forest and use them to attract prey, coordinate movements, strike fear in the hearts of their enemies, even cover the screams of their victims.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“Within sixty years of Columbus’s landfall, the Taino were extinct, reduced to zero from a population that modern demographic studies indicate may have been as high as eight million. In that regard, how a tribe has come to possess a knife or a machete—or even a rifle—would reveal more about its degree of contact with the outside world than the mere fact of its possession.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“The absence of peaceful contact meant they were still “virgin soil populations,” as vulnerable to the communicable diseases that evolved over millennia on the Eurasian landmass—measles, flu, tuberculosis, pneumonia, even the common cold—as were the very first Taino encountered by Columbus on Hispaniola.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“The isolation, even from other tribes, appears to be a relatively recent phenomenon, born of the violent imposition of the White Intruder.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“Indigenous groups living in isolation are isolated because they choose to be. It’s not for complete lack of contact, but precisely because previous experiences of contact with the outside world proved so negative.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“1988 National Geographic story, “Last Days of Eden,” a celebration of tribal knowledge and a lament for a rapidly vanishing way of life.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“In any case, the idea wasn’t to cordon the Indians off forever from the outside world; it was to allow them to choose if and when they wanted contact.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“The most dangerous men are the ones who don’t confront you directly. They talk behind your back and sow discontent.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“Researchers have uncovered preliminary evidence suggesting an evolutionary link between snakes and some of our more advanced cognitive abilities. Our keen eyesight, our ability to distinguish primary colors, and the human brain’s capacity for fear may have evolved together over the course of millions of years to counter increasingly deadly snakes, they say, in a kind of “biological arms race” between primates and vipers.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“It was a disarming gesture of kindness,”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“hoping to salvage a shred of dignity.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“Brazil’s three main bloodlines: Portuguese, African, and Indian.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“WHEN YOU SPEAK, MAKE SURE YOUR WORDS IMPROVE UPON THE SILENCE,”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“He explained the dynamic that leads an uprooted tribe to extinction: “The women stop having children. Under these conditions, why have children? The older men lose their ability to run, climb mountains, cross rivers. The younger ones are strongest, but they’re in a state of total demoralization. It’s contradictory. On the one hand they don’t want to live; on the other, they don’t want to surrender.” 44”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“They are a reminder that it’s possible to live another way,” Meirelles told the BBC as he looked down on the Indians from the circling plane. “They are the last free people on this planet.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“One official in the state oil company likened the tribes to the Loch Ness monster, a mere figment of the imagination concocted by environmentalists to sabotage Peru’s economic growth. The”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“Eager to generate employment and earn revenues on timber and hydrocarbon development, Peruvian president Alan García had thrown his country’s Amazonian territories open to logging and oil and gas exploration.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“an even more withering drought returned in 2010. Billions more trees perished, releasing their stored carbon. For the first time, the Amazon had become a net producer of greenhouse gases, rather than the world’s most important carbon sink.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“Whatever its faults, and there were many, the system of identification, protection, and vigilance Possuelo had put in place was making a difference. The number of uncontacted tribes whose existence the department had confirmed had grown to twenty-six, and the department continued to uncover and compile evidence of previously unknown groups of wild Indians. But”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“Most important, as far as Possuelo was concerned, they appeared to be thriving in every way. Isolation, far from strangling them, had made them strong. For Possuelo, this is what victory looked like: the Arrow People, holding forth in the Parallel Realm. Uncontacted. Untamed. Unconquered. Still,”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“Like the rest of her people, back then she’d thought that the whites were but a handful, and she proposed wiping them out once and for all.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“poverty and desperation are fueling much of the environmental crime in Amazon. Twelve million wild birds and animals are poached in Brazil every year, according to IBAMA. Middlemen—like Moysés Israel, “Big Carlos,” and “the Captain”—may have grown fat on the trade. But the desperadoes raiding the nests and felling the timber, like the Kanamari of Queimada or the two-bit poachers nabbed by Queirós, are driven by more basic imperatives, like the need to put food on the table. We”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“sitting in hospital waiting rooms with Indians he’d brought in from the bush, encountering the blatant racism that so often attended such experiences—the refusal to treat, the willful neglect. He’d once pulled his gun on hospital security guards when they tried to eject a gravely ill Guajá woman from an emergency room. Another time, he put a choke hold on an orderly who failed to tend to a tribesman.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“Without a single boat to patrol the district’s myriad waterways, his agents effectively went nowhere; the municipality’s entire network of roads petered out in rutted dirt tracks just beyond town. Relatively”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“I could think of no better reason to applaud Brazil’s efforts—however flawed, enfeebled, or underfunded—to protect them. As the Possuelo-led sertanistas pointed out in their proposal to spare the last isolated Indians from gratuitous contact with civilization, the tribes were the patrimony not only of the nation, but of all humanity. *”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“As long as they had streams unsullied by mercury and sprawling woodlands rich with animals, they could remain beyond our reach, beyond the swirling vortex of consumer society and the machinery that manufactures our wants, creates our needs, serves us our ice-cold beer.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes