When Rita was born, her tribe, the Piripkura, were uncontacted. They shunned contact with outsiders, fishing, hunting, collecting fruit and honey, and sleeping in tapiri shelters made from forest fibres. But their forest had been targeted and invaded for decades: rubber tappers in the region hunted down the Piripkura from the late 1800s, and colonists, loggers and land grabbers flooded into the region from the 1940s. They brought with them both their greed for the forest’s riches, and their guns, changing the Piripkura’s lives forever, and almost annihilating them completely. More
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sarah Shenker.