The solitary and mysterious man was known only as Índio do Buraco, or “the native of the hole,” because he spent much of his existence hiding or sheltering in pits he dug in the ground. For a period of decades, during which his land was attacked and his friends and family were killed, he resisted all attempts to communicate with him, setting traps and shooting arrows at anyone who came too close. “Having endured horrific massacres and land invasions, rejecting contact with outsiders was the best chance for survival,” said Sarah Shenker, an activist at Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples. “He was the last of his race and so this is another race that went extinct – it didn’t go extinct, as some people say, it’s a much more active and genocidal process than extinction.” Officials know very little about the man, but his determined independence and apparent comfort have helped create a mystique around him that has drawn the attention of activists and media across Brazil and around the world. “He didn’t trust anyone because he had a lot of traumatic experiences with non-indigenous people,” said Marcelo dos Santos, a retired explorer who monitored his well-being for Funai, Brazil’s national indigenous foundation. Dos Santos said he and other Funai officials left strategically placed gifts of tools, seeds and food, but they were always rejected. They believe that sometime in the 1980s, illegal ranchers, after leaving the first sugar offerings, gave the tribe rat poison that killed all the “hole people.” A Funai official monitoring the man’s welfare from a distance found his body lying in a hammock in a state of decomposition. Because he had placed brightly colored feathers around his body, the official believes the man had prepared himself for death. The man was estimated to be around 60 years old. Indigenous organizations put the number of remaining tribes at between 235 and 300, but the exact number is difficult to determine because some tribes had very little contact with settler society. At least 30 groups are believed to live deep in the jungle and almost nothing is known about their numbers, language or culture. “Because he resolutely resisted all attempts at contact, he died without revealing his ethnicity or the motives behind the holes he dug into his home,” wrote the Human Rights Watch for Isolated and Recent Indigenous Peoples (OPI). when he learned of the man’s death. “[He] he clearly expressed his choice to distance himself without saying a single word that would allow him to be identified with any known indigenous language.” OPI said Funai officials first noticed the man in the mid-1990s. Indigenous activists found small plots of cultivated land destroyed by invading ranchers and the ruins of homes they believe had been swept away by tractors. There were also large, hand-dug pits. The region, along Brazil’s border with Bolivia, has been and continues to be under attack from ranchers, prospectors and loggers who covet its precious natural resources. The discovery led Funai to fence off an area where the man could live unhindered, and in 1997 the Tanaru Reserve was officially established. OPI has called for the reserve to be preserved in its current state and asked officials to carry out archaeological and anthropological studies that could shed light on the man’s history and lifestyle. The number of tribes whose land is under threat has risen since far-right president Jair Bolsonaro took power in 2018. The number of recorded incursions into indigenous land rose from 109 in 2018 to 305 last year, according to the group. Cimi rights. Bolsonaro has long made his disdain for indigenous peoples clear, once saying that Brazil was wrong for not decimating the natives like the US cavalry did. Before assuming the presidency, he promised not to give the indigenous population even one square centimeter of land and he kept that promise.
