Maggie's Farm

It could be that the Mashco-Piro were angry because he hadn't provided them with more machetes and cooking pots.

Ah, man in his natural state.

I've got a friend who worked as a kind of liaison between Peruvian and Brazilian government agencies and an oil and natural gas company. He had a number of encounters with natives tribes that had only been in direct contact with the outside world for very short periods of time. Often they were not as clueless about what was out there as you might think, and they had a pretty keen understanding of what kind of technology would be very useful to them. Some of it was simple stuff like machetes and bowls, but they knew of things like plumbing and water pumps, and of course power sources that ran them. And doubly of course, electric lights and generators. Which leads right into television.

One tribe granted permission for the company to explore in their area for gas and asked for various things for their village in return. Among them was a TV set. My buddy got to see them get together in the evening to watch the thing, even though they couldn't understand a word of Spanish.

They knew what aircraft were, and that they were operated by men, but little else. The aforementioned Tribe's chief was asked to accompany the gov't and company officials to attend a meeting in another part of the jungle, to be taken there by helicopter. My buddy said that for just a fraction of a second the chief's eyes showed terror, but the whole tribe was watching so he sucked up and climbed aboard, stony-faced.

One interesting thing I hadn't thought about was that all the people that did this kind of work had to be thoroughly inoculated well before they went in - not to protect them, but to protect the tribes.