Sydney Possuelo facts for kids
Sydney Ferreira Possuelo (born April 19, 1940) is a Brazilian explorer and social activist. He is considered the top expert on Brazil's remaining isolated Indigenous Peoples. These are groups of people who live deep in the Amazon rainforest. They have little or no contact with the outside world. Possuelo works hard to protect their way of life and their lands.
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Life and Career
Early Work and New Ideas
Sydney Possuelo started his career helping the famous Villas Boas brothers. They worked with Indigenous peoples in the Xingu River area of Brazil.
In the late 1980s, Possuelo played a key role for FUNAI. FUNAI is Brazil's agency for Indigenous affairs. He helped make peace with the Arara (Para) people. Conflict had started between the Arara and workers building the Trans-Amazonian Highway.
When the Arara people came into contact with outsiders, they became sick. Many caught diseases from Europe and Asia. They had no protection against these illnesses. This caused many problems for their community. Possuelo saw how difficult this was for the Arara. He realized that trying to make isolated tribes join the outside world often hurt them.
Protecting Isolated Tribes
With support from other FUNAI officials, Possuelo pushed for a new idea. He successfully argued for the creation of a special department. This was the Department of Indigenous in Isolation. It was created within FUNAI in 1987. Possuelo became its first director.
This new department helped protect Indigenous lands. Over the next two years, it doubled the size of officially protected Indigenous land in Brazil.
Possuelo has led many expeditions in the most isolated parts of the Amazon region. He has made contact with or learned about isolated tribes in Brazil. His main goal is to protect them from outsiders. For example, he helped restore peace with the Korubo Indians. The Korubo had previously killed some FUNAI officials. One of them was Possuelo's friend, Raimundo Batista Magalhães.
On January 24, 2006, Possuelo was removed from his role at FUNAI. Days earlier, he had criticized the FUNAI director. He felt the director suggested that Brazilian Indigenous people had too much land. Possuelo compared the director to people who harm Indigenous lands.
Possuelo continues his efforts to defend isolated tribes. He works through a non-governmental group called Instituto Indigenista Interamericano.
Activism
In a 2022 interview, Possuelo spoke about protecting Indigenous lands. He criticized the approach of then-president Jair Bolsonaro. Possuelo blamed Bolsonaro's government for more illegal invasions of Indigenous lands. He stated that Indigenous people had never faced a worse time in Brazil's history. He accused Bolsonaro of supporting criminals who entered these lands.
Before the 2022 Brazilian general election, Possuelo shared his thoughts. He had some concerns about Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's past. However, he hoped Lula would improve conditions for Indigenous Brazilians if elected.
Recognition
Sydney Possuelo has received many awards for his work. These include honors from the National Geographic Society. He also received the Bartolomeu de las Casas award in 1998. The Royal Geographical Society gave him a gold medal. Time Kids Magazine called him a "Hero of the Planet." The United Nations named him "Hero of the year" in 2001.
In his 60 years of work, Brazilian-born Possuelo has made contact with seven tribes that had never previously been exposed to white people, was responsible for demarcating about 15 percent of Brazil’s territory as protected reserves for the indigenous communities, and afterward adopted an opposite – and revolutionary – policy of avoiding contact with those peoples, in order to protect them. With machete in hand and without an academic degree, he became an ethnographer and spent years in the jungles in the company of the native peoples.
For years Possuelo worked for and headed the Department for Isolated Indians in FUNAI, Brazil’s National Indian Bureau. His efforts have made him the foremost authority in the field, a spokesman for the indigenous tribes of the Amazon region and one of the most admired and decorated activists in the world. Without him, dozens of tribes would have become extinct.
Possuelo is the main character in the book The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes. This book was written by National Geographic writer Scott Wallace in 2011. It tells the story of a 76-day trip in 2002. Possuelo led this trip to find out about the "Arrow People." This is an uncontacted tribe living in the Vale do Javari Indigenous Land.
See also
In Spanish: Sydney Possuelo para niños
