Sydney Possuelo facts for kids
Sydney Ferreira Possuelo (born April 19, 1940) is a Brazilian explorer and activist. He is known as a leading expert on the isolated Indigenous (native) peoples of Brazil. He has dedicated his life to protecting these groups and their lands in the Amazon rainforest.
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Life and Work
Sydney Possuelo began his career helping the famous Villas Boas brothers. They worked with Indigenous communities in the Xingu River area.
In the late 1980s, Possuelo played a key role in helping the Arara (Para) people. Conflict had started between the Arara and workers building the Trans-Amazonian Highway. The Arara people became sick with diseases from outside their community. This caused big problems for them. Sydney Possuelo saw that the old way of trying to make isolated tribes join modern society was not working well.
Because of this, Possuelo worked with other officials at FUNAI. FUNAI is Brazil's agency for Indigenous affairs. With their help, he successfully pushed for a new department. This was the Department of Indigenous in Isolation. He became its first director in 1987.
This new department helped to double the size of protected Indigenous land in Brazil. This happened over the next two years.
Protecting Isolated Tribes
Possuelo has led many trips into the most remote parts of the Amazon region. He has met or learned about many isolated tribes in Brazil. His main goal was always to protect them from outsiders.
For example, he helped bring peace with the Korubo Indians. This tribe had previously had conflicts with FUNAI officials.
On January 24, 2006, Possuelo was removed from his role at FUNAI. Days before, he had spoken out against the FUNAI director. He felt the director was not protecting Indigenous lands enough.
Today, Possuelo continues his work to defend isolated tribes. He does this through a non-government group called Instituto Indigenista Interamericano.
Activism and Views
In an interview in 2022, Possuelo shared his concerns about how Indigenous lands were being managed. He said that illegal invasions of these lands had increased. He felt that Indigenous people were facing a very difficult time in Brazil's history.
He also shared his hopes for the future. He believed that if Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was elected president, conditions for Indigenous Brazilians would improve.
Awards and Recognition
Sydney Possuelo has received many awards for his efforts. 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 also a main character in the book The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes. This book was written in 2011 by Scott Wallace. It tells the story of a 76-day trip in 2002. Possuelo led this trip to check on the "Arrow People." This is an uncontacted tribe living in the Vale do Javari Indigenous Land.
See also
In Spanish: Sydney Possuelo para niños
