The way the world is these days, it’s getting harder and harder for previously untouched people to continue living the way they have for millennia.
Whatever you think about their lives and choices, it is ultimately their decision stay removed from modern life.
At least, it used to be before we removed the resources they need to survive.
The Hongana Manyawa people of Indonesia are being threatened by nickel mining in the area, which has increased due to the demand for electric car batteries.
Recently, a video surfaced that shows some of them approaching those miners and asking for food.
Survival International shared the video, accompanied by a grave statement to IFLScience.
“We don’t know if or how long they will survive after the encounter. They could have contracted any number of diseases which are deadly to them. Or they may starve – the reason they came out of their territory is because their shrinking territory cannot feed them.”
Hongana Manyawa means “People of the Forest,” and they live on the island of Halmahera. One of the last nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes in Indonesia, they number between 300-500 uncontacted members.
Around 3,000 of their people were contacted in the 1980s and maintain some level of contact with the outside world today.
The nickel mining that is currently taking place will likely only increase in the future, so their situation is considered dire.
And although some want to claim the video shows a tribe desiring to make contact, officials with Survival International say that’s simply not true.
A spokesperson for the tribe says they are starving after the decimation of their ancestral rainforest was cleared for mining.
Weda Bay Nickel, partly owned by French mining company Eramet, began mining on the island in 2019 and plans to increase those efforts in the future.
One of Indonesia’s top politicians, AA LaNyalla Mahmud Mattalitti, has asked the government to protect the Hongana Manyawa people, and for Halmahera’s North Maluku government to take another look at the regulations around mining in the area.
Callum Russell, Asia Research and Advocacy Officer at Survival International, says he doubts they can count on mining companies or governments to do the right thing.
“Eramet – if you can imagine such an oxymoronic thing – sees themselves the Greta Thunberg of mining companies. They think they’re the good guys who are mining for electric car batteries. It’s a deep irony that these people literally call themselves Hongana Manyawa – ‘People of the Forest’ – and yet they’re the ones being destroyed in the name of the green transition.”
It’s a sad picture of the current state of affairs.
I don’t know about you, but it’s definitely hard to have hope that the people in charge will do the right thing.
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