Funai indigenists monitor isolated indigenous groups in southern Amazonas through forest traces like tree marks and abandoned campsites. The expedition to the Mamoriá Grande territory highlights efforts to preserve these peoples' voluntary isolation, threatened by diseases and invasions. The STF's recent rejection of the marco temporal bolsters land protection.
In an expedition in southern Amazonas, in the Médio Purus Extractive Reserve, Funai indigenists like Daniel Cangussu and Lucas Mattos, coordinators of the Madeira and Purus Ethno-Environmental Protection Fronts (FPEs), decipher signs left by the isolated Mamoriá Grande indigenous group. These traces include alternating "quebradas" on trails, envira bark strips for ropes and caripé for pottery, plus hammock ties indicating about 60 people in the group spotted in August 2021.
The 2021 encounter, during a patrol, prompted shouts from the isolated people, confirming their existence, but under the Bolsonaro government, Funai denied the group, claiming they were hi-merimã. In February 2025, a young man from the group approached ribeirinhos in Bela Rosa seeking fire, showing signs of acute hunger; he and his family, speakers of a peculiar Arawá language, were monitored from afar.
The no-contact policy, adopted by Funai since the 1980s under Sydney Possuelo, aims to prevent contacts that historically decimated populations, like the panará, reduced from 400 to 60 in two years in the 1970s. Indigenous members like Atxu Marimã, a survivor of family tragedies in the 1980s, and Mandeí Juma from the massacred Juma people, join teams to bolster protection.
"It is essential to demystify misconceptions about isolated indigenous peoples," says Cangussu, author of "Vestígios da Floresta" (2024). Funai recognizes 114 isolated peoples, with 28 confirmed. On December 18, 2025, the STF rejected the marco temporal, which required presence in 1988 — impossible for isolated groups — and ordered Mamoriá Grande's delimitation in 2026, following a September 2024 restriction decree driven by Apib's action.
