“I’ve always loved the forest. I was born there — I lived there. It’s never left my head and it never will.”

Atxu was born in the early 1980s to a large Hi-Merimã family living uncontacted in the Brazilian Amazon. “I have many memories. Of my mum, my dad, my brothers. Running through the woods, playing hide and seek,” Atxu told Survival this year.

But then, rubber-tappers and loggers started appearing in their territory. Atxu’s family tried to avoid them, fleeing deeper into the forest whenever they came near. “The loggers were looking for wood where we lived. We knew for a fact that they had guns. Dad saw them. But he never let them see him. He kept us away so they wouldn’t attack us and kill us. He protected us.”

When he was about seven, his father died in a tragic accident. Without him, and far from their other uncontacted relatives at the time, his family became even more vulnerable. Atxu’s mother was forced to make contact with outsiders.

“The contact…I don't remember the year, but I was very young, still small. After contact, we went through a lot of...very difficult things. My mother wanted to leave, to go back home. But it wasn't possible… she caught the flu. [She and] my aunt died. My baby brother disappeared and to this day nobody knows…It’s a story I don’t like to tell.”

Atxu, still a young child, was taken by a settler family, and enslaved. Given little food and clothing and forced into backbreaking unpaid labor, he was forced to give up his language and culture. “By 12, 13 years old, I no longer spoke my language. I forgot, I stopped speaking it.”

Extractive industries – both legal and illegal – threaten the overwhelming majority of uncontacted Indigenous peoples. Logging is the most widespread danger, threatening two thirds of them. Jack, please help us stop this. The destruction of the world’s most important forests isn’t only a disaster for the environment, it’s deadly for the many thousands of uncontacted people who live in them.

In recent years, Atxu started working for Brazil’s Indigenous Affairs Agency FUNAI.

“The most important thing is not to contact the people but to protect them — just like my land, which is protected. Don’t let the loggers or anyone else into the territory. Let's fight for our land, let's fight for these [uncontacted] people who are threatened all the time. Not for one day or two days, but always.”

Please, lend your voice to support uncontacted peoples. Today, tomorrow and always.

Thank you.