Contact!:
9-12 Classroom Activities

Dwelling in a remote region near Brazil’s borders with Peru and Colombia, the Korubo tribe has long eluded significant contact with people of European ancestry. They have also eluded the misfortunes which often befall indigenous peoples after first contact with outsiders: displacement, impoverishment, erosion of tribal languages and cultures, outbreaks of diseases to which they lack acquired resistance and against which they have never been vaccinated.

For better or worse, the outside world has finally come to the Korubo’s corner of Amazonia. Loggers, lured by the region’s tropical hardwoods, have made illegal poaching forays into Korubo territory. The result: bloodshed on both sides, and a public spotlight one of the last isolated peoples left on earth.

The escalating violence in the jungle drew the attention of Brazil’s media and the Brazilian government. In an expedition echoing themes from Joseph Conrad’s classic novel Heart of Darkness, the Brazilian department of indigenous peoples’ affairs sent an expedition led by Sydney Possuelo far up the Amazon to contact the Korubo, teach them about the outside world, and broker an end to the conflict. Countless such efforts have been launched before in the Americas, dating back to the earliest trans-Atlantic voyages by Europeans. And while the mission is humanitarian, their effort could readily backfire and hasten the Korubo’s demise.

Does the outside world have the right to contact the Korubo? Whatever the answer, the Possuelo expedition has made contact.

Take a Stand

Discuss the many dimensions of the Korubo’s plight and the Brazilian expedition with your class. Ask your students to take and defend a position on whether or not contact was justified. Ask them to share their views with people around the world on our bulletin board about the expedition, or to respond to other postings that they read there. If you teach younger students, you’re welcome and encouraged to summarize the class consensus on the message board!

Draining the Continents

Show your students a map of South America that includes major rivers, such as the one in National Geographic’s Atlas of the World or in one of our online Map Machine atlases. As a group or individually, have them sketch the approximate boundary of the Amazon basin. To do this, they should draw a continuous line from the mouth of the river on the Atlantic coast around all of the Amazon’s tributaries (the rivers that flow into it) and their tributaries, and back to the mouth on the other side. The boundary should not cross any rivers.

Explain to your students that virtually all of the rainfall within the basin either evaporates back into the air or ultimately makes its way back to the Atlantic via the Amazon. Remark on the size of the basin—about three-quarters as large as the contiguous United States—and the volume of water it carries, far more than any other river on earth. To give a sense of the terrain it crosses, note that in the last 2,000 miles (3,226 kilometers) of its length the river only descends about 300 feet (91 meters) in elevation.

A watershed is the area drained by a particular stream or river. The lines that your students draw around the Amazon basin should correspond roughly to watershed divides, which are the boundaries between adjacent watersheds.

Ask your students why they think the Amazon basin’s western margin lies so close to the Pacific, rather than following the center of the continent. Is the river likely to be as gently sloped near its headwaters, where the river originates, as in its lower reaches nearer the river’s mouth?

Ask your students to look at maps of other continents and trace watershed boundaries for the major river systems, such as the Nile and the Congo in Africa or the Mississippi, the Columbia, the Colorado, and the Mackenzie in North America.

River Diary

After your students have explored “Contact!” and the February 1995 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC article “The Amazon: South America’s River Road,” ask them to write an imagined but realistic travel diary relating events on a journey up the Amazon. What would they do to pass the long days and to cope with the mosquitoes?

Speaking the Same Language

Divide your students into one or more paired groups. Let one group pretend to be members of an isolated tribe resembling the Korubo, defensive and suspicious after frictional encounters with a few outsiders, and the other an outside party bent on contacting the tribe. Let the outside party determine in secret whether they wish to be a friendly expedition hoping to protect and study the tribe or a band come to exploit some of the tribe’s resources, such as timber or minerals on tribal lands.

Students in different groups in each pair should pretend they speak different languages and cannot understand words spoken or written by students in the other group. The students must devise some other means of communicating their intentions between groups. Have them decide how they will respond to actions by the other group, such as offerings of gifts, efforts to shake hands, or the display of a possible weapon. After playing out the scenarios your students devise, have them discuss their experiences with the entire class. Were most of their efforts to make contact successful?