Korubo
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The Korubo or head clunkers, are among many indigenous peoples of Brazil. This tribe lives in the Amazon River Basin in Brazil.
[edit] Contacts with the tribes
Among local people they are often referred to as "caceteiros" which was wrongly translated by a French journalist as "headsmashers" because of the similarity to the French word "casse-tête". "Caceteiro" however, literally means only "clubber" or "man with a club" referring to their arms, just as the neighbouring isolated people called "Flecheiros" are simply "archers", also referring to the arms they use.
They are commonly referred to as "Korubo" although this is not the name they have given themselves. In fact "Korubo" is a degrading, negative label given by a former enemy tribe and later adopted as a tribal designation by the outside world.
A dispute between a small group of about 20 members and the main tribe (population figures unknown but estimated from arial reconnaissance of houses to a few hundred individuals) caused the two bands to separate. The main tribe is for the time being in complete isolation whereas the the smaller band of Korubo have frequent interaction with neighbouring settlements and FUNAI employees.
A first peaceful contact in 1972 ended tragically and over the following decades Brazil's FUNAI agency lost seven civil servants in attempts to establish a peaceful relation with them. This finally occurred in 1996.
National Geographic Magazine wrote an article about them in its August 2003 edition called After First Contact. More recently, The Smithsonian wrote an article about the same tribe called Out of Time in its April 2005 edition.[1]
The Korubo are one of the last peoples on Earth to live in near isolation from modern day society although they have on numerous occasions had violent contact with the surrounding communities. Many other tribes in the Amazon have been contacted in the last quarter century and have adopted a more modern life, even though they retain aspects of their own culture.
[edit] Culture of the tribe and FUNAI's involvement with the tribe
Much is unknown about these people, because of FUNAI's refusal to let anthropologists study the group. After a long history from the 1950s of massacres of this indigenous people a special department of FUNAI organized an expedition in 1996 to establish a first peaceful contact with them. The korubo in the past have killed trespassers on their land and the latest incident occurred year 2000, when Korubo warriors killed three lumbermen near the Indian Reservation. FUNAI helps the Korubo by giving them modern immunization shots and checking up on them often. FUNAI also established a national park that encompasses the korubo's land in order to stop logging in the area. Their goal is to prevent further contact with the tribe by modern society in order to preserve their way of life for several more years. The Korubo eat a diet of corn and meat from peccary and monkeys. Both men and women paint themselves with a red dye from the roucou plant. The small splinter group of tribe is dominated by a middle age woman named Maya.it:Korubo
