Scott Wallace Talks About Exploring the Land of the Arrow People

By Nate Storey

Little is as exciting to people as the idea of the discovery of a long lost uncontacted tribe deep in the jungles of the Amazon.  The image brings to mind such movies as Indiana Jones and The Mummy.  But few people have actually had the opportunity to go on such an expedition.  Scott Wallace is one of those few.  Wallace spoke to Gettysburg College on Monday March 22, describing his expedition into the depths of the Amazon.

Wallace is a photojournalist who, while working for National Geographic was invited to accompany Sidney Possuelo, an officer for the Brazilian government’s Indian Affairs office on an expedition to find the territory boundaries of the mysterious, “uncontacted,” Fleschieros, a group about which so little is actually known that Brazilians don not know what they call themselves, what language they speak, or what ethnicity they are.  Flescheiros is the Spanish name for the group, which translates as “The People of the Arrow,” given to them because of their reputation as being deft archers, willing to defend their territory with the weapons.

Possuelo’s mission, however, as Wallace described, was not to make contact with this group, but to determine the boundaries of their territory so as to create a protection zone to keep the Fleschieros isolated from outsiders.  Wallace explained that Possuelo was worried about the Fleschieros being exposed to Western diseases that they do not have antibodies for, as well as the contamination of the Fleschiero culture with Western problems and concerns.

Wallace spent the majority of his talk showing photographs that he took on the expedition and describing his experience.  Most exciting was a story he told about finding footsteps along a path which they followed, eventually leading them closer and closer to the Fleschiero village.  Two of their porters disappeared and they set out to find them.  This brought them into the village, which they found abandoned, clearly in a rush, as there were smoldering fires, and pots of poison used for arrows and blowpipes hurriedly hidden.  After losing the trail of the missing porters, and fearing the worst, they left the village, and set up a camp a short ways away.  The porters appeared shortly later, telling of hearing screaming and yelling from the Fleschieros somewhere in the jungle nearby, terrifying the porters.

This story was the pinnacle of their long trek through the jungle which lasted almost four months, and included traveling by boat and canoe on the rivers and hiking through the jungle.  Wallace told of eating piranhas, boars, and even monkeys, as the expedition lived off the land.  Wallace answered questions at the end, when he described the experience as life-changing, and was immensely impressed with the opportunity he had to see a view of the “deep past” and that one can still experience the “primordial life” which is “underlying the ephemeral, fast-paced life” of the Western world.

Scott Wallace’s articles can be found on his website, covering a number of topics from all over the world.  He is working on an upcoming book on the subject of the Fleschieros.