The Ka'apor are an

indigenous people Indigenous peoples are culturally distinct ethnic groups whose members are directly descended from the earliest known inhabitants of a particular geographic region and, to some extent, maintain the language and culture of those original people ...

Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...

. They live on a protected reserve in the state of

Maranhão Maranhão () is a state in Brazil. Located in the country's Northeast Region, it has a population of about 7 million and an area of . Clockwise from north, it borders on the Atlantic Ocean for 2,243 km and the states of Piauí, Tocantins and ...

. They were the subject of a book by anthropologist Dr.

William Balée William Balée (born 1954) is a professor of anthropology at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and educated at the University of Florida, Gainesville, where he received a B.A. in Anthropology bef ...

in an exhaustive study of their ethnobotany lifeways and the

historical ecology Historical ecology is a research program that focuses on the interactions between humans and their environment over long-term periods of time, typically over the course of centuries. In order to carry out this work, historical ecologists synthesiz ...

of the area they currently inhabit. They live in a heavily deforested area of Pre-Amazonian forest, but have managed to protect the forest within their designated reserve. There is a high degree of congenital deafness among the Ka'apor, and consequently most of the hearing community knows

sign language Sign languages (also known as signed languages) are languages that use the visual-manual modality to convey meaning, instead of spoken words. Sign languages are expressed through manual articulation in combination with non-manual markers. Sign l ...

. (See

Ka'apor Sign Language Ka'apor Sign Language (also known as Urubu Sign Language or Urubu–Ka'apor Sign Language, although these are pejorative) was a village sign language used by the small community of Ka'apor people in the Brazilian state of Maranhão. Linguist Jim ...

.) Their forest reserve is under attack from illegal loggers, and in September 2014 the tribe took matters into their own hands when they attacked a group of loggers, tying them up, humiliating them before destroying the logs that had been extracted from the forest and burning the logger's lorry, before eventually setting them free.

Notes

References

*Balée, William 1994 ''Footprints of the Forest: Ka’apor Ethnobotany—the Historical Ecology of Plant Utilization by an Amazonian People.'' New York: Columbia University Press.
Ka'apor warriors in the Amazon confront illegal loggers
The Telegraph Indigenous peoples in Brazil Indigenous peoples of the Amazon {{Brazil-ethno-group-stub