Scott Wallace > Quotes

“For all the illusions of freedom our society promotes, rarely do we have the chance to step outside it long enough to gain some distance. Beyond the fatuous talk about liberty and the price our founders paid for it, I wondered: How free were we if we’d become so dependent on the comforts produced by industry that we couldn’t do without them?”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“One official in the state oil company likened the tribes to the Loch Ness monster, a mere figment of the imagination concocted by environmentalists to sabotage Peru’s economic growth. The”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“His intentions were pure, at least he thought so; he wanted to get the Indians to medical care quickly. But the more he thought about it, the more he sensed an underlying, unconscious arrogance in his own gesture: See? Our way is so much better than yours. He’d unwittingly begun the assault on the Guajá’s values and identity that plagued every tribe following contact. Such incidents ended up haunting many sertanistas to their dying days, Possuelo said; trying to save the Indians, they’d succeeded in hastening their demise.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“In another time and place, the Texeiras would have been hailed as model citizens, environmental stewards, exactly the kind of decent, hardworking settlers an Ohio-born nun named Dorothy Stang was organizing farther east in the state of Pará to resist powerful ranchers who were razing the forest to plant pastureland for their cattle, a crusade for which she would eventually pay with her life.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“Within one hundred years of the establishment of the Jamestown colony in 1607, settlers were well on the way to eliminating the ancient eastern woodlands of North America in what was to become the largest and most rapid deforestation in human history, until the current industrial-scale assault on the world’s tropical rainforests.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“Whatever its faults, and there were many, the system of identification, protection, and vigilance Possuelo had put in place was making a difference. The number of uncontacted tribes whose existence the department had confirmed had grown to twenty-six, and the department continued to uncover and compile evidence of previously unknown groups of wild Indians. But”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“Most important, as far as Possuelo was concerned, they appeared to be thriving in every way. Isolation, far from strangling them, had made them strong. For Possuelo, this is what victory looked like: the Arrow People, holding forth in the Parallel Realm. Uncontacted. Untamed. Unconquered. Still,”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“The white presence, ipso facto, was a threat. Did”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“All too often, scientific inquiry served to bolster the domination of the privileged few over the many.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“As long as they had streams unsullied by mercury and sprawling woodlands rich with animals, they could remain beyond our reach, beyond the swirling vortex of consumer society and the machinery that manufactures our wants, creates our needs, serves us our ice-cold beer.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“Like the rest of her people, back then she’d thought that the whites were but a handful, and she proposed wiping them out once and for all.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“The equating of primitive culture with backwardness has been so ingrained in the popular mind that even so-called civilized Indians on the lowest, most marginal rungs of society invariably believe themselves to be superior to their isolated brethren who remain in the bush.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“he subscribed to the notion that, given an equal chance, Indians could flourish alongside their fellow citizens as full-fledged members of society. The problem was, the cards were stacked against the Indians; there was no such thing as an equal chance.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“In any case, the idea wasn’t to cordon the Indians off forever from the outside world; it was to allow them to choose if and when they wanted contact.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“More of the Amazon Basin had been leveled and burned in the past fifty years than in the previous five centuries combined, as ranchers, growers, and timber barons threatened or bribed their way to industrial-scale devastation.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“The most dangerous men are the ones who don’t confront you directly. They talk behind your back and sow discontent.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“One-quarter of all prescription drugs have their origins in tropical rainforests, owing in large measure to the elaborate defenses their plants and animals (most notably frogs) have evolved to ward off a multitude of would-be predators.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“What enabled tribes to prosper in isolation from the global economy was a healthy and intact environment from which they derived their livelihood. In protecting the isolated tribes, as Possuelo had said, he was protecting enormous stretches of primeval forest.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“It was a disarming gesture of kindness,”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“They need to get organized and understand the importance of protecting this.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“The isolation, even from other tribes, appears to be a relatively recent phenomenon, born of the violent imposition of the White Intruder.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“human beings were a part of the complex system of interactions among living organisms that made up an ecosystem, rather than apart from it or opposed to it, that people actually had a role in equilibrating that system, rather than destroying it.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“Within sixty years of Columbus’s landfall, the Taino were extinct, reduced to zero from a population that modern demographic studies indicate may have been as high as eight million. In that regard, how a tribe has come to possess a knife or a machete—or even a rifle—would reveal more about its degree of contact with the outside world than the mere fact of its possession.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“The white man brings problems, never solutions,”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“the early chroniclers, see what they say. They all remark on the kindness of the natives.” But for all their kindness, the Indians were fleeced, bullied, massacred. Some”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“After all, they were as yet unpacified, and anthropologists generally were not in the business of beating the bush in search of hostile indigenes. Scientists typically entered well after first contact had been made, once a modicum of security had been established in which to conduct research.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“Without definitive expulsion of all the whites, violence would erupt again; it was just a matter of time. History had demonstrated graphically enough, on the Upper Amazon and elsewhere throughout the Americas, that a single well-organized reprisal raid could obliterate a whole village, wipe out the last remnants of an entire tribe, and no one on the outside would even be the wiser. All screams were smothered, all evidence was snuffed out, in the vast depths of the jungle.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“counting their 4 percent share as they drilled away at the riverbank and leached out the gold into dull yellow cakes”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“he hoped the sheer isolation would keep most intruders from venturing in this direction. That, and the willingness of the Indians to defend what was theirs. But that was more problematic.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

“You know, Indians don’t attack whites just because they like to or because it’s their nature,” Possuelo said, imparting a quick civics lesson. “They do it because, in the past, whites burned their villages and razed their crops. They’d kill the Indians that didn’t get away.”
― Scott Wallace, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes