When pho­tographs of an uncon­tacted and unknown Brazil­ian tribe were released in May 2008, the world went a bit nutty with the pho­tographs mak­ing front pages everywhere.

Now, how­ever, it seems the story was quite dif­fer­ent to what was reported.

The pho­tos of grass-roofed shel­ters and hos­tile, body-painted Indi­ans bran­dish­ing bows and arrows spread like brush­fire around the globe. Sur­vival Inter­na­tional, an indige­nous rights advo­cacy group, described the group as “uncon­tacted,” sum­mon­ing cel­lu­loid fan­tasies of lost sav­ages who had never seen civ­i­liza­tion. Reporters began to describe them as “Earth’s last uncon­tacted tribe” who reacted vio­lently to the “bird god” in the sky. But then the story col­lapsed. Meirelles stated in an inter­view that he had been fol­low­ing the group for two decades. The tribe was nei­ther lost nor undis­cov­ered — the out­side world had known of them since 1910. It should have been clear from the begin­ning; the ini­tial Por­tuguese reports never claimed the group was “uncon­tacted.” Intro­duced by sloppy report­ing, this error fanned sus­pi­cions that the pho­tos were just a hoax.

The cru­cial issue raised by these pho­tos of a remote group iso­lated from our soci­ety is not whether, in an age of world­wide con­nec­tiv­ity, sur­veil­lance satel­lites, and explo­sive pop­u­la­tion growth, we might still have undis­cov­ered neigh­bors on a shrink­ing globe — we don’t. In fact, one of Meirelles’s friends first noticed the clear­ing where the tribe was found while brows­ing Google Earth. In truth, our reac­tions to and per­cep­tions of these peo­ple reveal far more about us than about them. We eas­ily believe that a band of hos­tile Indi­ans con­fronting an air­plane from a clear­ing do so out of igno­rance and fear. But the likely truth is harder to face: The tribe might have threat­ened the observers pre­cisely because they had encoun­tered some of the worst aspects of our cul­ture before, and suf­fered griev­ously. These images of a peo­ple coura­geously stand­ing against us are not sym­bols of their igno­rance, but of ours.