Cristina Rocha: colonialism is alive and well on television

Associate professor Cristina Rocha

Sunday Night on Channel Seven portrayed white people meeting an allegedly “lost tribe” living in the “stone age”. In fact, the tribe had been contacted in the early 1980s and live in a reserve managed by the Brazilian government.

In true 16th century first-contact fashion, the journalists gave the Suruwaha Amazonian Indians trinkets and mirrors, mesmerising them with technology. Like centuries-old colonialists, they claimed this “primitive” tribe killed their own disabled children, and so they were the “worst human rights violators in the world”. The audience could almost hear them ruling: “They have no soul!”

Long ago, anthropologists did a mea culpa for their work with colonial empires. But some TV journalists and adventurers can’t get enough of the “barbarian savage”. This is not simply harmless fun – television is serious business, just as the former colonials empires were.

As a Brazilian anthropologist who has lived in Australia for the past 15 years, I can see parallels between how Europeans have dealt with Indigenous Brazilians and Indigenous Australians. The strategies of removing Indigenous children, cultural assimilation, expelling traditional owners from their land to open it for agriculture and mining, are common in both contexts.

Why did Channel Seven not consult anthropologists who have studied this tribe? Why not use what professional researchers have written in putting together the story? The likely answer is the one reached by Survival International and now the Australian Communications and Media Authority (Acma): racism.

As much of the western world start to acknowledge the value of traditional indigenous cultures, Channel Seven has drawn on tired stereotypes of savagery. It is comforting that Acma has decided it is not acceptable to denigrate other cultures so blatantly any more.

Cristina Rocha is an associate professor and ARC future fellow at the religion and society research centre, University of Western Sydney

Scott Wallace: reporters, turn a critical eye on yourselves

Journalist Scott Wallace

I think it’s a shame that two otherwise talented journalists would lend themselves to this simplistic, sensationalistic, and inaccurate story.

I am guessing that video journalist Tim Noonan had never set foot in the Amazon before this journey and was therefore easily caught up in the myth of stone age tribal savages. I was more surprised by Paul Raffaele’s active participation in a project that perpetuates a racist viewpoint and a presumption that our advanced technology also makes us morally superior to the isolated tribes of the Amazon.

Tribes such as the Suruwaha have evolved physiologically and socially over the millennia in a manner that has allowed them to prosper in one of the world’s most extreme, forbidding habitats. The producers made no effort to place the Suruwaha practice of occasional infanticide in that context.

Having written extensively on the Amazon rainforest and the struggles of its indigenous peoples, I have learned that you must always dig beneath the surface to find the truth. If I’m not careful, my own cultural prejudices can limit my perceptions in ways I may not even be aware of.

While it is tempting to presume a certain worldliness and superiority over traditional tribal cultures, they know many things that we do not, like how to exploit the resources of the rainforest without destroying it. It’s always a challenge to report accurately on people and places that are removed or different from ourselves and our world. I believe the reporters in this instance failed to turn a critical eye on themselves and their own motivations for doing this story.

Why did they not reveal, for example, that an evangelical missionary group has been trying to proselytise the Suruwaha and that the missionaries had been in conflict with the Brazilian government over the tribal practice of infanticide? The question posed at the end of the report could then have been more meaningful: do we have the right to intervene in the internal affairs of a traditional culture that has managed to endure through the millennia?

Scott Wallace is author of The Unconquered: in Search of the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes and a Ted Scripps fellow in environmental journalism at the University of Colorado-Boulder

Jonathan Mazower: it’s time to move on from circus freak shows

Campaigner Jonathan Mazower

Channel Seven’s report on the Suruwaha Indians was probably the worst example of a phenomenon Survival International has labelled “freak show TV”, in which contemporary tribal peoples are portrayed as backward, primitive grotesques for the amusement of western audiences – the reality TV equivalent of circus freak shows.

What made this report even worse was that it represented a massive betrayal of the Suruwaha, who had been (and still are) under attack by evangelical missionaries in Brazil for several years. The missionaries falsely accuse the Suruwaha of regularly killing their newborn children (it’s hard to think of a more incendiary charge), and are campaigning in Brazilian Congress to pass a law that would allow any indigenous child in the country to be forcibly removed from its family if deemed to be at risk.

If you think this sounds like Australia’s stolen generations all over again, you’re absolutely right. Channel Seven gained access to the Suruwaha by promising to present a fair portrayal of their tribe. Was the reality – a society where children are loved and cared for – not sensational enough for primetime TV?

We discussed the report with the Suruwaha, who were unsurprisingly very angry at being portrayed as child-killing monsters, and complained to Acma when Channel Seven refused to correct its report. We’ve also produced a set of guidelines for TV crews working with indigenous peoples. I’d like to think this precedent might dissuade other TV companies from producing similar rubbish in the future, but I’m not holding my breath.

Jonathan Mazower is the advocacy director of Survival International

Nicholas Spiers: documentaries should be about dialogue

Documentary filmmaker Nicholas Spiers

Channel Seven’s depiction of the Suruwaha was sensationalist TV. It denied the members of the Suruwaha community any autonomy or actuality by exploiting the colonial trope of the savage, lost in space and time, static, infantile, and sinister.



My personal experience of working with indigenous communities and ethnographic film projects in Brazil has taught me that even with the best intentions, the audiovisual representation of cultures different from your own poses a lot of ethical challenges.

To begin to deal with these, participants in a documentary have to be active participants, contributing to and overseeing the development of their own representation at all stages of the filmmaking process. Misguided attempts to portray a culture in its entirety should be substituted for something achievable, such as the exploration of a particular social phenomenon or sensory encounters.

The potential pitfalls of documentary filmmaking, as illustrated in Channel Seven’s piece, exist alongside an enormous potential. Our artistic responsibilities require the creative incorporation of ethical questions into the film itself, along with a continuous challenging of the medium’s conventions.

In this way, documentary film can represent an exciting dialogue between cultures, rather than reproducing the exploitation of one over the other.

Nicholas Spiers is a documentary filmmaker interested in emancipatory movements in Brazil and Mexico