A M A Z O N R A I N F O R E S T

Amazon Rainforest

Matses were a tribe or Jaguar people that lived along the Javari river in the remote areas of the Amazon Rainforest in Peru and Brazil. In the early 1990s, the Matses were not interested in money because they had little access to shop in their remote area of the Amazon Rainforest. Matses lived a different lifestyle, On hunting wild games, such as the peccary and tapir with bows and arrows and fishing as their primary food source, farming crops such as sweet plantain and manioc, and the collection of wild foods. To Matses, plants and animals have spirits just as humans do, and can ail or heal a human body. In the last thirty years, Matses have become a largely settled people, living mostly in permanent forest settlements. They started to contact with the outsiders, missionaries encourage assimilation into a modern culture so that they could improve access to trade goods and they started to began living in larger, fixed, super nucleated villages along the rivers. Now Matses are starting to be involved in the sustainable harvesting and marketing of natural products. They are harvesting renewable and valuable tree resins, such as copaiba and Sangre de Grado, they can earn money they need but be free of destructive and dangerous forestry jobs.