Amazonian Indian

Indigenous inhabitants of the Amazon River Basin in South America. The majority of the societies are kin-based; traditional livelihood includes hunting and gathering, fishing, and shifting cultivation. A wide range of indigenous languages are spoken. Numbering perhaps 2.5 million in the 16th century, they had been reduced to perhaps one-tenth of that number by the 1820s. Their rainforests are being destroyed for mining and ranching, and they are being killed, transported, or assimilated. In June 1998 a previously unknown tribe of about 200 hunters and gatherers was discovered in Brazil's Amazon rainforest.