Meanwhile, Chief Surui is lobbying for donations of computers and other equipment from companies or non-profit groups and hopes to persuade the Brazilian government to include his tribe in a new program to provide Indians with satellite Internet connections.
The tribe has already proven its technological prowess, creating sophisticated maps of the reservation after receiving handheld Global Positioning System devices and laptop computers from the Amazon Conservation Team.
"We gave them GPS and told them how to use it and they took it from there," said the group's president, Mark Plotkin.
About 400,000 Brazilian Indians still live on reservations, the majority of them in the Amazon rain forest.
Indian reservations are among the best preserved areas of the 4.1 million-square-kilometer Amazon region, which has lost about 20 percent of its forest cover to loggers and ranchers in recent years.
RSS