Does Discovery broadcast fakery about indigenous peoples as well as sharks?

George Monbiot’s articles for the Guardian about Discovery Channel possibly faking an image of a giant shark, among other things, reminded me of the scandal several years ago when a TV crew was accused of bringing a fatal epidemic to indigenous people in Peru’s Amazon. The crew, from the London-based, now defunct Cicada Productions, was scouting for a location to shoot a film series for Discovery, according to its requests to enter Manu National Park and a radiogram from the head of a Matsigenka community inside the park, Yomibato, to the park director. Previous series had been called “World’s Lost Tribes” – an inaccurate, arguably offensive title – with one about the Kombais in West Papua shown on Discovery in 2007, and another, about the Meks in West Papua, shown on Discovery in 2008.

After arriving in Yomibato, in a remote part of Manu, the Cicada crew was disappointed at how “Westernized” the Matsigenkas were, according to anthropologist Glenn Shepard. In an interview in Anthropology News Shepard – who was in Yomibato at the same time and is one of the world’s leading experts on Matsigenka society and culture – said:

[They] said they had come to scout filming opportunities for a sequel to Mark Anstice and Oliver Steeds’s reality series Living with the Kombai. [One of Cicada’s crew] was disappointed by the Western trappings in the community of Yomibato. “The shorts, the guys playing soccer, the school house – that just won’t cut it with Mark and Ollie,” he said. He had heard of other communities further upriver where people wear traditional clothes and don’t speak Spanish, and was planning to travel there the next day.

According to a report by Cicada and Matsigenkas later interviewed by Shepard and indigenous organization FENAMAD, the crew travelled further upriver to visit even more remote Matsigenkas. Both Shepard and FENAMAD claimed that this decision was taken despite Cicada’s permit from the park authorities allowing them to travel no further than Yomibato and specifically prohibiting them from making contact with such people, who have very little contact with “outsiders” and therefore are extremely vulnerable to disease transmission. The permit read:

At the request of CICADA PRODUCTIONS and at the invitation of the Native Community of Yomybato, [the people listed above] are authorised to enter the Manu National Park as far as the Native Community of Yomybato with the aim of evaluating the possibility of including said community in a TV documentary. . . You agree to. . . not establish contact with uncontacted indigenous peoples or those in initial contact.

Cicada made its trip, then left Manu altogether. Soon after, a Matsigenka man, Kian-Kian (or “Kea-Kea”), travelled downriver to Yomibato and said that four people had died, linking it directly to the crew’s visit. The deaths were subsequently recorded by Dr Wilfredo Huamani Oblitas, from the Health Ministry, who visited Yomibato and reported fatalities and an epidemic affecting about 80 people.

“[Yomibato residents] said that two weeks before they [the Matsigenkas upriver] had been visited by a group of foreigners from the Discovery Channel who had respiratory problems, and that the four died as a result of respiratory disorders,” the doctor wrote to the park director.

Huamani Oblitas also reported that Cicada failed “to comply with its permit”, and after his report was sent by the park director to the head of the National Institute of Natural Resources (INRENA), INRENA’s head repeated that claim in a letter to the government institution then responsible for indigenous peoples, INDEPA. When FENAMAD learnt that Cicada was planning on returning to Manu, despite all this, it issued a public statement accusing the crew of provoking a flu epidemic causing the deaths of several people. FENAMAD’s accusations – as well as Cicada’s response, denying responsibility – were publicized by NGO Survival International, where I worked at the time, and generated considerable media coverage. Cicada’s denials included:

We emphatically deny being responsible of [sic] the introduction of the reported respiratory diseases, since when we arrived we found local people already ill with symptoms and signs of respiratory disease, in the settlements we visited. . . The accusations made do not tally with the facts, as we never entered the headwaters, we were not in the locality quoted at any time and certainly not at the time of any outbreak and, in any case, there has been no officially reported outbreak.

FENAMAD also argued, in a subsequent report, that Cicada had long thought of travelling beyond Yomibato. In fact, FENAMAD claimed that Cicada was even thinking of dressing the Matsigenkas upriver from Yomibato in case not even they looked like the TV crew wanted them to:

[The film] would require more isolated groups with a minimum presence of “non-indigenous” cultural and material elements. The interest of the Cicada film crew in the “purity” of the indigenous people is revealed by its concern about the “aesthetic” aspects it would want to film. According to what they told us in Yomibato, the crew had proposed that they could provide “cushmas” [long, robe-like garments] to dress the people in the headwaters for the next filming. Given the reluctance of the community to do so, the film crew said that in that case it would bring “cushmas” from Ucayali.

None of this – the deaths, the epidemic, the accusations, the media coverage, a ban on entering Manu and a report by FENAMAD to the UK’s Association of Social Anthropologists, among other things – deterred Cicada from eventually shooting its film, with other Matsigenkas, in another watershed. The result was eight programs with plenty of pejorative nonsense about the Matsigenkas, misleading assertions, mistranslations, distortions, and so many unlikely things happening that Cicada was accused of “staging” whole scenes and story-lines. Ron Snell, an American who grew up in Matsigenka territory and whose parents have worked with the Matsigenkas for more than 50 years, wrote on his blog:

This series is so totally out of whack that it’s hard to imagine anyone taking it seriously. Our response was, “How did they get the Machiguengas to do so many things that are completely out of character and so contrary to their culture?” . . . No Machiguenga that we have ever known would have let Olly sleep outside the “hut”. . . No Machiguenga would have punished them by having them chew manioc to make masato. . . How did they get all of the Machiguengas to dress up in white cushmas (robes) when they almost never wore that style of cushma for everyday use? . . . How did they produce the wild pig dance, which we have never seen in 35 years of living in Machiguenga villages? . . . About all we could conclude is that they paid the Machiguengas to perform for them, saying things the Machis wouldn’t ordinarily say and doing things the Machis wouldn’t normally do.

Snell later spoke to two Matsigenkas involved in the production and heard that:

[The Cicada team] entered the village on a well-travelled path and only veered a few feet off the path to film themselves “hacking their way through the jungle.” They contracted someone to make new cushmas so everyone would be wearing one. They staged the whole drama about one of the guys being accepted and the other being treated as a lazy outsider. Since they couldn’t get to the Pongo [de Mainique, a dangerous canyon] by balsa raft, they used a motorboat to get there.

Responses by Shepard – on his blog and in an Anthropology News article – were also damning, describing the “program [as] rife with egregious mistranslations and outright falsifications”, and stating it is “inconceivable [the Matsigenkas] would subject foreign visitors to the initiation trials portrayed in the show.” The alleged mistranslations include one man’s remark, “I will have sex another day” subtitled as “I have sex every day”; “You come from far away where lots of gringos live” subtitled as “We use arrows to kill outsiders who threaten us”; and the suggestion that a woman with an unwell new-born child is considering killing it.

“The subtitles are sometimes correct, sometimes partially correct, and mostly very misleading,” Snell writes. “One section involved “conversations” with all kinds of sexual innuendos about these guys coming without wives, and blah blah blah. Don’t believe a word of it.”

Another example of distortion is the description of the Matsigenkas as “the most elusive tribe of the Amazon.” How best to illustrate just how preposterous that claim is? Perhaps by pointing out that there have been missionaries among the Matsigenkas for 100s of years, and that intense colonization, logging, and oil and gas exploration – including by Big Oil companies like Shell, Mobil, Total and Chevron – have taken place there for decades. Or that Peru’s biggest energy development, the Camisea gas project, has been in Matsigenka territories since the early 1980s, near where Cicada filmed, bringing jobs and income for some but disastrous social and environmental impacts too. Or that the Education Ministry set up bilingual schools for the Matsigenkas in the 1950s. Or that of the more than 60 indigenous peoples in Peru, the Matsigenkas are actually one of the most well-known, most researched, most written about. Indeed, Snell’s mother, Betty, wrote a paper on Matsigenka grammar published in 1963, the New Testament was translated into Matsigenka by the 1970s, and scores of other books, articles and reports have been written about them.

Mark and Olly: Living with the Machigenga was shown on The Travel Channel in 2009 and BBC Knowledge in 2010, leading to condemnation by Survival, the publicizing of Snell’s and Shepard’s reactions, and responses from Cicada’s former managing director and The Travel Channel defending it. According to Broadcast, the latter stated that the translations were “provided by the Machigenga translator engaged by Cicada, without any alteration by Cicada”, and “[a]ll traditions and rituals portrayed in the programme are those represented by the Machigenga to Cicada as being part of their heritage, without any exaggeration.” About the cushmas in particular, they were reported to state:

As the aim of the programme was to depict the hosts immersing themselves in the traditional lifestyle of the Machigenga, Cicada desired the villagers to wear their traditional dress while on camera. Because of the wear-and-tear on the villagers’ own traditional clothing that would result from four months of continuous wear, and because such tunics are not inexpensive, Cicada provided the villagers with tunics to wear during filming.

Discovery World also broadcast the show, in 2011, according to Discovery Networks Western Europe’s Senior Publicity Manager Caroline Watt. Four questions worth asking are: 1) Was no one at Discovery World aware of the scandal surrounding shooting the film, including the crew’s use of Discovery’s name to obtain the permit which it was subsequently accused of violating? 2) Was no one at Discovery World aware of the letter sent by Survival to Discovery Communications’ founder and then chairman about the “enormous controversy” caused in Manu, and asking “if, in the future, the Discovery Channel intends to broadcast programmes produced by Cicada”? 3) Doesn’t Discovery have a mechanism to ensure it avoids broadcasting programs that i) are shot involving scandal or ii) feature distortion and pejorative nonsense? 4) What – dare I say it – might this suggest about the two previous series about the Meks and the Kombais?

I put the first three of those questions to Watt. Her response: “We did not make the show.”

This happened a few years ago now – Cicada entered Manu in late 2007 – but it’s no less relevant today. You can buy Living with the Machigenga on DVD, and distorted, pejorative representations of indigenous peoples frequently appear on TV, in cinemas, in newspapers, and on the internet. To give just one topical, Peruvian example: a TV program called La Paisana Jacinta which takes the piss out of women from the Andes and was severely criticised by the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) in Geneva last month.

““Your Mum is Jacinta,” they say,” CERD’s president, Francisco Cali, was reported saying by indigenous organization CHIRAPAQ about how children of Andean women are being bullied in school. “What [Jacinta] is creating is a very negative idea in Peruvian society about indigenous women, mainly Quechuas and Aymaras.”

Ditto Cicada’s series about the Matsigenkas – only the audience is global and men are involved too.