Deep in the heart of the Amazon rainforest is a tribe of three sisters. The only single man was killed by a jaguar and when the women’s father, Aruká, the chief of the Juma people, died of Covid in 2021, most people assumed that was the end of the tribe.

The New York Times ran an obituary for what it said was “the last man of the tribe” and when Boreá Juma, the eldest sister, assumed the chiefdom and spoke at a meeting of local indigenous leaders, she was shouted down. “Your tribe is extinct!” she was told.

“They don’t listen to us because we are few and we are women,” she said.

But the sisters — Boreá, 44, Maytá, 41, and Mandei, 37 — are fighting back. They are doing all they can to ensure not only the survival of the Juma people but also other endangered tribes, including those who have no contact with the outside world, and the forest itself. Mandei said: “Tribes like ours are the best protectors of the forest against those who would destroy it, and our survival is crucial.”

Government officials from around the world (though not the Trump administration) will gather in the Amazonian city of Belem this week for Cop30, the United Nations climate conference, where ending global deforestation is one of the key pledges to reduce carbon emissions and a tropical forest fund will be launched.

The threats are all too evident on the journey to visit the Juma sisters. Their territory in the southwest Amazon is part of the so-called arc of deforestation — a hotspot of what is known as grilagem or land-grabbing by ranchers, soya farmers and illegal loggers.

Deforestation surrounds the Juma territory

GABRIEL UCHIDA FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES

Many areas along the road have been stripped of virgin forest for white cattle to graze. On the muddy brown waters of the Madeira River flowing through the nearest small town of Humaita floats a cluster of wooden barge contraptions that look like something out of Mad Max. These are illegal gold dredgers; many were burnt out after a recent police operation to destroy them, but people are already working to restore them. At nearby hotels-by-the-hour and nightclubs, bills are paid in grams of gold, but it is not the workers on the dredges who make the real money but the owners — drug lords from cocaine smuggling gangs.

The goldmining dredges that line the banks of the Madeira River

GABRIEL UCHIDA FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES

After a bumpy 90 minutes on the red mud Transamazonica highway, we came to the bank of the Assuã River where the two younger sisters were waiting with their boat.

The boat putt-putted through dense forest, layers of green, with the occasional flash of colour from birds. A sign warns that this is protected indigenous area — 38,000 square hectares belong to this tiny tribe.

Maytá Juma and Erowak Uru Eu Wau Wau travel the Assuã River

GABRIEL UCHIDA FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES

After an hour we came to a stop and clambered up the muddy bank to the one street settlement, a small pack of dogs in tow. The visit began alarmingly as I followed the women into the malocca, an open structure with a high thatched roof strung with hammocks that functioned as an eating and gathering place. There, they threw themselves on to the earth and wailed. It was the spot where they had buried their father and any time a newcomer visits they must grieve.

We sat at a wooden table where they told me the story of the decimation of their tribe. Mandei, who speaks the best Portuguese, said: “We were once a very numerous people, more than 15,000. But diseases brought in by European colonisers and missionaries saw many killed.”

Then in the 1960s there was a massacre by rubber-tappers. “My father and uncle had gone hunting when they came across a group of *brancos *[white people]. They did not want conflict but they were scared and fired arrows at them. The rubber-tappers came back, helped by two other tribes, the Mura and Apurina, and said, ‘We will finish with Juma people’. They not only killed but slaughtered them, cut bodies into pieces and left them on the path. My father and uncle were both shot but were among the only survivors.”

By the time the sisters reached their teens in the 1990s the tribe was just them, their parents and an uncle and aunt.

“Then came American missionaries from the Summer Institute of Linguistics who brought flu and more of my family died, including my mother and eldest sister.” Amazonian tribes have little to no immunity from common diseases. Their uncle was later killed by a jaguar and their father died of Covid. “Then we had only a radio and no way to get help.”

Yet, as the sisters show me round their small hamlet of wooden huts, it is an unexpected hive of activity and far more developed than other tribes I have visited.

In the centre was an open-air kitchen where dozens of tucunaré fish were being washed and cooked on the fire. Two scarlet macaws wandered about, as well as the pack of dogs, a grey cat and dozens of chickens, which made a constant din. The hum of a generator powered by two large racks of solar panels accompanied the nightly chorus of crickets.

To my surprise, there was a newly built bathroom block, as well as an artesian well, a chest freezer and an area for grinding cassava into flour. A satellite dish for Elon Musk’s Starlink was installed last year, providing internet, and a TV screen in one of the huts is showing football.

Boreá Juma

GABRIEL UCHIDA FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES

GABRIEL UCHIDA FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES

There is a surprising number of people. The three women all married men from another tribe, Maytá and Boreá twice, and have 14 children between them.

Before she died, their mother had asked Funai, the Brazilian government protection agency for indigenous peoples, to find the sisters partners so the tribe could continue, Maytá said.

Instead, in 1998, the six remaining Juma were moved to the Uru Eu Wau Wau, another tribe more than 300 miles away in Rondonia, because they had a number of single men and a similar language. But Aruká believed this was intended to deprive them of their ancestral lands and the elders struggled to adapt. Their aunt, they said, died of sadness.

In indigenous culture, the bloodline passes from the father, so the children are regarded as Uru Eu Wau Wau, not Juma.

“We were treated badly,” Mandei said. “Our father said we must marry as otherwise we would not be respected and our tribe not grow.” She was married at 13 and, though she quickly became pregnant with her first son, she was mistreated by her husband, who then left her.

“I was also treated badly,” Maytá added. “My husband’s family did not like the fact I kept having daughters.”

Five of her six children are daughters, including the youngest, Shakira, who is named after the singer. Her husband then died after being struck by lightning and she married again.

Maytá’s youngest daughter, Shakira, and her pet Lowland paca, Fernandinho

GABRIEL UCHIDA FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES

In 2013, Aruká persuaded Funai to let them return home. “There was nothing here but jungle,” Mandei said. To start with, they built the malocca where they all slept and began planting yams. Mangoes and pineapples also grew. The men fished and hunted anteaters, wild pigs and pacas, large grey rodents with long noses — Maytá kept one as a pet.

Today, 16 people live in the village: the three women, three men — second husbands of Maytá and Boreá and a visiting father-in-law — as well as eight children and two grandchildren. Boreá has five children, Maytá six and Mandei three, but several are away studying or have left.

Some of the children have elected to stay in their fathers’ tribe including Bitate, Mandei’s eldest son, Kain, Maytá’s son and her eldest daughter, Koembu.

Boreá’s eldest daughter, Cunha, 26, was taken by missionaries, and Pure, her eldest son, left to study agribusiness. He became very right-wing — a Bolsonarista — and lives with another tribe. “He only contacts when he wants money,” Boreá shrugged.

Mandei confessed that she sometimes wished she married a branco because then the children would have taken both parents’ ethnicity. However, the sisters won a landmark victory two weeks ago when they had Juma added to the rest of their children’s surnames on their official identity cards.

The children do not speak Kawahiva, the Juma language, but they can understand some. Instead they converse in Portuguese.

Thiago Juma, 13

GABRIEL UCHIDA FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES

I hung my hammock in the visitors’ hut with Wesley dos Santos, a linguistic expert, who answered an SOS posted by Mandei on Facebook to come and document their language before it died out. He is compiling an interactive dictionary. He also kindly disposed of a hairy tarantula by my hammock and reminded me to check my boots for scorpions.

Mandei, who initially served as chief after her father’s death, said she was desperate not to let the tribe’s heritage die out. “It’s very important to maintain our language and traditions,” she said. “We try to show our culture to the children a lot.”

On my second evening staying with them, a strange lowing sound emerged from the malocca. The men were playing long bamboo tubes — yrerua clarinets — and had switched their shorts and T-shirts to feather headdresses and body paint, while the three sisters wore red and white beaded skirts, bras made of macaw feathers and dangly feather earrings.

The Juma children take part in the yrerua ritual

GABRIEL UCHIDA FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES

The next few hours were spent performing the yrerua ritual, which started with shouting to scare off the spirits of the dead and re-enacting past clashes. The men and boys went round and round in circles with bows and arrows on their backs. In the past, they would have carried sticks with the heads of those they had killed.

The moment they finished the boys — Awip, 18, Kajubi, 16, and Thiago, 13 — went back to their phones. What I took to be orange earrings in Kajubi’s ears turned out to be AirPods. He told me he loved American action movies and Gabriel o Pensador, a Brazilian rapper, who “raps a lot about cars”.

The tribe is able to access the internet via a Starlink satellite

GABRIEL UCHIDA FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES

The settlement has a small school with one teacher for the five pupils aged 4 to 18. Further study means going to Humaita where there is such hostility to indigenous people, locals burnt down the office of Ibama, the government environment agency, and Funai officials do not wear their uniforms. One staff member travels with two gunmen.

Vehicles and equipment belonging to Ibama burnt by a crowd of illegal goldminers in Humaita

GABRIEL UCHIDA FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES

Borep, 20, daughter of Boreá, said she was eager to go and study. “I want to be a lawyer because it’s important to fight for our rights,” she said. “I don’t know if our tribe will survive. There are no men to marry, so I will have to marry outside.”

She cannot marry her cousins because the tribe consists of two sub-clans — Macaws, like them, and Curassow — and it is forbidden to marry from the same clan. AnaIndia, 13, one of Maytá’s daughters, added: “I wouldn’t marry a man who wouldn’t move here. It’s our responsibility.”

The Juma sisters feared that their children would not return. Maytá said: “I won’t impede them from studying but I want them to come back and help their people. My biggest fear is once they go, they won’t want to know about their own people and culture and won’t come back, like Boreá’s son.”

One of Maytá’s daughters returned after graduating but went back to Humaita with her husband.

The sisters are working with Funai to ensure the same thing does not happen to other tribes that have avoided contact with brancos.

“I’m scared the same will happen to them as happened to us Juma,” Mandei said. “We monitor and protect their areas to ensure no one enters.”

The uncontacted

A report by Survival International, the London-based indigenous rights organisation, revealed that there were 196 uncontacted groups worldwide, far more than previously thought, of which 124 were living in the Brazilian Amazon. The report warned half could be wiped out within ten years.

Two of these groups are thought to be in adjacent land to Juma territory in the Balata-Tufari National Forest in the north and the Jacareúba-Katawixi Indigenous Territory in the south.

“We see vestiges of people like pots and pans and also paths where branches have been broken to mark [the way],” Mandei said. She lives in hope that some may be Juma who ran away during the massacre.

Fiona Watson, the advocacy director for Survival International, said the work of the Juma sisters was vital. “Today, the Juma are part of a network of indigenous peoples working tirelessly on the front line to protect the Amazon forest and uncontacted peoples. This work is essential, not just for their survival, but for all humanity in the global fight to conserve forests and mitigate the impacts of climate change. ”

Funai uses the expression* indios isolados*, or isolated Indians, rather than uncontacted. Daniel Cangussu, co-ordinator of the local protection front for Funai, said: “There is no such thing as uncontacted Indians. They are all aware of the outside world but are choosing to hide themselves as they have seen what happens to those who make contact. The tendency is for more and more to isolate themselves.”

Daniel Cangussu from Funai

GABRIEL UCHIDA FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES

The Juma sisters have struggles of their own, fending off outside threats. Illegal goldminers have entered their area and polluted their waters with mercury, but also a new wave of modern-day missionaries have moved into the Amazon. These are not just the men or couples with Bibles of the past, but high-tech operations with helicopters and drones, bankrolled by American far-right Maga groups, eager to promote the spread of Christianity. The report by Survival International said this operation was funded by hundreds of millions of dollars that threatened one in six indigenous communities “in the name of salvation”.

• In the Amazon, leaders talk climate while dynamite waits upstream

On the outskirts in Porto Velho, behind a set of barred gates lies the local headquarters of Jocum, the Brazilian wing of Youth With a Mission, an American organisation that has 22,000 missionaries worldwide. It is highly secretive but I managed to get into its sprawling campus and met Rebecca from Rio and Hernan from Colombia, among hundreds of students learning indigenous languages and jungle health training such as how to make a stretcher from bamboo poles. Rebecca said: “We just want indigenous people to have the same opportunity to know the Bible as us.”

After a while, a young woman in a yellow T-shirt appeared. She told me her name was Cunha, she was 26 and she was studying to become a lawyer. By remarkable coincidence, she is Boreá’s missing daughter. “I was adopted by a couple and brought here 16 years ago,” she said. “My mother sent me because there was lots of conflict in the tribe.”

This is not how Boreá remembers it. “Funai took us to the city when she was nine and asked us to sign a document. I don’t read or speak Portuguese and thought it was for her to go to school, but then these missionaries just took her.

“I went to Jocum but they told me she was studying and would not let me in.” She began to cry. “Cunha does not answer my calls. Even when her grandfather Aruká died, we asked her to come to the funeral but she did not come.”

The Juma sisters are also waging war on the misogyny from their own Tupi nation. “It’s a totally patriarchal community,” Boreá said. “There is only one other female chief.”

Some also see them as traitors for working with Funai, an organisation many indigenous people do not trust, because in the past it has taken a paternalistic attitude and used to try to make contact with indios isolados, often with disastrous results.

Mandei said: “We have done far more to save our tribe than the men would. But they think we are nothing because we are women. And it’s not changing. Our daughters are finding the same.”