Flora Lu Holt: The Huaorani were first peacefully contacted in 1958. So if you think about it, within your lifetime, they've gone from a point where all outsiders were to be feared and killed on sight, practically to the entrance into [trading] goods and a settlement pattern that has become very sedentary. The practices of warfare and fratricide have ceased. I mean, sometimes you still get spearing raids. But it's really cut back.
Tom Foreman: And why is that?
Flora Lu Holt: Because of the missionary contact. Protestant missionaries came and said, "God tells you that you should not kill." And the Huaorani are very aware that the outside world sees them as savages, and they're uncomfortable with that. Especially the young people.
Tom Foreman: How do they see themselves?
Flora Lu Holt: They see themselves as people that, that have a lot of value. They really are proud of who they are. They have a connection with the land and they still see that. But they also see that there are things that they want, that they don't know how to get—Western things, or different types of technologies.
Tom Foreman: So are you there to just objectively observe them or are you trying to help?
Flora Lu Holt: That's a critical question, because just by quote "helping" I think that that can be really paternalistic. I'm trying to bridge between the Huaorani and our society. But right now, with the oil companies coming in quickly, they don't have a lot of time. In the next few years, [their] whole area can just be carved by roads and with oil companies and colonists.
Tom Foreman: Will the Huaorani as you know them today be around in 10 - 15 years?
Flora Lu Holt: It's a very difficult question. Once they devastate the land base, what's gonna happen is that the Huaorani will not have the means to support themselves. They will no longer be able to hunt.
Tom Foreman: Then they'll have to assimilate.
Flora Lu Holt: Then they'll have to. But I think that the Huaorani are capable of making good decisions. I think that they can adopt certain things from Western culture, or you know, choose not to. What's important is that they have that choice.
Inside Base Camp's Tom Foreman on Work, Guests
Presidents and prisoners; scientists and soldiers; the heroic and the hated—all have sat down with National Geographic Channel Senior Anchor Tom Foreman as he has traveled the globe for the past 25 years. Starting out in small town radio in Alabama, he progressed through local television to join ABC Network News when he was 30. For a decade he covered virtually every major news story for World News Tonight, Nightline, 20/20 and Good Morning America.
Now, as host and managing editor of the Emmy Award-winning Inside Base Camp with Tom Foreman, he brings his years of experience—and dozens of riveting guests—to the National Geographic Channel at 12:30 p.m. ET Monday through Friday, and Sundays at 11:00 a.m.
As the show's name implies, Foreman asks the intimate, revealing questions that cut to core of the passions that drive his guests.
Read an interview with Tom Foreman>>
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