Google recently unveiled the Surui Cultural Map, a digital tool that highlights important components of the Amazonian tribe's culture and could also aid in the fight against illegal logging.
Google recently unveiled the Surui Cultural Map, a digital tool that highlights important components of the Amazonian tribe's culture and could also aid in the fight against illegal logging.
In 2007, Google began teaching the Surui how to collect its cultural data using specially equipped Android smartphones, pinpointing important locations in the Amazon like genipapo and acia tree stands, macaw and toucan roosts, and sites of military battles. Google took all the data and compiled it into a file that can be viewed using Google Earth. At the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development, Google unveiled this video overview titled "Trading Bows and Arrows for Laptops: Carbon and Culture."
"So instead of hotels and gas stations," Google wrote on its blog on Monday, "on the Surui map you'll find the locations of parrots and toucans, or the three kinds of trees necessary to make their bows and arrows. You'll learn where to find the Acai trees (which provide delicious fruit as well as the thatch for their maloca longhouses), the locations of good hunting grounds for the porcao (wild pig), and where the jaguar roam (jaguars have particular spiritual significance to the Surui people and figure in their creation myth)."
Chief Itabira Suruí is hopeful the Surui Cultural Map can help fight illegal logging. His tribe's territory is surrounded by clear-cut logging operations, and, using the technology provided by Google, his tribe is pinpointing, documenting and reporting illegal loggers to authorities.
The Surui Cultural Map can be downloaded here.
Google Earth can be downloaded here.
More information on the Surui tribe can be found here.
