A shocking new video shows members of an uncontacted tribe in Indonesia approach the miners who are destroying their land, begging them for food. The footage (below) is a tragic insight into the Hongana Manyawa people whose existence is being threatened by nickel mining, driven by the demand for electric car batteries.

“We don’t know if or how long they will survive after the encounter. They could have contracted any number of diseases which are deadly to them. Or they may starve – the reason they came out of their territory is because their shrinking territory cannot feed them,” Survival International, the NGO that shared the video, said in a statement sent to IFLScience.

The Hongana Manyawa, which means “People of the Forest” in their language, live on the island of Halmahera and are one of the last nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes in Indonesia. There are an estimated 300 to 500 uncontacted members of the tribe, as well as 3,000 Hongana Manyawa people who were contacted in the 1980s and maintain some contact with the wider world.

Halmahera is the site of some of the world’s largest unexploited nickel reserves. With demand for electric cars only set to rise in coming years, it’s expected that mining operations in Halmahera will ramp up, posing a very real existential threat to the Hongana Manyawa.

Some have claimed the recent video indicates the tribe wants to make contact – but that’s simply not true. Survival International spoke with a contacted Hongana Manyawa person who said her people are starving to death as a result of their ancestral rainforest being cleared for mining. 

In the wake of this footage going viral, one of Indonesia’s top politicians, AA LaNyalla Mahmud Mattalitti, called on the government to protect the Hongana Manyawa and asked Halmahera’s North Maluku provincial government to revisit their land planning regulations.

Weda Bay Nickel, a company partly owned by French mining company Eramet, started mining operations on the island in 2019, and have plans to ramp up their efforts in the decades to come. 

“Eramet – if you can imagine such an oxymoronic thing – sees themselves the Greta Thunberg of mining companies. They think they’re the good guys who are mining for electric car batteries,” Callum Russell, Asia Research and Advocacy Officer at Survival International, told IFLScience in October 2023.

“It’s a deep irony that these people literally call themselves Hongana Manyawa – ‘People of the Forest’ – and yet they’re the ones being destroyed in the name of the green transition,” continued Russell.