BRAZILIAN INDIANS

Five hundred years of exposure to disease, violence and dispossession wiped out the vast majority of this indigenous population. Today, there are around 650,000 Indians in Brazil in over 200 tribes, who live scattered across the country.

                                        

Between them they speak a huge number of languages; 110 of the tribal languages of Brazil have fewer than 400 speakers. Brazil’s tribes range in size from the Guarani and Yanomami, who number tens of thousands, to tribes such as the Akuntsu and Kanoê, who number only a few dozen.

How do they live?

Brazil’s tribal peoples live in a wide range of environments – tropical forests, grassland, scrub forest and semi-desert – and have a wide range of ways of life.

Their experience of contact with European invaders and their descendants also varies widely: some, such as the Guarani in the south, have been in contact with white people for 500 years; others encountered them far more recently; and some tribes are effectively uncontacted – the majority of the world’s uncontacted tribes, probably more than 50, live in Brazil.

Most tribes live by a mixture of hunting, gathering, and growing plants for food, medicine and to make everyday objects. Probably only the uncontacted Awá and Maku are completely nomadic, living entirely by hunting and gathering in the Amazon.

    

What problems do they face?

In the 500 years since Europeans arrived in Brazil, the tribal peoples there have experienced genocide on a huge scale, and the loss of much of their land.

Today, their land is still taken over for ranches or industrial projects, or invaded by miners and settlers – and they are still being killed, whether by diseases encountered when their lands are invaded, by starvation as they are driven from their hunting grounds, or by the hitmen who are employed by ranchers and ‘landowners’ to keep Indians away.

                                                             
    There remains an endemic racism towards Indians in Brazil that makes all this possible – in law they are still considered minors. The most important thing for tribal peoples in Brazil is control over their lands – Brazil is one of only two South American countries that does not recognise tribal land ownership.

If Brazil’s tribes were recognised as the owners of their land, it would give them some real protection against the individuals and businesses that take over their land, destroying their livelihood and often destroying them.