Atikum

The Atikum are an indigenous ethnic group who live in the Brazilian states of Bahia and Pernambuco. According to Funasa, there were 5,852 individuals in the group in 2006.

Name

The members of the indigenous community of Atikum refer to themselves as Atikum-Umã. According to a legend, Umã was the "oldest indian" and the father of Atikum, whose descendants grew up in the village of Olho d'Água do Padre. The first documented reference which cites this name dates from when the Service for the Protection of the Indians (SPI) officially registered the tribe in the 1940s.

Towards the end of the 19th Century, the word "Araticum" was mentioned in the Chorographic, Historical and Statistical Dictionary of Pernambuco, by Sebastião Galvão. It was the name of a small village in the municipality of Floresta. In 1968, Cestmir Loukotka, in his Classification of South American Indian Languages, said that Aticum, or Araticum, was the extinct language spoken by a tribe that lived near Carnaubeira, in Pernambuco.

Language

The Atikum only speak Portuguese, and don't have any memory of the lexicon of a previous language, except for few words used for natural elements (for instance, "sarapó" means "large edible snake" and "toê" means "fire"). There is only one reference which credits Aticum (or Araticum) as an extinct language, and the name Umã is used to refer to the the territorial area in which these indigenous people moved about in the 19th Century.

A couple of documents, "Introduction to Brazilian Archaeology" and "The Cariri of the Northeast", assert that the language once spoken by the Atikum belongs to the Cariri family of languages, though other authors mention that the language spoken in the lands of Umã is isolated or unknown.

External links

• Atikum on socioambiental.org, in English