Guajajara

The Guajajara are an indigenous ethnic group of people in Brazil, state of Maranhão. They were first contacted by white people around the first years of the 17th century. Their relationship with the whites was at times very difficult and troubled. The 1901 revolt against Capuchin missionaries was the last war bewteen whites and indigenous peoples in Brazilian history. According to Funasa there were around 19,400 people in the group during year 2006, divided in 11 different Indigenous Reservations.

Name

Besides calling themselves Guajajara, there is another more comprehensive proper name, Tenetehára, including also the Tembé Indians. Guajajara means "owner of the feathered head ornament" and Tenetehára, "we are the real human beings". Sometimes the Guajajara translate Tenetehára as "Indian", excluding from this category Jê groups as the Canelas, who are called àwà ("wilds, barbarians"). There is no certainty about the origins of the name Guajajara, but probably the Tupinambá gave it to the Tenetehára. Both among the Indians themselves and in the scientific literature, the name Guajajara nowadays is more used than Tenetehára.

Language

The Guajajara language belongs to the Tupi-Guarani family, and the closest related languages are Asurini (people near the Tocantins river), Avá (Ava-Canoeiro), Parakanã, Suruí, Tapirapé and Tembé. The Guajajara call their speech with the name "ze'egete" ("the good speech"). Portuguese is understood by the majority of the people and is used as lingua franca for contacts with other tribes and white people.

Location

They live in 11 Indigenous Lands, which are located in the centre of Maranhão, specifically the regions of the Pindaré, Grajaú, Mearim and Zutiua rivers. They're mostly covered by tropical forests and lower cerrado forests (transitional vegetation between the tropical forest and the cerrado, a type of savannah). The cerrados are occupied by Jê peoples.

Starting from the late 18th Century, they expanded their territory to the regions where the Grajaú and Mearim rivers flow, where they settled a few years before the creation of the first Portuguese stable colonies. Around 1850 some of the Guajajara migrated northwards, forming a group which would be called Tembé by the regional population.

Demography

The actual number of the Guajajara population is unknown, because statistics from Funai are not complete. According to Funai data, there were at least a total of 13,100 individuals in the Indigenous Lands in 2000. There are Guajajara natives living in cities outside the reservations, such as São Luís, Barra do Corda, Grajaú, Imperatriz and Amarante, and the total count for them is unknown.

History of contact

The Guajajara have a long history of contacts with the whites. The first contact might have occurred in 1615 near the Pindaré River, when some French colonists and scouts reached the region for a reconnaissance expedition (the treaty of Tordesillas, which had divided the Americas between Spain and Portugal, wasn't recognized by France). Until the 18th Century these natives were persecuted by Portuguese slave-hunters who explored inland territories near the river. The situation changed when Jesuit missions were established in 1653: the friars offered protection and housing to the indios, preventing them from being taken as slaves, however this created a system based on dependency and serfdom.

After the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Portuguese colony in 1755, the Tenetehára managed to re-establish some of their former independence by avoiding contacts with the white colonists. Since the mid 19th Century, they were gradually integrated in regional systems of patronage, and they were exploited as labor force, as collectors of products from the forest or as oarsmen. The indigenist politics of that time didn't schedule any kind of protection against those abuses. The Guajajara sometimes rebelled violently against that state of things, but generally remained obedient.

The greatest revolt was provoked by a Capuchin missionary in 1897 at Alto Alegre. In 1901, the chief Cauiré Imana managed to unite a great number of villages to destroy the mission and force the whites to go away from the region, between the towns of Barra do Corda and Grajaú. Some months later the natives were defeated by militia men, composed of members from the army, the military police, people from the local population and Canela warriors. After that the Guajajara would still face persecution for some more years, in the end paying a very high toll in deaths compared to the whites that died in the uprising.

External links

• Guajajara at socioambiental.org