Indigenous Populations - Amazon in Brazil

Another 30,000 are Indians who have left their villages for urban areas. The indigenous population is concentrated in Amazônia, where around 60% of Brazilian Indians live. There is great diversity amongst the indigenous societies, for example, in relation to languages. There are 163 different indigenous languages, and including dialects, the number rises to 195.

With the exception of ten isolated languages that are unrelated to any other, this huge variety of languages can be divided into 14 groups. Four major linguistic groups are spread across large areas which can cross national frontiers: these groups are the Macro-Tupi, Macro-Jê, Aruak and Karib. The Macro-Tupi and Macro-Jê linguistic branches cover more than 20 languages each.

Ten linguistic groups are territorially more compact and are almost all from the periphery of the Amazon basin, bringing together a smaller number of languages: these are the Arawá, Txapakúra, Pano, Guaykuru, Nambikwára, Mura, Katukina, Yanomami, Tukano and Maku families. The isolated languages, of which there are ten in all, are mainly spoken by small groups. But one of them is spoken by one of the largest indigenous Brazilian groups, the Tikuna, numbering 20,000 Indians.

Many languages have become lost during the 20th century and others are on the verge of extinction. For this reason, the Pataxó Hã-hã-hãe from south Bahia asked linguists and anthropologists to prepare a vocabulary with the co-operation of the last speaker of their language.

It is in the East and North-East regions of Brazil where most languages have become lost, partly as a result of prejudice and assimilationist policies. Nowadays, according to the Brazilian Constitution, teaching in indigenous areas must be bilingual. The diversity of indigenous societies - each one being an original synthesis of sociability and use of natural resources - is an essential heritage of Brazil.

73% of indigenous populations, that is 152, consist of less than one thousand people. Forty four groups comprise between one thousand and five thousand individuals; four have between five thousand and ten thousand members; three, between ten thousand and twenty thousand, and two, between twenty thousand and thirty thousand. Only the Guarani have slightly over thirty thousand members.

What is perhaps most striking is the contact between the simplicity of technology and the richness of the cultural universes. The indigenous societies have assembled cosmologies and complex social systems in which non-material heritage appears to be more favoured than material heritage.

In relation to private property, for example, it is non-existent and rights over non-material possessions such as names, chants and ritual ornaments, are the subject of detailed regulation. Indigenous art, in turn, seems to prefer ephemeral support: in many of these societies, the human body, straw and feathers are the subject of intense artistic work - body painting, basketry, feather art - on objects that are essentially ephemeral.

According to the definition of Clause 231 of the Brazilian Constitution, there are almost one million square kilometres in Brazil that are indigenous lands, representing around 11.7% of the nation's total area. These lands are unequally distributed across the Brazilian territory as a result of great age and the specific nature of the exploitation of the regions. For this reason, the lands are concentrated in Amazônia, where economic exploration is recent or short-lived. In other words, the Indians were living in regions that until recently had been of no interest to anyone or, as in the case of rubber, of no further interest.

Still untouched tribes
In Amazônia, contact has been made with 160 such populations, consisting of around 170,000 Indians and probably a further 50 groups which have not been contacted. Of the 554 indigenous areas in Brazil, 364 are in Amazônia. But those 364 indigenous lands in Amazônia comprise 98.77% of the total area of Brazil's indigenous lands.

With 98,457,455 hectares, they occupy 19.65% of the lands in Amazônia. The areas already regulated include those of the Yanomami, in the states of Roraima and Amazonas, with a total of 9.6 million hectares, those of the Alto Rio Negro, in Amazonas, and the Kayapó areas in the state of Pará.

Although it was predicted during the 1950s and 1960s that the Indians would disappear, nowadays there is a demographic recovery and a resurgence of ethnic groups that had been hiding themselves because of prejudice. Even so, there are still very few Indians for a great deal of land, a fact lamented by those believing them to be hindering the course of development.

The judgement of values may be reversed as soon as they know how to evaluate the possible benefits: in the large areas of Amazônia they occupy, the Indians have preserved an amazing richness in terms of biodiversity and an accumulated knowledge that has a hitherto unknown market value.

The appropriate assessment of these resources - genetic diversity and knowledge - and a policy that enables the continuation of a non-destructive method of exploiting nature, could guarantee the Indians a future in Brazil and Brazil the conservation of its cultural and natural diversity.

Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, 20 May 2001

Additional information
Source for background information: F. Ricardo.

Information used with permission from the Brazil`s Ministry of External Relations.

Presentation of the author
Manuela Carneiro da Cunha is an anthropologist. She was a professor at the University of São Paulo and is currently a professor at the University of Chicago. She has served as chairman of the Brazilian Association of Anthropology and the São Paulo Pro Indian Commission.

Amongst other books, she has published Direito dos Índios ("The Right of Indians") (São Paulo, Brasiliense, 1987) and was responsible for organizing História dos Índios no Brasil ("History of the Indians in Brazil") (São Paulo, Companhia das Letras/ Secretaria Municipal de Cultura/ Fapesp, 1992).

Read more about exotic tribes on our site. The world is bigger than you think!