Native Peoples of Brazil

This article connects two realms often considered separately, sometimes even antithetically: the historiography of Brazilian indigenous peoples and that of the Lusophone Atlantic world. While the first would seem to point toward the South American interior, the second presumably faces from the seaboard eastward. This difference in orientations has led many scholars of these realms to pursue their research with little reference to each other. Those who sought to understand Portuguese America’s transatlantic connections long ignored the colony’s diverse native populations, except as an initial, quickly vanishing element of the colonial encounter. Historians of indigenous Brazil, for their part, concentrated on establishing the legitimacy of their field of study, largely relegated to anthropology until the 1990s. The degree to which they might draw insights from the burgeoning scholarship on Atlantic history was a secondary concern. Moreover, although the Atlantic paradigm occupies a growing place in the broader historiography of colonial Brazil, it does so in the face of some ambivalence. Skeptics question whether Atlantic history simply re-inscribes a traditional privileging of European over indigenous peoples. Others note that Atlantic historiography too often marginalizes the South Atlantic. Consequently, the authors whose works are assembled here, representing a young but increasingly vibrant field of Brazilian indigenous history, seldom frame their research in Atlantic terms. Nevertheless, one can identify in their studies a de facto historiography of Brazilian native peoples as both dispossessed victims of and resilient agents in a consolidating South Atlantic world. The timing and nature of the changes indigenous peoples suffered, resisted, evaded, refashioned, or embraced differed markedly as they became actors in this larger world. As elsewhere in the Americas, outcomes depended on native social, political, and cultural constitution; the geography, ecology, and natural resources of diverse domains; relations maintained with neighboring groups; distinctive trade and labor regimes; imperial policies, projects, fears, and fantasies; and the religious and racial preconceptions and malleability of the colonizers. It is no surprise, then, that the books and articles comprising this bibliography constitute a complex and varied whole. After initial sections on general works and early primary sources, the organizational scheme is first broadly regional (Coastal Contact and Exchange, Highlands, Amazon Basin) then thematic (Warfare, Resistance, Diplomacy; Slavery; Evangelization and Mission Life) with considerable overlap. Thus a study of coastal peoples might well address the theme of warfare, while a slavery study might emphasize Amazonian peoples. The reader is therefore advised to consult both regional and thematic sections.