The Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750-1830 - Hardcover

Langfur, Hal

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804751803 ISBN 13: 9780804751803

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2006

Synopsis

The Forbidden Lands concerns a pivotal but unexamined surge in frontier violence that engulfed the eastern forests of eighteenth-century Brazil's most populous region, Minas Gerais. Focusing on social, cultural, and racial relations, it challenges standard depictions of the occupation of Portuguese America's vast interior, while situating its frontier history in the broader context of the Americas and the Atlantic world. The author argues that the key to understanding the colony's internal consolidation―ignored and misconstrued by scholars fixed on coastal events and export-led development―resides in the incompatible ways in which Luso-Brazilians, Afro-Brazilians, and seminomadic indigenous peoples accused of cannibalism sought to territorialize their distinctive societies. He demonstrates that cultural conflict on the frontier was a defining characteristic of Brazil's transition from colony to independent nation and a fundamental consequence of its relationship to a wider world. The study moves Brazil to a prominent place in our understanding of the hemispheric sweep of internal colonization in the Americas.

Essays based on material in this book have won the 2006 CLAH Prize and the 2005 Tibesar Prize.

About this title

About the Author

Hal Langfur is Associate Professor of History at SUNY, Buffalo.

From the Back Cover

"In a dramatic, compelling, and thoroughly researched revision of Brazilian frontier history, The Forbidden Lands recounts the lurching, inconsistent, and contentious story of the conquest and incorporation of Brazil's eastern sertao."—Colonial Latin American Historical Review

From the Inside Flap

The Forbidden Lands concerns a pivotal but unexamined surge in frontier violence that engulfed the eastern forests of eighteenth-century Brazil's most populous region, Minas Gerais. Focusing on social, cultural, and racial relations, it challenges standard depictions of the occupation of Portuguese America's vast interior, while situating its frontier history in the broader context of the Americas and the Atlantic world. The author argues that the key to understanding the colony's internal consolidation, ignored and misconstrued by scholars fixed on coastal events and export-led development, resides in the incompatible ways in which Luso-Brazilians, Afro-Brazilians, and seminomadic indigenous peoples accused of cannibalism sought to territorialize their distinctive societies. He demonstrates that cultural conflict on the frontier was a defining characteristic of Brazil's transition from colony to independent nation and a fundamental consequence of its relationship to a wider world. The study moves Brazil to a prominent place in our understanding of the hemispheric sweep of internal colonization in the Americas.
Essays based on material in this book have won two prizes for scholarly articles: the 2006 CLAH prize and the 2005 Tibesar Prize

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Forbidden Lands

Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil's Eastern Indians, 1750-1830By HAL LANGFUR

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2006 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5180-3

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................................................xiiiA Note on Conventions......................................................................................xviiIntroduction: A Forgotten Frontier in Colonial Brazil......................................................1Part One: Colonization.....................................................................................191 Uncertain Refuge: The Shifting Geography of a Frontier in the Making.....................................212 Ordered Space, Disorderly Peoples: Challenging Portugal's Frontier Policies..............................553 In the Eastern Forests: Territorializing Colonial Society................................................894 The "Useless People": Free Persons of Color and the Racial Geography of the Frontier.....................127Part Two: Confrontation....................................................................................1615 The Assault on the Eastern Serto........................................................................1636 Sources of Conflict: The Elusive Evidence of Indian Incorporation and Resistance.........................1917 Cannibalism and Other "Abominable Scenes": Frontier Violence as Cultural Exchange........................2278 War......................................................................................................262Conclusion: Unfinished Conquests, Unwritten Histories......................................................289Appendix: Governors of the Captaincy of Minas Gerais, 1750s-1820s..........................................303Notes......................................................................................................305Bibliography...............................................................................................373Index......................................................................................................397

Chapter One

Uncertain Refuge

The Shifting Geography of a Frontier in the Making

As in other regions south of the Amazon Basin, Brazilian Indians all but vanish from accounts of the history of Minas Gerais the moment they no longer serve as a foil for the exploits of bandeirantes, the famed coastal adventurers whose pursuit of native slaves led to the mineral discoveries of the late seventeenth century. The ensuing rush to the gold fields, which quickly turned to African slaves to replace detribalized natives as laborers, unfolds in historical narratives virtually devoid of indigenous peoples. By the third decade of the eighteenth century-as one historian puts it, articulating a common working assumption-gold seekers had "already penetrated practically all of the forests and sertes, expelling and/or decimating the great majority of the indigenous population." Given this perspective, the absence of Indians from what is known about colonial Minas Gerais becomes understandable if no less misleading. Other topics predominated as scholars focused on the opulent apex of the gold cycle, on the export as opposed to internal economy, on urban rather than rural society, and on the overshadowing presence of the foiled Inconfidncia Mineira.

By mid-century, as the gold boom subsided, surviving natives just beyond the fringe of the mining district were becoming the great nemesis of settlers bent on occupying new lands and discovering new sources of wealth, which they hoped would restore their languishing fortunes or simply provide for their subsistence. This was especially true of the Indians who inhabited the Eastern Serto, first among them the Botocudo. Since the sixteenth century, the region had nourished rumors of untapped riches in gold, diamonds, and emeralds. After the gold boom ended, convinced that the eastern lands would return the captaincy to its former prosperity, government officials became no less determined than many settlers to neutralize Botocudo resistance. As colonists both rich and poor pushed into zones bypassed by the gold rush, they invaded lands the Botocudo and other groups controlled, provoking violent clashes and, ultimately, the prince regent's declared war in 1808. Unmentioned in standard histories of the era, however, is the fact that the war against the Botocudo had its violent origins in expansionist policies set in motion a half century before the royal declaration.

The origin and chronology of the assault on the Indians of the Eastern Serto are not the only formulations requiring historical reassessment. Crown and local attitudes toward Indians-which were seldom the same-also need to be reexamined, as do notions of geography and regional identity that gave rise to the renewed colonization effort in the direction of the coast. Changes in the region unfolded in a fluid context in which interdependent yet irreconcilable positions concerning the significance of Indian territory vied for predominance and to whose opposing ends Crown policy often proved equally adaptable. Before conquest became legitimate, the policy that forbade activity by colonists in the eastern forests had to be challenged, as did prevailing indigenous policy. Geographic space itself had to be culturally reconstituted, the serto transformed from a savage wilderness into a beckoning frontier, from an accepted barrier blocking the passage of gold and diamond smugglers into a fertile, gold-laden cornucopia, an Eden or Eldorado, promising sustenance and riches to those who dared seize them. This transformation, like the conquest it engendered, occurred gradually and unevenly, with the notion of the frontier as a desirable deterrent enduring, in a weakened form, into the nineteenth century.

The Formation of a Colonial Frontier

Unlike the Aztec, Maya, and Inca civilizations of Mesoamerica and western South America, the native peoples of Portuguese America, particularly those living beyond the coast, have never attracted the scholarly attention they warrant. Unlike their seminomadic counterparts in inland North America, they have rarely been portrayed as integral, even in counterpoise, to Brazil's late colonial or postcolonial history. Their significance has been ignored with respect both to what they were, adepts of an environment through which the Portuguese moved only inexpertly, and what they were not, a malleable workforce readily molded to the demands of a colonial labor regime. Their multiple and radically divergent cultures and histories, the influence they exerted on colonial development, the intricacies of their highly effective resistance to conquest, and their importance for even a rudimentary comparative understanding of the formation, expansion, and circumscription of the early modern Atlantic world remain poorly understood. Their absence from the history of Brazil's most important colonial zones is part and parcel of this neglect.

Although scholars of a later era posited the Indian's disappearance from Minas Gerais soon after the onset of settlement, inhabitants of the captaincy knew otherwise, to their great consternation, especially those who migrated outward from the urban mining centers as the decline following the bonanza became pronounced. West of the mining district, beyond the So Francisco River, the Kayap formed a barrier to settlement well past the beginning of the nineteenth century. One official in 1807 described this border area between Minas Gerais and the captaincy of Gois as an unsettled expanse inhabited solely by "wild heathens who cause great damage to travelers who pass through those lands." South and southeast of the mining district, along its border with the captaincies of So Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, lived the Corop and Coroado. From the seventeenth century and likely earlier, pressures from settlers in the coastal Campos dos Goitacases region of the lower Muria and Paraba River valleys reverberated inland through this zone. According to some accounts, the Goitac Indians, from whom the coastal plain took its name, had conquered the inland Corop and Coroado. According to others, these groups themselves were fragments or "mixtures" of Goitac bands forced to flee the colonized littoral. During the late 1750s, as the search for gold-bearing and agricultural lands in southeastern Minas intensified, these Indians fought displacement in what one of the era's most respected observers described as a "barbarous and bloody war." Throughout subsequent decades, they responded to settler incursions with a combination of resistance and accommodation. Coroado hostilities in the captaincy of Rio de Janeiro appear to have increased toward the end of the eighteenth century, suggesting that some bands were pushed out of Minas Gerais entirely, prompting clashes with coastal settlers.

However, it was particularly to the east of the central mining district that numerous Indian groups continued to keep the expansionist ambitions of late colonial Minas society in check. Like the Corop and Coroado-speakers of associated but mutually unintelligible languages of the Macro-G linguistic stock-these eastern groups shared many cultural traits, leading contemporaries and, later, historians to confuse one with another. During the second half of the eighteenth century, their world came to be defined not only by confrontations with colonists but with each other as well. As in many regions on the edge of expanding European empires, interethnic and even internecine warfare, catalyzed by competition for dwindling resources, typified the Eastern Serto as a threatened zone of refuge.

Along with still-independent Coroado Indians, the Puri resolutely held the southern reaches of the tropical and subtropical forests separating Minas Gerais from Brazil's Atlantic coast. Puri domain stretched from the Paraba River to the low mountains of the Mantiqueira range and the upper tributaries of the Doce River. Reputed to be cannibals, they engaged in perennial conflict with the Coroado and, subsequently, with rivals to the north as their respective territories diminished. In addition to the Puri, ranging roughly from south to north from the Doce to the Pardo River valleys, the Makoni, Malali, Maxakali, Panhame, Kumanax, Monox, Kutax, Kopox, Patax, and Kamak inhabited the forests dividing Minas Gerais from Esprito Santo and Bahia's southern comarcas (judicial districts) of Ilhus and Porto Seguro, including portions of the Doce, So Mateus, Mucuri, Jequitinhonha, and Pardo River valleys.

Finally, vying for the territory of these groups and moving across a vast expanse of mountainous terrain extending from the Pomba River north to the Pardo River and beyond, the Aimor or Botocudo, as they were increasingly called after the middle of the eighteenth century, blocked exploration and settlement. Portrayed both by contemporaries and historians as inveterately hostile, even to other Indians, the Botocudo can be better understood as acting with marked success to secure limited land and natural resources under the pressures of colonization. East of Minas Gerais' border, a boundary then still ill-defined, they controlled much of the interior of Esprito Santo and southern Bahia until well into the nineteenth century. Along with the Puri, they continued to conduct raids in the vicinity of the port city of Vitria. Effective colonization remained limited to a coastal strip rarely extending inland more than four leagues (26 km), according to the French naturalist Auguste de Saint-Hilaire, who traveled throughout the region in the 1810s. As late as 1838, when a well-informed friar set out to the south from Bahia along the coastal route, the Botocudo and others still prevented access to substantial sectors of the highlands beyond the seaboard.

The Portuguese applied the name Botocudo generically to a variety of groups believed, probably erroneously in some cases, to be common descendants of the Aimor, inland natives who had for two centuries all but stifled settlement of coastal Ilhus, Porto Seguro, and Esprito Santo before seeking safe haven from the Portuguese deeper in the interior. These groups generally spoke derivatives of the Macro-G languages. At times, the Portuguese classified groups like the Patax, Maxakali, and Makoni as Botocudo subgroups; other times, they considered them distinct. To this day, no scholarly consensus has emerged. Vexed by the difficulty of systematically distinguishing the various Botocudo "tribes" with their "diverse customs" despite extensive direct contact with them, Saint-Hilaire wrote, "In truth, there exists no bond among all those [groups] that constitute, as a whole, the [Botocudo] nation."

That the name Botocudo had a less than reliable ethnological basis is clear from its origin, even though it must still be employed as colonial sources provide no alternative. According to most scholars, it derived from botoque or batoque, the Portuguese word for a barrel lid thought to resemble the ornamental wooden disk that many, but not all, of these Indians inserted in their ear lobes and lower lips. Other experts cited the adaptation of names the natives used for their own lip and ear ornaments, bet and bet-apc, respectively. Another explanation attributed the name to an elision of the Portuguese words boto (bulky object) and cdea (crust) in reference to the group's supposed corpulence and habit of covering their bodies in hardening copal resin as protection against mosquitoes. An English merchant who resided in Brazil between 1808 and 1818 offered a particularly fanciful etymological theory. The Botocudo Indian acquired his name, the traveler wrote, because of his practice, when in flight, of endeavoring "to reach the brow of a hill little encumbered with wood, where, dropping on his breech, he puts his head between his knees, and his arms round his ankles." In this position, "being nearly as round as a ball, he precipitates himself from the brow, and rolls speedily to the bottom. From this circumstance ... the Indians take their modern name of Booticudies, or Butucudies, a barbarous word, half Tupi, half Portuguese, signifying fallers by the breech."

Similar disagreements and essentializing pronouncements pervade the ethnological literature on the Botocudo. Scholarly descriptions of their skin color are another case, with specialists describing the Botocudo on various occasions as "whiter than most other Brazilian Indians"; "not merely light or dark ruddy-brown, but almost quite white, and cheeks even pink"; "yellower than Guaran"; "nearly as light as the Portuguese"; "whitish yellow"; "light, some even white, with red cheeks"; and "yellowish." Collecting these and other expert opinions and proffering his own, a nineteenth-century British anthropologist concluded the following about the Botocudo complexion:

I have heard it ... spoken of as a drab, a fawn, a buff, a chamois, a light leathery-brown, and so on. But I consider that the yellowish tinge ... is unmistakable, and it is this very yellow complexion which, combined with [other] features, imparts both to the Guaran-Tupi and to the Botocudo that decidedly Mongolic look which has been noted by most observers.

If such assessments verge on the preposterous, so did the colonial habit of grouping diverse peoples together under the rubric of a single, reductive name. In practice, when colonists used the term Botocudo, they collapsed many distinct ethnic groups into one, usually referring to nothing more specific than any one of the numerous indigenous bands of the Eastern Serto that refused to submit to Portuguese subjugation. The primary exception occurred when colonists sought to focus attention on a particular group, for instance, singling them out as enemies not only of the Portuguese but of other indigenous groups. Thus, in 1800, the priest Francisco da Silva Campos petitioned the Crown for greater aid in the struggle to Christianize Indians, horrified that those whom he labeled the Botocudo had "destroyed through warfare" a series of other "nations" in order to "eat them." Those victimized, he said, included the "Mandali [Malali?], Maxakali, Pendi, Capoxi [Kopox], Panhame, ... Monox, [and] Patax." The generic term Botocudo, in other words, was synonymous with incorrigible enemy.

The classificatory ambiguity pervading the sources points to what anthropologists describe as coerced tribalization. Like other groups destabilized by colonial expansion in innumerable frontier regions throughout the Americas, the Botocudo became an ethnic group to a significant degree as a result of this process. In conjunction with the gradual formation of the frontier itself, they coalesced as an identifiable people largely as a product of their contact with, struggle against, and representation by encroaching settlers. Ethnogenesis, in a word, occurred as colonists ascribed supposed preexisting cultural affinities and affiliations to what were, in fact, distinct indigenous communities.

The persistence of inadequate renderings of these groups in the historiography derives from a dearth of ethnographic studies extending into the second half of the twentieth century. By then, the near extinction of the region's natives and their languages had occurred. Apart from the broadest of characteristics, therefore, frustratingly little has been reported about the historical conduct of the Botocudo and others, a problem the second half of the present study in particular seeks to address. For the present, it suffices to make note of their seminomadic hunting and foraging, their proclivity for fissuring into small bands, their determined territoriality, and their frequent conflicts with neighboring groups. Mobility and fragmentation themselves help explain the nature oftheirresistancetocolonization,whichtooktheformofisolatedambushesand flight far more frequently than large-scale warfare. Furthermore, the impulse to resist sprang from the most fundamental need to retain an expanse of territory sufficient to ensure physical, social, and cultural reproduction.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Forbidden Landsby HAL LANGFUR Copyright © 2006 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804751803
• ISBN 13: 9780804751803
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 432