Indigenous Migrants and the Foreign Indians of Colonial Portuguese America

The events that followed the arrival of the Portuguese to Brazil in 1500 reshuffled the pre-existing territorial occupation of native communities.  By the third decade of the sixteenth century and through the eighteenth, Indian peoples were captured, sold and forced to work and live in white settlements.  Others fled their homes to escape the psychological and physical trauma of disease, violence, and war.  Reduced clans banded together, forming new ethnic/regional groups or agreeing to live as mission towns.  Yet others moved to Portuguese-influenced settlements to gain employment, trade, and take advantage of new opportunities that they judged would serve their interests.  These trans-continental and inter-regional movements dramatically altered the ethnic-linguistic landscape.  This paper will examine Indian migrations and the language communities that emerged along coastal Brazil in the sixteenth century, in the São Paulo captaincy and borderlands of Brazil and Paraguay of the seventeenth century, and in the regions of Mato Grosso, Pará, Maranhão, and Rio Negro in the eighteenth centuries.  Migrant and foreign Indians, like recently-arrived Europeans and Africans, entered into sustained relations with local communities, in the process innovating shared conventions and social practices, such as spoken communication.  Though these so called “new languages” were often considered as the speech of Indians, in fact they served as lingua franca in inter- and intra-ethnic communications between merchants, settlers, missionaries, slaves, soldiers, administrators, and mothers who claimed provenance from within the colony, Europe, the Americas, and Africa.