Representing Indigenous Power: Colonial Brazilian Sources on the Mbayá-Guaikurú

This paper examines how a subset of Portuguese colonial officials approached the task of interpreting and communicating their knowledge of a powerful indigenous group, the Mbayá-Guaikurú of the Paraguay River basin. The focus is on how borderland fort commanders made sense of, and attempted to explain to higher authorities, a situation in which Indians were formally at peace with the Portuguese, yet could not be described as “pacified” (i.e., submissive). A mobile, equestrian society that occupied the borderlands between Spanish and Portuguese territories, the Guaikurú had a long history of raiding colonial settlements while occasionally forging short-lived peace agreements with Spaniards. In 1791, however, two bands of Guaikurú decided to make a more enduring peace with the Portuguese. Over the following two decades, thousands of autonomous Guaikurú came to live seasonally in the vicinity of Coimbra Fort on the Upper Paraguay River. Their regular interactions and intrigues with the Portuguese commanders at Coimbra generated a huge documentary record, much of which has survived in the public archive of Mato Grosso, Brazil. Fort commanders found that they could not maintain in their correspondence the tone of willful optimism about alliance-making that characterized the writings of more distant officials. Instead, they grappled with the daily consequences of their policy of showing outward respect for—and even paying tribute to—Guaikurú status and prestige. The resulting archives tell us more than we might expect about indigenous efforts to maintain autonomy and the upper hand in exchange relations with the Portuguese.