Geographical Mobility and Interethnic Alliance in the Formation of Amazonian Identities, 1700–1800

The vast fluvial system of the Amazon Basin provided European explorers, missionaries, traders, and slavers access to the dense indigenous populations and natural resources after about 1600. The invaders waged war in canoes and introduced diseases such as smallpox and measles that ravaged the dense populations recorded at initial contact. Waterways also allowed some native peoples and runaway slaves, both indigenous and African, as well as disgruntled settlers to flee colonial exploitation and find refuge above the waterfalls of tributary rivers, along igarapé, backwater channels, or in neighboring territories. Many of the supposedly un-contacted “tribes” of the nineteenth and twentieth century had thus evaded enslavement or missions during the colonial era. On the great inland sea interethnic contact and conflict, ethnogenesis, disease, and voluntary isolation would define the Amazon region.

During the first half of the eighteenth century, mameluco or mestiço men, the sons of Portuguese men and native women, contacted indigenous groups up distant tributaries, especially in the far northwest along today’s Brazil-Colombia-Venezuela borders, to bring them downriver to the missions, towns, and forts. The men first offered gifts to the native leaders, who would then give them a female relative as their wife to solidify their alliance. When Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado, governor and captain-general of the State of Grão-Pará and Maranhão, introduced reforms at mid-century, he encouraged marriage between Portuguese men and native women to solidify local society and make the region more productive. Scholarship on these marriages is especially thin, due in part to the lack of documentation, yet some clues offer glimpses into the formation of new identities in the region.