Guaraní Means War: Guaraní-Language Sources on Violence and Identity

The Indigenous peoples whom Spaniards called “Guaraní,” in the Río de la Plata rarely used this word to describe themselves, preferring instead ava (man) or the more generic mboja (people) when describing themselves in their own written records. “Guaraní”, which signifies “war” or “to fight”, therefore, is an ethnonym that the first settler generation ascribed to a people they deemed bellicose. When in the early seventeenth century Jesuit priests began working with Guaraní peoples to create mission towns, they organized and supported mission militias to defend residents from Portuguese slavers and enemy Indigenous. These militias were deeply controversial in the region but provided Jesuits with significant leverage to attain royal support for their independent reducción project. Jesuit dictionaries and lexicons reflect a moral tension over the language of warfare and violence. One the one hand Jesuits hoped to eradicate inter-village violence and anthropophagy while on the other hand they hoped to rationalize violence within sanctioned militia activities. This paper draws on Guaraní-language sources to argue that Jesuits created neologisms to attach a negative moral meaning to war, but these terms never lexicalized in common usage. Instead, Guaraní developed their own values associated with warfare in the colonial period, values connected to a kind of colonial pact of mutuality between their communities and the King of Spain.