Contact Strategies: Histories of Native Autonomy in Brazil by Heather F. Roller

Abstract

Following historians like Pekka Hämäläinen, who have done comparable work for North America, Roller’s ethnohistory demonstrates that many of Brazil’s Indigenous people not only maintained, defended, and even expanded their autonomy in the face of Luso-Brazilian colonialism but also engaged creatively with the newcomers.1 Elegantly written and painstakingly researched in sources produced by hostile Luso-Brazilians, which Roller carefully reads against the grain, this impressive book shows how “state and settler expansion looked from the vantage point of still-autonomous peoples” (3). Roller focuses on the two best-documented groups, the Mura in the upper Amazon and the Mbayá-Guaikurú (or Guaikurú) in the Pantanal region bordering modern-day Paraguay, but she cites examples from across Portuguese America. These autonomous groups “shape[d] the form and pace of contact” and their descendants still do so today (24–25).The first three chapters about the late-colonial period constitute the strongest part of this book. Chapter 1 examines what Indigenous people knew of Luso-Brazilians and how they navigated the tension between the evident dangers of contact and their desire for the newcomers’ “novel and interesting things” (34). They strategically occupied territory to alternate between raiding and trading (few chose complete isolation), and they assimilated outsiders, whether refugees from colonialism or survivors of Native groups devastated by contact, to strengthen their societies.Six Indigenous peace initiatives between 1775 and 1795, the focus of Chapter 2, took place amid intensifying Spanish–Portuguese rivalry and border demarcation, but they primarily reflected Indigenous peoples’ desire to acquire Luso-Brazilian goods and resources on their own terms. Indigenous groups’ “factionalism” involved internal debates about how to deal with newcomers. When they chose to seek peace, they did so confidently: A frustrated Portuguese fort commander recorded Guaikurú boasts in 1803 to the effect that “even though we [the Portuguese] are very fierce, they know how to tame us” (16, 74).In “practices of peace,” like talks and gift exchanges (the subject of Chapter 3), Luso-Brazilians had “to play by Indigenous rules” (90). As gifts flowed from Portuguese forts in the 1790s, officials grumbled about becoming tributaries of their erstwhile enemies; gradually and grudgingly, they learned something of how the recipients understood gift exchanges. The Guaikurú also learned about Luso-Brazilian society: Those contemplating settlement near a fort demanded that the Portuguese provide slaves to farm for them.Chapters 4 and 5, about the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, do not quite match the quality of the first three. The rich late-colonial sources dry up after independence, and the 1808 declaration of a war of extermination against the Botocudo set a disturbing tone for borderlands interactions throughout Brazil. Independence resulted in cash-strapped successor states on both sides of the old imperial borders, the governments of which offered fewer gifts. Paraguay even declared a war of extermination against the Guaikurú. Internal colonization accelerated, and in 1845, the Brazilian government launched a new program to gather “uncivilized” “Indians” into villages, where they would provide labor for settlers who claimed their former lands. Despite these challenges, Indigenous groups continued to pursue the “strategies of mobility and patterns of seasonal occupation” that had served them well (151). Others negotiated with the new state; delegations of Indigenous leaders routinely turned up in Rio de Janeiro and provincial capitals.Rereading early twentieth-century “salvage ethnography,” Roller shows how the Kadiwéu (descendants of the Guaikurú) and the Mura re-invented themselves and remained in contact with outsiders. The cultural purity that preoccupied early anthropologists meant (and means) far less to Indigenous groups whose “capacity for cultural persistence through transformation” laid the groundwork for their contemporary struggles for land and autonomy, briefly discussed in the conclusion (190).Roller limited her research to Luso-Brazilian sources; future work in imperial Spanish archives and those of the successor states may reveal additional dimensions to her story. Contact Strategies sets a high standard for ethnographic research that future historians may fruitfully emulate to extract insights from hostile sources that rarely even acknowledged Indigenous people by name.