Once there were indigenous peoples Before the Europeans came to the southern Atlantic shores of what today is Brazil, there were indigenous people there. The demographic estimates vary, the data indicates two million Amerindians in the whole territory plus five million alone for the Amazon region. The main family of peoples occupying the territory were the Tupys and Guaranys, but there were also the Goitacazes, Tremembis and Aimoris.(1) One of the surviving Tupi-Guarany nations (called arawete by the Sertanistas [backland dwellers who are Amerindian specialists] from the National Amerindian Support Foundation (Funai-Fundacao Nacional de Apoio aos Indios), a federal government organization says: We are in the middle of mankind . . . . We inhabit the Earth, this intermediary level between the two heavens and underworld, peopled by the gods who were exiled at the beginning of time . . . . The gods have gone, abandoned the humans, the bode, as they call themselves. The exile of the gods created the condition of all that is earthly: submission to time, that is, growing old and dying.(2) When the Europeans made contact with the Amerindians they created the discourses of the beau and the mauvais sauvage, as the chronicle of two French Capuchin monks in Maranho revealed in 1616: . . . In fact, this is a people who do not want to be guided by force, but rather by sweetness and reason. are very clever and active in making everything that they need for hunting, fishing or war. can do a thousand inventions to decorate their bows, arrows, ornaments and feathers; they know how to make the instruments which they normally use. Few among them do not know most of the constellations and stars of their hemisphere; they call them all by their own names, invented by their ancestors . . . .(3) The good savage is ambiguous because his world is the world of the Other. The dimension of the otherness questions the best and worst of the culture of the invaders. The Amerindians reached the territory tens of thousands of years ago and settled throughout the continent. In the sixteenth century they had a sociocultural organization that resembled the Palaeolithic - nomadic peoples who lived by hunting and inter-tribal warfare. were scattered in groups, living together with the fruits and other sons of the Earth in a splendid, self-sustainable ecosystem. Their traditions, languages and religions, their world-views were shocking to the European foreigner arriving on their shores. The European invaders of the Amerindian lands, however, soon saw them as a non-ego, as the Pero Vaz de Caminha Charter shows us: They seem to me people of such innocence that, if mankind were to understand them and they us, they would soon be Christians, because they, as it seems, do not have nor understand any belief.(4) were indigenous peoples who bravely fought the invaders, such as the Guaikuru, who, with their physical constitution and cunning, often attacked the Iberians. is stated that they would almost have eliminated the Spanish in Paraguay. During slavery of the Africans in the colony they learned the art of barter. would kidnap slaves to negotiate with the white invaders. The survivors settled in Mato Grosso (Mbya) and in Assuncao (Paguaya). After five centuries, two hundred peoples had survived, with no more than two hundred and fifty thousand people in Brazilian territory. It is the confrontation of two very different, heterogeneous, truly ignorant humanities from each other that a mortal intolerance cannot but be imposed between them.(5) The arrival of the Lusitanians, cross and sword (dependencies and national project) enslaved the Africans . . . . was Alfredo Bosi who presented the colonizing process as the dialectization of three orders: cultivation, cult and culture.(6) The Portuguese intent was first and foremost a business enterprise. The maritime projects cost the Crown dearly and needed to be compensated at the same level. …