Amazonian Routes

Indigenous Mobility and Colonial Communities in Northern Brazil

Heather F. Roller

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780804787086
• eBook ISBN: 9780804792127
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

This book reconstructs the world of eighteenth-century Amazonia to argue that indigenous mobility did not undermine settlement or community. In doing so, it revises longstanding views of native Amazonians as perpetual wanderers, lacking attachment to place and likely to flee at the slightest provocation. Instead, native Amazonians used traditional as well as new, colonial forms of spatial mobility to build enduring communities under the constraints of Portuguese colonialism. Canoeing and trekking through the interior to collect forest products or to contact independent native groups, Indians expanded their social networks, found economic opportunities, and brought new people and resources back to the colonial villages. When they were not participating in these state-sponsored expeditions, many Indians migrated between colonial settlements, seeking to be incorporated as productive members of their chosen communities.

Drawing on largely untapped village-level sources, the book shows that mobile people remained attached to their home communities and committed to the preservation of their lands and assets. This argument still matters today, and not just to scholars, as rural communities in the Brazilian Amazon find themselves threatened by powerful outsiders who argue that their mobility invalidates their claims to territory.

1

From Missions to Towns

Amazonian Settlements in an Era of Reform

IN THE STORY OF colonial settlement in the Amazon, as it has been told and retold since the early nineteenth century, there are several stock characters and symbols. One is the crown reformer, armed with Enlightenment-era plans and acting on direct orders from the powerful Portuguese minister of overseas affairs, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo (the future Marquês de Pombal). Another is the pillory, that traditional symbol of royal justice, erected in a hastily cleared field in the middle of the jungle. A group of Indians also makes an appearance in the story, often to humorous effect: recently brought out of the forest, still dressed in their “savage” garb, they are elevated to official village posts. How did these characters and symbols emerge?

In 1804, several years after the abolition of the Directorate, a new generation of colonial officials in Pará took stock of the sixty Indian villages that had survived to see the new century. They were not much impressed. The governor at the time, Marcos de Noronha e Brito, traced the villages’ demographic and economic miseries to what he saw as the flawed vision of his Pombaline predecessors in the mid-eighteenth century:

Making twenty thatched huts, two larger ones for the church and municipal council; cutting down the forest to make a clearing, at the center of which the magistrate erected, with much ceremony, a vertical piece of wood they named the pillory; and finally nominating among the residents a judge, a scrivener, and the other members of a municipal council—that is [what they called] a village here.¹

The governor clearly saw delusions of grandeur in the construction of village buildings and in the assignment of offices among residents. In the waning years of the colonial period, a minister of Dom João VI provided a similar description of the villages’ origins:

Contributing to the misfortune of the Indian establishments was, first, the ignorance and sloppiness of the governors and ministers who were in charge of them and who did not know how to choose the important locations for the foundation of the villages. . . . In founding villages, they simply looked for an amenable and fertile spot, as if creating a village consisted only of the erection of a pillory in a fertile and amenable place.²

Here, too, the erection of the pillory was ridiculed as a superficial and cursory gesture toward settlement in an otherwise vacant land.

Written long after the political fall of the Marquês de Pombal, these early nineteenth-century assessments reveal more about their authors’ biases and political agendas than they do about the settlement history of the Portuguese Amazon. Though aiming to portray Pombal and his colonial agents as retrograde and unsophisticated in their methods, the authors inflated the reformers’ role as village founders. This inflation can also be seen in the secondary literature, which has emphasized the primary role of Pombaline reformers in shaping the settled landscape of the northern colony. Historians have mostly told a story of top-down innovation and reform, impressive in its ambition and scale, even if less than consistent in its results.³

A rather different story emerges from sources left by on-the-ground observers, a group that includes not only Pombaline officials but also missionaries, secular administrators, and native residents themselves. When royal officials and engineers arrived in the colony in the 1750s, they did not find a tabula rasa upon which to sketch their ideal villages.⁴ They did establish about a dozen new settlements during the administration of Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado (1751–1759), but only several of these were created from scratch, and the rest were old military outposts that were repopulated or Jesuit-owned ranches that were expropriated and turned into villages. The vast majority of the Directorate villages in both Pará and the Rio Negro were former missions that had been founded by religious orders during the seventeenth or early eighteenth century (see Appendix A). Many of these communities had existed for a century or more when, in 1757, they were renamed after towns in Portugal, assigned new civil administrators and clerics, and ordered to construct more uniform houses. Pombaline reformers made so many symbolic changes and drew up so many official town plans (plantas) that subsequent generations—nineteenth-century politicians and modern scholars alike—attributed to these officials a more formative role than they had ever been able to play.

This chapter examines how Pombaline efforts to reorganize Amazonian space and people intersected with preexisting settlement patterns in the colonial sphere. Focusing on the 1750s and early 1760s, the principal period of settlement reform activity, the chapter seeks to answer three related questions: (1) What were the main spatial and social characteristics of the Amazonian missions? (2) What did crown reformers seek to change and to preserve of these settlements? And (3) What conflicts arose in this context? Looking beyond symbolic changes to the settlements, one finds significant continuities between the missionary and Directorate periods. Many of these continuities were pragmatic choices on the part of crown reformers, rather than indications of the reforms’ failure. Other important continuities can be traced to the ongoing struggles of índios aldeados to maintain their old community spaces and to follow long-established patterns of mobility.

The Mission Aldeias: Planned Communities on the Move

By the mid-eighteenth century, a network of sixty-three missions stretched from the Atlantic Coast to the border of the Portuguese Amazon with the Viceroyalty of Peru.⁵ Back in the 1690s, the crown had divided this immense mission field among four religious orders. The Jesuits’ territory was thereafter restricted to the south bank of the Amazon River and its southern tributaries, all the way to the Madeira River; the various branches (“provinces”) of the Franciscan Order were assigned to the northern side of the Amazon River, including Marajó Island and the region of Cabo Norte; the Mercedarians’ field encompassed the relatively small area in which they already worked, on the Urubú River and around Lake Saracá; and the Carmelites, because of a shortage of Jesuit personnel, received the vast expanse of the Negro and Solimões Rivers.⁶

The missions ranged from small, frontier-zone hamlets to major population centers and regional trade hubs. For all their demographic and economic differences, the missions shared the main features of waterfront societies: they depended on the waterways as arteries of communication and trade, grounds for fishing and hunting, and, when the floodwaters receded, fertile plains for agriculture. Most were founded at the junctures of the major tributaries or on the fish- and turtle-abundant lakes connected to the main waterways, following precolonial settlement patterns. The missions were connected to each other and to the smattering of non-mission settlements via the main rivers but also by an elaborate network of canals, igarapés (streams, or “canoe paths”), and forest trails.

Like their counterparts in northern New Spain and the Chaco, Amazonian missions were fundamentally unstable places with porous boundaries.⁷ This characterization merits further discussion, not only because so little historical work has been done on the Amazonian missions and their native residents but also because it sheds light on what did and did not change with secularization.⁸ The key point, developed in the rest of this section, is that the missions’ instability derived from environmental and historical factors as well as from the preferences and choices of mission residents themselves.

In one sense, the instability was distinctly Amazonian, caused by changes in the fluvial landscape. As they do to this day, the region’s multitude of rivers constantly shifted course, floods swept away chunks of riverbank, swamps or stagnant backwaters expanded, and channels silted up. These changes, in turn, could affect the availability of food, the composition of the soil and its suitability for planting, the prevalence of insect-borne diseases, and even the physical accessibility of a settlement.⁹ The availability of vacant land in the Amazon Basin during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries meant that moving a settlement was a relatively viable option, so when sites were determined to be too vulnerable to floods, unhealthy, unproductive, or under attack by hostile native groups (who were themselves affected by fluvial and other environmental changes), the missions moved elsewhere.

The Jesuit José de Morais, who meticulously recounted many of the Amazonian mission relocations, tells us that Trocano (named Borba upon its secularization) was first founded in 1725 at the junction of the Jamarí and Madeira Rivers, but it moved downriver in 1742 after the first location was repeatedly sacked by bands of Mura Indians.¹⁰ The mission of Tupinambaranas was located on a large island at the juncture of the Paraná-Mirim, Madeira, and Amazonas Rivers, but in 1669 it moved to a smaller interior tributary to escape the mosquitoes that had infested the first location, changing its name to Santo Inácio (Boim); then, in 1737, the residents moved even farther away, eastward and up the Tapajós River, to avoid the “bad air” that was thought to hang over the previous site.¹¹ Some missions, such as Iracatuba (Fonte Boa) and Maturá (Castro de Avelãs), moved as many as four or five times along the same tributary to escape plagues of insects or sicknesses thought to be induced by the environment.¹² And in some cases, missionaries had to move their aldeias, or mission villages, after most of the residents had already relocated. The Indians of the Aldeia dos Bocas made their homesteads on a different river, the Araticu, because there were not sufficient agricultural grounds near the mission site, and it was not until the missionary finally found himself alone at Mass that he finally decided to move the mission to that river and renamed it Araticu (Oeiras).¹³

Missionary frustration is palpable in accounts describing the abandonment of nearly completed churches and the necessity of building new ones.¹⁴ Yet there was, as Richard Kagan has pointed out for the Spanish American colonies, a deep European tradition of defining cities and towns on the basis of their human associations (civitas), not their physical structures (urbs).¹⁵ This may have made moving a settlement more conceptually possible for missionaries and colonial officials.¹⁶ In most cases, however, the sources do not indicate whether these moves were undertaken on the initiative of the missionaries, the heads of the religious orders, or the crown and its primary representative in the colony, the governor. Many relocations were likely negotiated between colonial representatives and índios aldeados, who may have had markedly different aims.¹⁷ The contested nature of some relocation decisions can be seen in José de Morais’s description of moving the mission of Tabapará, whose residents traditionally had been distributed on labor assignments to settlers in the nearby town of Vigia:

For lack of lands for the Indians to farm in the old location, I moved [the mission aldeia] almost to the coast, a league by land from the old site, where I made a church and new houses, with the consent of the Governor and Captain General João de Abreu de Castelo Branco, who had granted the petition of the Indians themselves. . . . And because I do not want the truth to be buried by time, I proclaim that it is false what the settlers of Vigia allege, that I moved the aldeia without the Governor’s license and against the orders of His Majesty.¹⁸

According to Morais, then, the move had been requested by the índios aldeados, licensed by the governor, carried out by the missionary (himself), and opposed by the settlers who had presumably enjoyed easier access to the Indians’ labor in the mission’s old location. We can assume that mission relocations would have been more contested in this delta region, close to the capital of Belém and more densely populated with settlers, than in the remote interior, where the lack of communication and the near-absence of official oversight made such controversies more unlikely.

There is compelling evidence that the enduring mission sites were precisely those that had supported large native populations before the arrival of the Portuguese. When the royal magistrate Francisco Xavier Ribeiro de Sampaio visited Fonte Boa in the 1770s, for example, he noted that the village had moved four times in the past, and that it had finally come to rest at the site of an ancient native settlement. Partially unearthed ceramic urns, which had served as burial vessels in precolonial times, were strewn all along the streets of the village.¹⁹ Most colonial officials were not as observant or curious as Sampaio, but the absence of other references to pre-Columbian remnants in the missions does not mean that these did not exist. Recent archaeological studies have shown that many, if not most, missions ended up on riverine bluffs over the várzea, or floodplain, near deposits of ancient anthropogenic soil, or terra preta, plots of black, fertile earth created by native Amazonians thousands of years ago. Surveys by soil scientists have found large deposits of the soil at the old mission sites (and modern towns) of Coari (Alvelos), Jaú (Airão), Saracá (Silves), Trocano (Borba), Jamundá (Faro), Cumarú (Vila Franca), Surubiú (Alenquer), Tapajós (Santarém), Santo Inácio (Boim), and Maturú (Porto de Moz), among others.²⁰ This pattern of pre-Columbian settlement, which many missions evidently followed, has been described as the “patch model”: areas of intensive agriculture and dense settlement on terra preta–covered bluffs, separated by vast, sparsely occupied areas that were less suitable for settlement, for lack of either elevated ground or access to active river channels. Inhabitants of these bluff sites had access to the resources of both the floodplain and terra firme, or uplands.²¹ Many of these sites are still inhabited today, and Amazonian farmers still plant their crops in soil laced with potsherds and other remnants...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Orthography and Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. From Missions to Towns: Amazonian Settlements in an Era of Reform
• 2. Forest Collecting Expeditions and the Pursuit of Opportunities in the Sertão
• 3. Searching for “New People”
• 4. “The Indians of This Town Ebb and Flow”: Absentee Movements Within the Colonial Sphere
• 5. Defining Indians and Vagrants
• 6. The Struggle for Autonomy in the Early Nineteenth Century
• Conclusion. Mobile and Rooted
• Appendix A. Directorate Settlements in the Captaincies of Grão-Pará and São José do Rio Negro
• Appendix B. Demography, 1770s–1790s
• Appendix C. Ethnic Groups Appearing in Documents at the Arquivo Público do Estado do Pará (APEP) in Belém, Brazil
• Notes
• Glossary of Portuguese and Língua Geral Terms
• Bibliography
• Index