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The Forbidden Lands

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................................................xiiiA Note on Conventions......................................................................................xviiIntroduction: A Forgotten Frontier in Colonial Brazil......................................................1Part One: Colonization.....................................................................................191 Uncertain Refuge: The Shifting Geography of a Frontier in the Making.....................................212 Ordered Space, Disorderly Peoples: Challenging Portugal's Frontier Policies..............................553 In the Eastern Forests: Territorializing Colonial Society................................................894 The "Useless People": Free Persons of Color and the Racial Geography of the Frontier.....................127Part Two: Confrontation....................................................................................1615 The Assault on the Eastern Serto........................................................................1636 Sources of Conflict: The Elusive Evidence of Indian Incorporation and Resistance.........................1917 Cannibalism and Other "Abominable Scenes": Frontier Violence as Cultural Exchange........................2278 War......................................................................................................262Conclusion: Unfinished Conquests, Unwritten Histories......................................................289Appendix: Governors of the Captaincy of Minas Gerais, 1750s-1820s..........................................303Notes......................................................................................................305Bibliography...............................................................................................373Index......................................................................................................397

Chapter One

The Shifting Geography of a Frontier in the Making

As in other regions south of the Amazon Basin, Brazilian Indians all but vanish from accounts of the history of Minas Gerais the moment they no longer serve as a foil for the exploits of bandeirantes, the famed coastal adventurers whose pursuit of native slaves led to the mineral discoveries of the late seventeenth century. The ensuing rush to the gold fields, which quickly turned to African slaves to replace detribalized natives as laborers, unfolds in historical narratives virtually devoid of indigenous peoples. By the third decade of the eighteenth century-as one historian puts it, articulating a common working assumption-gold seekers had "already penetrated practically all of the forests and sertes, expelling and/or decimating the great majority of the indigenous population." Given this perspective, the absence of Indians from what is known about colonial Minas Gerais becomes understandable if no less misleading. Other topics predominated as scholars focused on the opulent apex of the gold cycle, on the export as opposed to internal economy, on urban rather than rural society, and on the overshadowing presence of the foiled Inconfidncia Mineira.

By mid-century, as the gold boom subsided, surviving natives just beyond the fringe of the mining district were becoming the great nemesis of settlers bent on occupying new lands and discovering new sources of wealth, which they hoped would restore their languishing fortunes or simply provide for their subsistence. This was especially true of the Indians who inhabited the Eastern Serto, first among them the Botocudo. Since the sixteenth century, the region had nourished rumors of untapped riches in gold, diamonds, and emeralds. After the gold boom ended, convinced that the eastern lands would return the captaincy to its former prosperity, government officials became no less determined than many settlers to neutralize Botocudo resistance. As colonists both rich and poor pushed into zones bypassed by the gold rush, they invaded lands the Botocudo and other groups controlled, provoking violent clashes and, ultimately, the prince regent's declared war in 1808. Unmentioned in standard histories of the era, however, is the fact that the war against the Botocudo had its violent origins in expansionist policies set in motion a half century before the royal declaration.

The origin and chronology of the assault on the Indians of the Eastern Serto are not the only formulations requiring historical reassessment. Crown and local attitudes toward Indians-which were seldom the same-also need to be reexamined, as do notions of geography and regional identity that gave rise to the renewed colonization effort in the direction of the coast. Changes in the region unfolded in a fluid context in which interdependent yet irreconcilable positions concerning the significance of Indian territory vied for predominance and to whose opposing ends Crown policy often proved equally adaptable. Before conquest became legitimate, the policy that forbade activity by colonists in the eastern forests had to be challenged, as did prevailing indigenous policy. Geographic space itself had to be culturally reconstituted, the serto transformed from a savage wilderness into a beckoning frontier, from an accepted barrier blocking the passage of gold and diamond smugglers into a fertile, gold-laden cornucopia, an Eden or Eldorado, promising sustenance and riches to those who dared seize them. This transformation, like the conquest it engendered, occurred gradually and unevenly, with the notion of the frontier as a desirable deterrent enduring, in a weakened form, into the nineteenth century.

The Formation of a Colonial Frontier

Unlike the Aztec, Maya, and Inca civilizations of Mesoamerica and western South America, the native peoples of Portuguese America, particularly those living beyond the coast, have never attracted the scholarly attention they warrant. Unlike their seminomadic counterparts in inland North America, they have rarely been portrayed as integral, even in counterpoise, to Brazil's late colonial or postcolonial history. Their significance has been ignored with respect both to what they were, adepts of an environment through which the Portuguese moved only inexpertly, and what they were not, a malleable workforce readily molded to the demands of a colonial labor regime. Their multiple and radically divergent cultures and histories, the influence they exerted on colonial development, the intricacies of their highly effective resistance to conquest, and their importance for even a rudimentary comparative understanding of the formation, expansion, and circumscription of the early modern Atlantic world remain poorly understood. Their absence from the history of Brazil's most important colonial zones is part and parcel of this neglect.

Although scholars of a later era posited the Indian's disappearance from Minas Gerais soon after the onset of settlement, inhabitants of the captaincy knew otherwise, to their great consternation, especially those who migrated outward from the urban mining centers as the decline following the bonanza became pronounced. West of the mining district, beyond the So Francisco River, the Kayap formed a barrier to...