Apyãwa

The Tapirapé, who call themselves Apyãwa, are a Tupi-Guarani people of the lower Araguaia river around Bananal Island. Their traditions and language point to descent from the coastal Tupinambá, bands of whom are thought to have fled inland after the European arrival of the 1500s and settled in this forest.

They lived by slash-and-burn horticulture, hunting and fishing: each large loghouse, home to four or five families linked through the mother's line, kept its own garden, while the oval village centred on the takana, a men's house shared by six Bird Societies that organized collective hunts and clearings and danced masked when spirits visited.

Shamans entered tobacco trances to heal and bless the hunt, and an annual gift-giving ceremony, sealed with manioc beer, redistributed wealth between households. Deep in the interior, the Tapirapé had no sustained dealings with colonial society through this period.