Guajá

The Guajá, who call themselves Awá, are a Tupi-Guarani people of the eastern Amazon, living between the Mearim, Tocantins and Araguaia basins in the forests of Maranhão and Pará. They were once settled villagers.

But from about 1800, as European settlers and slave raiders pushed in and cleared the forests, they abandoned fixed villages and became nomadic hunter-gatherers, moving in small bands of a few dozen people who lived off the forest's game, fruit and honey. Through the nineteenth century the raids and loss of woodland continued, and the Guajá withdrew deeper into the interior, with some groups avoiding all contact with outsiders.