Bare

The Baré, also called the Warekena, are an Arawakan people of the upper Rio Negro whose historical domain stretched from Manaus upriver to the great rapids where São Gabriel da Cachoeira now stands. Slash-and-burn manioc farmers, fishermen and hunters with blowpipes, they also made hammocks, baskets and pottery.

Documentary mention of them begins in the early 1700s, and Jesuit records of the 1750s describe Baré villages on the Xié River under pressure to relocate to the main waterways. By the later 1700s compulsory migration was resettling whole families as far as the Orinoco confluence.

Many families chose constant movement through the black-water rivers to evade slave raiders and debt traders, and under Carmelite influence they gradually gave up the Arawakan tongue for Nheengatu, the riverine lingua franca, while keeping their clan organization and territorial memory of the Rio Negro.