Guato

The Guato are the nomadic canoe people of the Pantanal wetlands along the upper Paraguay River, on the border between Brazil and Bolivia, and they may be the descendants of the Xarayes, a wetland people of the earliest Spanish expeditions.

Juan de Ayolas campaigned against those wetland tribes in 1537, and the chronicler Ulrico Schmidl recorded them; in 1555 Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca noted how their life revolved around canoes and seasonal floods. The Guato language is usually treated as an isolate, though some scholars link it to the Macro-Ge family.

Masters of the dugout canoe, the Guato built vessels on which a family could survive for weeks, men paddling and women steering, moving in small family bands rather than villages and living from fish and birds taken with bow and arrow; an 1825 estimate put them at about three hundred.