Ikpeng

The Ikpeng, also known to outsiders as the Txikão, are a Cariban-speaking people of Mato Grosso. Their own oral history places their ancestral lands as far as the Jari River, and in early historical times they lived by the Iriri River in firm wartime alliance with the Txipaya, before settling the converging rivers of the Teles Pires and Juruena basin, the country they already occupied in the fourteenth century.

They were repeatedly at war with neighboring peoples, and pressure from raiding and Portuguese frontier expansion from the 1700s onward drove them across the Formosa Mountains into the Upper Xingu basin.

Hunters, fishers and gatherers who also keep gardens of maize, manioc, cotton and other crops, they lived in autonomous villages and remained beyond the reach of the colonial frontier through the whole Portuguese period.