Kambeba

The Kambeba, or Omagua, are a Tupi-Guarani people of the upper Amazon, whose villages stood on river islands and banks from the Napo to the Juruá, upstream from Manaus into Peru. Neighbours called them Cambeba after their custom of binding a board to an infant's forehead to flatten the skull, a mark prized over other tribes' round heads.

Before contact they were a populous riverine society farming manioc and maize on floodplain clearings, famed as the finest Amazon canoemen. Spanish explorers met them in the 1500s and Jesuits reached the upper Napo in 1620; when Franciscan Laureano de la Cruz came in 1647, smallpox emptying the villages, he counted under five thousand survivors.

From 1687 the Jesuit Samuel Fritz spent thirty-eight years among them, gathering villages into reductions, and through the 1700s disease and colonial prejudice dispersed most Kambeba into river towns.