Kanhgag

The Kanhgag, better known as the Kaingang, are a Jê-speaking people of the South American interior, whose traditional lands run from the Tietê River to the Ijuí River. Their culture took shape in the araucaria forests, whose pine nuts were a staple food.

Their society is divided into two exogamic halves, kamé and kanhru, traced through the father and marked by distinct styles of body painting, straight lines and zigzags against dots and concentric circles. The Kaingang language belongs to the Southern Jê branch of the Macro-Jê trunk.

Coastal groups encountered after 1500 under the name Guayaná are regarded as their ancestors, and the Xokleng were long treated as part of the same people. Slave raiding and the westward push of Portuguese settlement narrowed their territory, though they still held wide domains west of the Paraná in the early nineteenth century.