Kawaiwete

The Kaiabi, who call themselves Kawaiwete, perhaps meaning “we ourselves”, are a Tupi-Guarani people whose villages dotted the upper Teles Pires and the Rio dos Peixes in northern Mato Grosso. They lived in self-reliant villages as fishermen, hunters and farmers, working a slash-and-burn calendar: forest was felled in May, cleared in June, burned in August and planted in September and October, with many varieties of manioc.

Through the 1700s and 1800s raiding parties stormed villages, killing the men and carrying off the women as slaves, while introduced diseases emptied others. The Kaiabi held that ancestral spirits stayed where their bones lay, a belief that kept families attached to their river homelands even under colonial pressure.