Waimiri Atroari

The Waimiri-Atroari, who call themselves Kinja, are a Cariban-speaking forest people of northern Brazil, whose villages lie in the country between the Uatumã, Negro and Branco rivers. Kin of the Kalina, they were known to earlier travellers by a string of other names, and their tongue belongs to the Carib language family.

Spanish and Portuguese expansion up the Amazon reached their rivers in the 1600s, though the first recorded face-to-face contact came only in 1732; in 1775 the Portuguese official Sampaio crossed their territory and left one of the earliest descriptions of it.

The Kinja already had a firm name as warriors, and the wealth of their rivers and forests drew pioneer traders upstream, so through the 1700s and early 1800s they kept their independence by meeting intruders with their bows rather than with trade or missions.