Laklano

The Xokleng, who call themselves Laklãnõ, are a Southern Jê people of southern Brazil, closely related to the Kaingang; archaeology suggests both peoples occupied the land that became Santa Catarina before the Guarani.

They lived in mobile bands of fifty to three hundred people, hunting and fishing and gathering the pine nuts of the araucaria: winters were spent on the plateau on stored nuts, and summers in the valleys, where huts stood in a semicircle around a plaza used for initiation and marriage rites.

The people split into three segments, the Angying, the Ngrokòthi and the Laklanõ of the Itajaí valley. In the 1800s European colonization of the Itajaí valley swallowed their hunting grounds, and armed frontier raiders exterminated several subgroups, while the Laklanõ held out longest in the valley forests.