Moqoit

The Moqoit, known in Spanish as the Mocoví, are a Guaycuruan people of the Argentine Gran Chaco. In the fifteenth century they held the lands between the Abipón and the Lules, living by fishing, hunting and gathering, sleeping in skin shelters and trading feathers and hides for metal objects.

On Good Friday 1686 some eight hundred Moqoit sacked Esteco, which never recovered, and in 1690 they struck San Miguel de Tucumán. Early in the 1700s, under chief Notinirí, they pushed south into Abipón lands and repeatedly raided Santa Fe.

In 1743 the Jesuits founded the San Javier reduction with the bands of chiefs Chitalín and Aletín. The Jesuit Florián Paucke taught them cattle farming and wrote an account of them, and in 1765 opened a second reduction at San Pedro. The Jesuit expulsion of 1768 closed both missions.