Mura

The Mura are a riverine Indigenous people of the central Amazon, moving among the islands, channels and lakes between the Madeira and Purus rivers in what is now Amazonas state. Portuguese sources describe them from the seventeenth century as expert canoeists and fishers who lived in small, dispersed family groups; tradition places their earlier home near the Loreto frontier on the upper Amazon, from which they spread down the Japurá, Solimões and Negro. The first written record, a priest's letter of 1714, found them on the right bank of the Madeira, already hostile after Portuguese slavers seized their people.

From the early eighteenth century the Mura fought a century-long war against the Portuguese, switching from open battle to ambushes and canoe raids after early defeats, and expanding into lands left empty by devastated neighbor tribes. By 1774 their raids menaced the whole of the Amazonas colony, and a Portuguese expedition failed to subdue them; peace was finally made in 1786, as epidemic disease and war with the Munduruku wore them down. In 1788 the Munduruku defeated them outright, and settled farming villages of pacified Mura began to appear under Portuguese supervision. In 1835 they joined the Cabanagem revolt against the Brazilian regency government, the last great rising in which the Mura acted as an independent military people.