Nambikwara

The Nambikwara are a cluster of mobile Indigenous bands in western Brazil, along the headwaters of the Juruena, Guaporé and Ji-Paraná rivers. Their name is a Tupi exonym meaning pierced ear; the cluster includes the Sabanê, Latundê, Tawandê and Anunsu bands among others. They range over grassland, rainforest and the transition between them, living mainly by hunting and gathering and moving camp across a wide territory.

Their tongues form the small Nambikwaran language family, related speeches long treated as dialects, of which at least three are mutually unintelligible. First encountered by Europeans in 1770, the Nambikwara kept their distance from the colonial frontier for generations afterward.