Panara

The Panará, once known to their neighbours as the Kreen-Akrore, are a Jê-speaking people of the forests between the upper Tapajós and the Iriri. The name Kreen-Akrore comes from the Mẽbêngôkre language and means “round cut head”, after their distinctive haircut, and their tall stature also earned them the label of giant Indians.

They are the last descendants of the Southern Kayapó, a Jê people who in the 1700s ranged across central Brazil. When gold- and slave-hunting bandeirantes pushed into central Brazil in the eighteenth century, the Kayapó communities abandoned their old lands and drifted west.

The ancestors of the Panará retreated into the least accessible forests between the Xingu and the Tapajós, where through the rest of the 1700s and the 1800s they lived beyond the reach of settlers, missions and soldiers, keeping their language and their forest life intact.