Pankara

The Pankará are an Indigenous people of the Pernambuco sertão, whose heartland is the Serra do Arapuá and neighboring Serra da Cacaria, with kindred communities at Itacuruba between the mountains and the islands of the São Francisco River.

From the seventeenth century the expansion of cattle ranching into the Pajeú and São Francisco valleys, led by the Garcia d'Ávila estates, seized indigenous lands and drove families into the mountains. Eighteenth-century colonial records styled these refugees revolted, dispersed and cattle thieves, and campaigns against them ran into the following century.

The Serra da Cacaria takes its name from the broken pottery and clay pipes left behind when its villages were stormed. The Pankará speak Portuguese laced with ritual words, and the Toré dance, the jurema cult and the Encantados remain central to their religious life.