Tarairiu

The Tarairiú, who call themselves the Otxukayana, were a large nation of the northeastern Brazilian interior, spread across the caatinga sertão from the Assú and Apodi rivers in Rio Grande do Norte to the Jaguaribe and Acaraú valleys of Ceará and over the Borborema plateau in Paraíba. They united more than twenty-two peoples, among them the Janduí, Kanindé, Ariús, Pêgas, Coremas and Xukurú, under a paramount leader titled maioral, first the chief Draruk and later his son Kanindé. Farmers of maize, manioc and tobacco who also hunted and gathered honey, they moved seasonally with the floods of the sacred Piranhas-Açu, fought with spear-throwers and clubs, and marked adulthood with the Korroveara log race. Their language, known only from word lists, is treated as an isolate.

Dutch artists including Albert Eckhout painted them during the Dutch occupation, and Elias Herckmans described them in his 1639 account of Paraíba. Allied with the Dutch, the Tarairiú fought Portuguese incursions from 1630 to 1730 in the savage Guerra do Açu, called by some the greatest indigenous war in Brazil. The Arariús branch, holding the upper Acaraú valley by the Ibiapaba mountains, was settled with the Anacés and Tremembés in the Jesuit aldeamento of Ibiapaba, which became the town of Vila Viçosa Real in 1759; disease, intermarriage and frontier wars then dissolved the tribe as a separate people.