Timbira

The Timbira are related Jê peoples of northern and northeastern Brazil, who speak Timbira dialects and often call themselves Mehím. Their name may come from a Tupi word meaning the tied ones, after their woven bands. Their homelands run from the Parnaíba valley across the Maranhão cerrado to the Tocantins, combining farming with hunting and gathering.

Contact with Portuguese colonists began in the eighteenth century: in 1728 a Timbira force raided Oeiras, capital of the Piauí captaincy. Cattle ranches spreading north from Bahia drove them west of the Parnaíba, and by the second half of the century none remained east of the river.

In northern Maranhão planters hunted them for slaves. A royal charter of 1811 legalized the enslavement of resisting Indians on the Tocantins and Araguaia, opening the bloodiest phase of their conquest in the 1810s and 1820s.