Tremembe

The Tremembé were a Tapuia, or non-Tupi, coastal people of northern Brazil, holding the Atlantic shore from the bay of São Luís in Maranhão five hundred kilometres east to the region of Fortaleza in Ceará, with a further stretch beyond the Tupinambá lands toward the Caeté River. Numbering perhaps twenty thousand at contact around 1500, they were almost ringed by Tupi neighbors: the Tupinambá to the west and the Potiguara and Tabajara to the east. They were famed for their crescent-shaped anchor axes, forged on the first night of the crescent moon and held to make their bearers invincible in battle, examples of which are found across eastern Brazil.

In the seventeenth century the Tremembé began settling at the Jesuit mission of Aracati-mirím, later called Almofala, on the Acaraú River in Ceará, with another mission at Tutóia in Maranhão. When the Marquis of Pombal expelled the Jesuits in 1759 and broke up their missions, the settled Tremembé were moved to Vila Nova do Soure, fared badly there, and were allowed back to Almofala, which was incorporated as an Indian town in 1766. Their own language, never closely classified, thereafter gave way to Portuguese.