Goianas

Goianas lies in the interior of Minas Gerais, in the hill country of the Rio das Velhas and upper São Francisco basins. The name recalls the Goianá, a people recorded among the Indigenous groups of the Rio das Velhas region. The wider eastern forest country was home to many other peoples: the ancestors of the Tikmũ'ũn, known to colonists as Maxakali, occupied extensive forest lands between the Doce valley and the Bahian highlands.

In the eighteenth century gold mining drew colonists and enslaved labourers into the region, and expeditions searching for minerals and Indigenous captives brought conflict and displacement. Missionary settlements and colonial expeditions pressed on the Maxakali and their neighbours, whose communities moved repeatedly through the forests.