Iate

Iatê is associated with the Fulni-ô people of the Ipanema country in Pernambuco. Colonial records called them Carnijós or Carijós; by the mid-eighteenth century the Carnijó name was established. A 1749 account recorded 323 people at the settlement of Ribeira do Panema.

Their land history became entangled with the Crown's policy of concentrating Indigenous communities in mission villages. A royal grant in 1700 provided a square league of land for settlements containing at least one hundred couples. Resistance by Pernambuco's authorities prompted further royal instructions in 1703 and 1705 demanding compliance. These grants later formed part of the documentary basis for Fulni-ô territorial claims. The uncertain date of the community's original concentration does not obscure the eighteenth-century record of an Indigenous settlement confronting colonial administration and competing demands on its land.