Kariri

Kariri refers here to Indigenous communities of the São Francisco hinterland, not to one centralized kingdom. In the late seventeenth century Portuguese expansion brought cattle routes, missionary settlements and new demands on Indigenous land and labour. Jesuit and Capuchin missionaries worked among different Kariri-speaking groups and recorded their languages while pursuing conversion. A manuscript by Bernard of Nantes, dated 1702, describes a Kariri mission on the São Francisco. In the wider Bahia hinterland, Ludovico Vincenzo Mamiani's Kiriri catechism of 1698 and grammar of 1699 grew out of exchanges with Indigenous speakers. Their categories were shaped by evangelization, yet they preserve traces of local knowledge.