Kaxixo

Kaxixó country lay in the Pará River valley of the upper São Francisco basin, in the interior of Minas Gerais. Its communities remembered the river, wooded uplands and sacred places as parts of a homeland whose history preceded the ranches that later occupied it. Their accounts placed the beginning of conflicts with outsiders in the seventeenth-century expeditions that opened tracks through central Minas.

During the eighteenth century, settlement spreading from Pitangui brought more sustained pressure. Kaxixó oral history especially associated the loss of land and freedom with Captain Inácio de Oliveira Campos, husband of Joaquina do Pompéu. Armed colonists overcame resistance, and Indigenous families were absorbed into a growing estate society. The imposed category Carijó grouped captive people brought from São Paulo together with local inhabitants, obscuring older names and relationships. African slaves and other newcomers also became part of the social world from which later Kaxixó communities emerged. Family memories linked survival to continued residence, work and kinship on the same land. The history of this river country thus carried both the violence of colonial expansion and the persistence of an Indigenous identity within the farms built over its territory.