Kayapo

The name Kayapo here belongs to the southern Brazilian interior, where eighteenth-century colonial writers grouped several independent Jê communities under the label Cayapó. Their country extended across southern Goiás, the Triângulo Mineiro and northern São Paulo. A report of 1723 described numerous villages with their own leaders. This was a populated landscape of settlements and cultivated ground when traffic toward the Goiás mines expanded through it.

Indigenous attacks on travellers, farmers and miners met increasingly violent colonial campaigns. In 1742 Luís de Mascarenhas ordered fighting against communities along the mining road, allowing the killing of resisters and the enslavement of young children. Authorities also brought allied Indigenous groups into frontier settlements to supply labour and soldiers. Cayapó communities responded through warfare, flight and the capture of goods, sustaining their own political strategies amid the disruption of the mining frontier.