Palikur

The Palikur are an Arawak-speaking people of the coastal rivers and wetlands around the Oiapoque and Uaçá. Their villages are associated with the Urukauá, a tributary of the Uaçá, and with the lower Oiapoque. From the sixteenth century they encountered European traders and travellers, French missionaries and Portuguese forces. Their relations with outsiders took commercial, political and religious forms, while the river network connected neighbouring Indigenous peoples across the low coastal country.