Pankara

Pankará is an Indigenous people of the dry interior of northeastern Brazil, living in the caatinga country near the São Francisco River. Their traditional territory includes the Serra do Arapuá and nearby hills and valleys, where thorny scrub gives way to open grassland. Knowledge of wild plants and healing places has long been part of the community's ritual life.

From the seventeenth century cattle ranches spread up the São Francisco and into the sertão, bringing new claims to land and water across the Indigenous interior. Pankará communities were drawn into these frontier conflicts and labour arrangements, and their territory remained a place of movement between river, hill and scrub.