Contact Strategies: Independent Indians in the Brazilian Borderlands, 1750-1850

FAIN: FA-251476-17

Heather Flynn Roller
Colgate University (Hamilton, NY 13346-1338)

A book-length study of indigenous political life on the Brazilian frontier during the 18th and 19th centuries.

This book project examines the political choices and motivations of independent Indians in the interior of Brazil during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Focusing on their interactions with Brazilian society, the study explores the ways in which Indian nations sought to preserve their autonomy through various forms of contact, and how these strategies changed over the course of Brazil’s transition from colony to republic. The challenges of getting at the perspectives and aims of independent Indians are formidable, because they did not keep their own written records. Despite these limitations, important insights about native political strategies can be reached through a critical reading of the rich documentary record on borderlands conflicts and interactions in Brazil. The project contributes to recent work across the humanities that attempts to reconstruct the perspectives, values, and motivations of illiterate or non-Western peoples.

Associated Products

Contact Strategies: Histories of Native Autonomy in Brazil (Book)
Title: Contact Strategies: Histories of Native Autonomy in Brazil
Author: Heather F. Roller
Abstract: Around the year 1800, independent Native groups still effectively controlled about half the territory of the Americas. How did they maintain their political autonomy and territorial sovereignty, hundreds of years after the arrival of Europeans? In a study that spans the eighteenth to twentieth centuries and ranges across the vast interior of South America, Heather F. Roller examines this history of power and persistence from the vantage point of autonomous Native peoples in Brazil. The central argument of the book is that Indigenous groups took the initiative in their contacts with Brazilian society. Rather than fleeing or evading contact, Native peoples actively sought to appropriate what was useful and potent from outsiders, incorporating new knowledge, products, and even people, on their own terms and for their own purposes. At the same time, autonomous Native groups aimed to control contact with dangerous outsiders, so as to protect their communities from threats that came in the form of sicknesses, vices, forced labor, and land invasions. Their tactical decisions shaped and limited colonizing enterprises in Brazil, while revealing Native peoples' capacity for cultural persistence through transformation. These contact strategies are preserved in the collective memories of Indigenous groups today, informing struggles for survival and self-determination in the present.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=33246
Primary URL Description: Publisher's website
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781503628113
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

Prizes

Friedrich Katz Prize
Date: 9/27/2022
Organization: American Historical Association

Sérgio Buarque de Holanda Prize
Date: 4/1/2022
Organization: Latin American Studies Association, Brazil Section

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