Xavante Playmates

Growing up, most of my playmates were the children of our Xavante (pronounced shah-vahn-tee) neighbors. In addition to very quickly learning their language (language learning comes easy when you're a kid), I also learned how to make a simple bow and soon was shooting my own homemade arrows. They taught me what fruit, nuts and bugs – yes bugs! - were edible, and I showed them how to ride a bike. We spent hours swimming together in the river and learning each other's games, and they taught me how to dance Xavante style and to sing the accompanying chants.

Xavante man dressed in festive regalia.

“Xavante” is actually a name given by outsiders. The Xavante's own name for themselves is a’uwẽ , “the people,” or a’uwẽ uptabi, “the real or authentic people.” The a’uwẽ were traditionally hunter-gatherers. A tall and handsome people, they lived in the savanna-type cerrado landscape of central Brazil raising seasonal gardens, and spending part of the year trekking, gathering fruits, nuts and berries, and hunting.¹

According to tribal oral history, the Xavante originally occupied a region near the eastern seaboard of Brazil. After the arrival of the Portuguese in the sixteenth century though, they were pushed westward, first to an area between the Araguaia and Tocantins Rivers in what is today the state of Tocantins and then later to an area west of the Araguaia. Legendary for their fierceness, "[f]rom the second half of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century the Xavante defended an enormous stretch of territory in north-eastern Mato Grosso against Indian and non-Indian alike. Male warriors bludgeoned interlopers to death, strewing their naked corpses as testaments to Xavante supremacy, xenophobia and masculine prowess.”²

It was not until the late 1940s and early 1950s that Xavante groups began making peaceful contact and settling in more permanent villages at several religious and government outposts established for that very purpose. The community where our family lived was at an installation of the government's SPI (Indian Protection Service – later renamed FUNAI or National Indian Foundation), located along the Batovi River and called Posto Marechal Rondon. This particular group of Xavantes had established peaceful contact only three years prior to our family's arrival.

1  The classic ethnological study of the Xavante was David Maybury-Lewis' Akwẽ-Shavante Society 1967. Oxford: Clarendon Press

2   Garfield, Seth. Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil: State Policy, Frontier Expansion, and the Xavante Indians, 1937-1988. 2001. Durham & London: Duke University Press.