The Indian peoples of Brazil have seen their tribal way of life disappearing in the face of forces from the rest of Brazil, much as indigenous peoples everywhere have seen an erosion of their way of life:
What has amounted to a genocidal process of attrition dates back to the arrival of the first white men, and the abuse and killing of native Brazilians has gained fresh impetus in recent decades as Brazil has opened up its frontiers in an effort to tap the vast resources of the Amazon basin (Page 85).
The elite of Brazil et the priorities for the nation, and they have always put their own comfort and enrichment ahead of that of the native Brazilian. The Indians have had to yield in every confrontation with the forces of "progress," and the exploitation of the Brazilian rain forests in recent decades has had a devastating effect on the Indians who depend on those forests for sustenance (Page 86).
Anthropologists differentiate two main types of native Brazilians, the tropical-forest Indians who live in the rain forests of the Amazon and coastal plains and who live off agriculture and fishing, and the so-called marginal-culture Indians, nomads living in the plains and plateaus who hunted, gathered, and fished. These peoples spoke four main languages and a number of unrelated tongues when the first Portuguese settlers arrived. The natives were rather warlike and fought back as the newcomers pursued their imperial designs:
Tribal groups fought among themselves and with other tribes. Prisoners were enslaved, ritually clubbed to death, and eaten. Such behavior supplied the Europeans with a pretext for resolving to "civilize" the indigenous peoples they encountered (Page 87).
Portuguese sugar plantations required manpower, and the colonists themselves considered manual labor beneath them. The Indians were eventually enslaved for this purpose.
Brazil today is a gigantic country that offers startling geographic and ...