::01

From the beginning of the XIXth Century, the region of the Rio Negro was missionized by the Carmelite friar José dos Santos Inocente (1832/52), the Capuchin friar Gregório José Maria de Bene (1852/54) and by Franciscans (1880/83), who, together with the military, had a strong participation in the repression of the Indians and the exploitation of their labor, principally in extractivism. At the same time, merchants, called regatões, began to penetrate on the Rio Negro, which was often marked by violence, for example when they took even Indian children captive to sell them to businessmen in  Manaus and Belém, as the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace pointed out in 1853.

From 1835 to 1840, the great popular rebellion of Brazil, called the Cabanagem, which began with the taking of the city of Belém, reached the Rio Negro. This led to a process of repression of the rebels which was concluded around 1840. After this period, the Military Command located in Belém sent a troop to the Upper Rio Negro, for the purpose of rebuilding the forts of São Gabriel and Marabitanas, then in ruins, for which the work was entirely done by the Indians. The Military Command also created the “Company of Laborers” in the region, to which the “domesticated Indians”, that is, those who knew how to speak Portuguese, were summoned to participate. This return of the military caused a setback in the relations between Whites and Indians in the region, from around 1840-42.

Several smallpox and measles epidemics devastated extensive parts of the Rio Negro during this century, which caused the flight en masse of the Indians from the villages and the colonial towns. In these periods of repeated epidemics, intermittent fevers [malaria], at times characterized as “malign” or “pernicious”, greatly contributed to the high mortality in the region.

In the mid-XIXth Century, the government of the recently-created Province of Amazonas attempted to convince the Indians to abandon their dwellings in withdrawn regions, difficult of access, and to live in the settlements and towns on the banks of the main rivers. The government also sought to keep a certain number of Indians in Manaus for construction work, which led to a depletion of the population in many indigenous communities of the Uaupés, Içana and Xié rivers, the families of which were taken by force to the Lower and Middle Rio Negro. Many Indians were involved in the extraction of sarsaparilla and rubber, which was just beginning at that time, and submitted to forced migration, being transported by the merchants from the Upper Uaupés, to work. This is the main reason for the actual presence of a significant population of their descendants on the Middle and Lower Rio Negro.

On various occasions, the Indians rebelled against this type of treatment and conducted expeditions in vengeance against the whites, who did not hesitate to use soldiers or even Indians of other ethnic groups of the region to repress the rebellions.

These rebellions were also expressed through religious movements. Indeed, there is an important tradition of religious movements in this region beginning in the middle of the XIXth Century. The leaders of these movements elaborated a variety of messianic messages and ideologies, and organized rituals and cerimonies expressing the millenial hopes of the peoples. Several of the leaders of the mid-XIXth Century, such as the Baniwa prophet Venâncio Kamiko, or Venâncio "Christ", as he came to be known, a very powerful Baniwa shaman who settled on the Rio Içana, preached freedom from the political and economic oppression of the Whites.

The movements spread throughout the entire region and threatened to expel the Whites. The local and provincial military reacted to these movements most of the time with violent repression, although the provincial government in 1858 sent an official commission to ‘tranquilize’ the situation. Around 1880, an Arapaço shaman of the lower Uaupés, who was called Vicente Christu, began to preach that he communicated with "Tupã" (Spirit of Thunder, who is part of the Tupian pantheon, but who was introduced by the missionaries along with the língua geral among the Indians of the Upper Rio Negro) and with the dead. He preached the end of the exploitation by the rubber bosses and their expulsion from the region. He foresaw the arrival of missionaries who would protect them from the bosses, the military and the merchants. He even proclaimed – as had Alexandre Christu in the mid-XIXth Century movements – a new social order, in which the Indians would be the bosses and the whites their slaves. There were several other movements of this type in the region in the first half of the XXth Century, several of which were violently repressed by the military.