The existing bibliographical sources on the Rikbaktsa were all written after the contact established by the Jesuits. There are papers and reports written by the missionaries themselves, within the perspective of catechism and tutelage, and those by the members of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, who also had contact with the Rikbaktsa, although not as profound and as constant as the Jesuits of the Anchieta Mission. Among the works by the missionaries, the most important was written by Father João Dornstaudter, who was in charge of the “pacification” process. In it he describes the expeditions and the first contacts, as well as the regional context and the living conditions of the Rikbaktsa. Other important information sources regarding the way the Jesuits carried out their work are those written by fathers Moura and Weber.

Of the first ethnographic descriptions about the Rikbaktsa, the best are by the anthropologist Harald Schultz, who visited their area in 1962, during the first year of peaceful contact and whom, in addition to the precise text, produced excellent photographs, which he published in the two articles he wrote that deal with the Rikbaktsa.

Ethnographic descriptions can also be found in the works by Joan Boswood, of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, although her studies are more focused on the Rikbakts, as is Sheila Tremaine’s.

A more ambitious work is Robert Hahn’s, an anthropologist who worked with the Rikbaktsa in the early 1970s and produced the first dissertation about them. Directed to the analysis of the terminological kinship system, it was the first extensive ethnography about the Rikbaktsa, and studied the presence of the Jesuits and the implications of catechism over the Indians as well.

More recent works about the Rikbaktsa, so far, are mine. Firstly, the reports assessing their situation, as part of the study carried out by the Polonoroeste Project between 1983 and 1988. Among them there is the report for the identification of the indigenous areas of Japuíra and Escondido, carried out in 1985. A new report of identification of the Escondido indigenous area was made in 1993, redefining it and serving as the basis for its demarcation in 1998. Those reports give a vision of the moment, although an effort was made to rely on a perspective of the Rikbaktsa’s history.

The research funded by CNPq scholarships resulted in a report in 1988, and in my PhD dissertation in 1992. In both, I tried to present the set of historical and ethnographic information about the Rikbaktsa I was able to gather, and analyze them in the perspective of the theoretical field of Anthropology.

Later on I studied in more depth some aspects of their though in my articles "Mitos Rikbaktsa" (Rikbaktsa Myths). I also published two more articles analyzing their political and territorial struggles, and developed yet another study comparing the regional model of occupation of the space and the use of natural resources to the Rikbaktsa model, in addition to producing an ethnographic video about them.

In 1985, during the struggle for the Japuíra Indigenous Land, the police invaded the area, submitted the Indians to physical and moral pressures and arrested and tortured Father Balduíno Loebens, a missionary who had been working among the Rikbaktsa for 30 years, among other abuses. Testimonies about those facts and the lawsuit that followed them, won by the Rikbaktsa, can be found in the Dossiê Rikpaktsa, organized by the Funai indigenist Odenir Oliveira. Last but not least, there are works by the Rikbaktsa themselves, one of them written with the support of Fausto Campoli, who at the time was OPAN’s consultant on education, and another by the Summer Institute of Linguistics.