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There are several indigenous oral histories the
content of which raise the possibility that the Akwe in
ancient times occupied areas close to the sea. However,
official historiography points out that the first contacts
between the Akwe and non-indigenous segments of society
occured in the 17th Century, with the arrival
of Jesuit missions and colonizers (frontier expeditions
and raids) to the Brazilian central West.
In the 18th Century, with the discovery
of gold mines, the colonization of the indigenous territories
located in what was then called the Captaincy of Goiás
intensified. Between 1750 and 1790, historical records
indicate the construction of the first indigenous settlements
financed by the Portuguese Crown. The objective of these
settlements was to open up the territory through the
attraction and pacification of the various indigenous
peoples located there. Part of the Akwe (the Xavante,
Xerente, Acroá, Xacriabá), besides the
Javaé and Karajá, among others, lived
temporarily in several of these settlements (Duro, Formiga
and Pedro III, also known as Carretão), but later
they rebelled and fled into less populated regions,
to the north of the Captaincy.
In the second decade of the 19th
Century, the government of the Province created indigenous
military prisons in the northern part of the region,
still considered "infested" with Xavante and Xerente,
with the intention of securing navigation on the Araguaia
River. Indigenous resistance persisted, with attacks
on the military prisons and the non-Indian towns. For
that reason, new attempts at settlement, particularly
of the Akwe, were undertaken by Capuchin priests, relying
on the support of punitive interventions by government
military forces. In one of these settlements, called
Teresa Cristina - today, the municipality of Tocantínia
- Frei Raffael de Taggia, in 1851, indicated the existence
of more than 3,000 Xavante and Xerente. According to
the most accepted hypothesis, the definitive separation
of these two Akwe groups took place at the end of the
19th Century: the Xavante are supposed to
have migrated to the Mato Grosso brushlands, near the
River of the Dead (rio das Mortes), while the
Xerente remained on the banks of the Tocantins River.
The 20th Century was marked by the
difficulties of Xerente survival because of squatters
and ranchers who invaded the little that was left of
their vast territory of traditional occupation. It was
only during the 1940s that the SPI (Indian Protection
Service, Serviço de Proteção
aos Índios) installed two assistance posts,
principally because of the reports by the ethnologist
Curt Nimuendajú, who denounced the terrible living
conditions of the Xerente. In this period, a Baptist
mission came to the region, and has stayed among the
Xerente until the present day. Historical records show
that the concern of the authorities over the demarcation
of an area for the group dates from the end of the 1950s.
In 1972, after more than 200 years of tense and conflictive
living together with diverse non-indigenous segments
- which resulted in deaths on both sides -, the Xerente
succeeded in getting their first demarcated area, which
was called in the FUNAI documents "Área
Grande"[Big Area]. Twenty more years and much struggle
were necessary to get another area claimed by the Xerente,
that of Funil, demarcated and homologated.
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