In the Captaincy of Pernambuco there lived many indigenous groups that spoke the Tupi language. The Indians that were not Tupi-speakers were known as Tapuios or Tupuyaa. During colonial times, the Indians who lived on the coast were pushed to the interior. Thus the peopling of the São Francisco River valley, for example, was mostly due to the Indians who settled there after the arrival of the Portuguese and to the catechist work missionaries carried out with them.

Also important for the formation of a new demographic distribution in the region was the dispute, in the mid-17^th Century, between the Portuguese and the Dutch for Northeastern Brazil. After the Dutch were expelled from Pernambuco, Portugal decided to reorganize the way it administered the local indigenous population. It is possible that, because of such administrative reorganization, the Portuguese Crown decided to put the Indians in villages in order to better control them. That would be the explanation for the insistence of the Portuguese authorities to give the Indians “a square league of land” where at least 100 Indian couples were to settle. We suppose that it was approximately at that time that the Fulni-ô were put in villages.