| Both in the historical
literature and in part of the anthropological literature,
the Indians from Águas Belas have been called Carnijós
or Carijós, or even Cajaú (Hohenthal, 1960).
It is not known when they were aldeados (put in
villages); what is certain is that in the mid-18th Century
they were already known by the name of Carnijós.
It is possible that in this village the Carijós
may have fused with other ethnic groups and later re-organized
themselves in clans, adopting then the name of the host
group, Fulni-ô.
For a long time the Fulni-ô were considered
by experts the last remnants of the Karirí Indians,
who once lived throughout the entire Northeastern region
of Brazil (Boudin, 1949). One example of this interpretation
is Mario Melo, who described them as "the last
children of the Cariris who once dominated our hinterland"
(Melo, 1929). According to Boudin (1949), this confusion
was due to the fact that both groups lived in the same
region, the mid and upper São Francisco River.
The hypothesis that the Fulni-ô were actually
Kariri was discarded since a comparative linguistic
analysis concluded that "the language of the Karnijós
Indians differs considerably from that of the Indians
of the Kariri family" and that the Ia-tê
may very well be an autonomous tongue, since it "represents
the relics of a linguistic family still not registered
in the list of Brazil’s Indian languages, or is
part of an indigenous family that has no other representative
in our territory, or whose existence is not known so
far" (Sobrinho, 1935: 49). Recently the linguist
Aryon Dall'Igna Rodrigues (1986) classified not only
the Kariri but also the Ia-tê language as part
of the Macro-Jê branch, although he did not include
the Fulni-ô language in a specific family.
Nowadays all the Indians in Águas Belas
speak Portuguese; mostly adults and the aged use Ia-tê;
children and young people use Portuguese more frequently.
Even though Ia-tê may be losing ground to Portuguese,
it still plays an important role in the Fulni-ô
society.
|
Print