Bororo

The Bororo, who call themselves Boe, are an Indigenous people of central Brazil, living today in the state of Mato Grosso. Their traditional lands once stretched from what is now Bolivia in the west to southern Goiás in the east. Known for a complex social organisation and a rich ceremonial life, they numbered 1,817 in 2014 according to Brazilian health data cited by the Instituto Socioambiental.

The word Bororo means "village courtyard" in their language, a reference to the central plaza around which a village is built. Over the centuries outsiders also used other names, among them Coroados, Coxiponé, Araés, Cuiabá and Porrudos. According to the Instituto Socioambiental, archaeologists have estimated that the Bororo have lived in this region for at least seven thousand years.

The first European contacts came in the seventeenth century, when Jesuit-led expeditions travelled through the region. Contact grew sharply in the eighteenth century, when gold was found around Cuiabá and mining spread across Mato Grosso, then part of colonial Brazil. Under this pressure the Bororo split into western and eastern groups. The western Bororo, living near Cáceres and Vila Bela, suffered so badly from colonial violence that by the mid-twentieth century they were considered to have ceased to exist as a separate group, and the language is thought to have died out on the Bolivian side.

The eastern Bororo stayed largely independent until the mid-nineteenth century, when a road across the São Lourenço valley linked Mato Grosso to São Paulo and Minas Gerais. A war of more than fifty years followed, ending in the eastern Bororo's surrender and the creation of military colonies in 1887. Cândido Rondon, an army officer who was the son of a Bororo woman and later became the first director of Brazil's Indian Protection Service, recruited Bororo help to build a telegraph line through their country, and from 1896 reserved areas of land for them. Salesian missionaries founded missions among the Bororo from 1902. Wars, epidemics and hunger cut the population drastically; the Instituto Socioambiental records about ten thousand people in the late nineteenth century and only 626 in 1979.

The ideal Bororo village is a circle of houses around a men's house, with a ceremonial plaza beside it. Even where houses now stand in lines, the circle remains the model of society and of the cosmos. The village is divided into two halves, Exerae and Tugarége, whose members must marry into the opposite half, and each half has four main clans. Descent passes through the mother, and a newly married man moves into his wife's household. A man's strongest ties, however, remain with his own birth family: he passes his names and ritual rights to his sisters' children. Funeral rites can last up to two months. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who lived among the Bororo in the 1930s, drew heavily on their myths in his later work.

The Bororo language, Boe Wadáru, is the only surviving member of a small language family that some linguists place within the wider Macro-Jê group. Until the late 1970s Salesian schools at Meruri and Sangradouro forbade children to speak it. The missionaries later reversed this policy and bilingual teaching was introduced, and most Bororo today speak both Bororo and Portuguese.

The Bororo hold six Indigenous Territories in Mato Grosso, together far smaller than their former lands. Meruri, Perigara, Sangradouro/Volta Grande and Tadarimana have been formally recognised; Jarudori has been taken over by a town; and the status of Teresa Cristina remains in dispute. Since the 1970s a Bororo movement has campaigned for land, health care and schooling, and the population has been growing again. The movement has sought to settle the status of Teresa Cristina, Jarudori and Sangradouro, all in the state of Mato Grosso in Brazil.

Our 1492 map draws Bororo territory under the label "Boe", their own name, across a broad area of central Brazil. The outline is approximate and does not mark the beginning or end of the people's history.