Kaingang

The Kaingang are an Indigenous people of southern Brazil, living in the states of São Paulo, Paraná, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul. Their population was estimated at about 51,000 in 2022. Their language belongs to the Jê family, and their traditional lands stretched across the forests, pine groves and grasslands of the southern plateau, from western São Paulo to northern Rio Grande do Sul.

In their own language the name is written kanhgág; in Portuguese it is caingangue. The name Kaingang only came into general use at the end of the nineteenth century, introduced by Telêmaco Borba. Earlier sources used many other names, including Guayaná, Coroado and Gualachos, some of which may in fact refer to other peoples, which has caused much confusion for researchers. The Kaingang were long grouped with the Xokleng as a single people; scholars now regard them as two peoples who separated in the distant past. The Kaingang also once lived in Misiones, in what is now Argentina, and their language and culture are quite distinct from those of their Guaraní neighbours.

Kaingang society is divided into two halves, kamé and kanhru, which in Kaingang thought are the two original halves of the world. People marry into the opposite half, and membership passes from father to child. Each half has its own body and face painting: kamé people paint straight lines and zigzags, kanhru people dots and circles. Although outsiders often described the Kaingang as constantly on the move, ethnographers stress their deep attachment to the land where they were born and where their ancestors are buried.

Contact with Europeans began in the sixteenth century, though the early records do not clearly identify Kaingang ancestors. In the seventeenth century some groups were gathered into Jesuit mission settlements, including one on the Piquiri river, but most Kaingang avoided mission life and remained independent in the forests and grasslands of the south. In the second half of the eighteenth century the Portuguese authorities sent armed expeditions to seize the grasslands of the interior; eleven were organised between 1768 and 1774, and one reached the plains of Guarapuava in 1770. Kaingang resistance forced them to withdraw, and the conquest resumed only in the nineteenth century. From the mid-nineteenth century some Kaingang chiefs accepted alliances with the settlers and became intermediaries, known as capitães, who helped bring other groups under control between about 1840 and 1930. The result was the loss of most Kaingang land and deep divisions within communities.

The Kaingang language has five main dialects, spread from São Paulo to Rio Grande do Sul. From the 1960s the missionary linguist Ursula Wiesemann studied its grammar and devised the alphabet still in use, and a school founded in 1969 trained Kaingang teachers who spread literacy in their own language. Today children in Kaingang schools first learn to write in Kaingang before moving on to Portuguese. Use of the language varies from community to community, from places where everyone speaks it to others where only elders do, but many Kaingang now see it as an important part of their political struggle for land.

The Kaingang live on more than 30 Indigenous Lands, which cover only a small part of their former territory, and some families live in towns and cities, including greater Porto Alegre. They have pressed land and compensation claims; in 2006 the state power company Copel agreed to pay 6.5 million dollars for running a small hydroelectric plant on the Apucaraninha reserve, after a protest in which community members threatened to destroy the plant.

Our 1492 map labels a broad Kaingang territory across the southern Brazilian plateau. The outline is approximate and reflects one moment only; it does not mark the beginning or end of Kaingang history, which continues today.