Tupi people

The Tupi are a family of Indigenous peoples of Brazil who speak, or spoke, languages of the Tupi–Guarani branch of the Tupian family. When Portuguese ships arrived in 1500 they held about three-quarters of the Brazilian coast. Their language, culture and descendants shaped the making of colonial Brazil, and Tupi peoples such as the Potiguara still live in Indigenous territories today.

Scholars believe the ancestors of the Tupi first lived in the Amazon rainforest. Groups began heading south roughly 2,900 years ago, and over the last 1,000 years or so they gradually spread along the Atlantic coast of south-eastern Brazil. Their languages are closely related to those of the Guaraní of the south, who are a distinct people within the same language family.

At the time of contact the coastal Tupi were organised in many separate tribes, each of perhaps 300 to 2,000 people, among them the Tupiniquim, Tupinambá, Potiguara, Tabajara, Caeté, Tamoio and Temiminó. One estimate puts their total number around 1500 at about one million. They were skilled farmers, growing cassava, maize, sweet potatoes, beans, peanuts, squash, cotton and tobacco. According to the scholar Eduardo Navarro, the different Tupi peoples traced their descent from an ancestral figure called Tupi, which is why many tribal names begin with that word. Tupi was not, however, the focus of their main cult. Thunder, Tupã, was regarded not as a god in its own right but as a manifestation of the god Nhanderuvuçu, and because Tupã had no rite of its own, Catholic missionaries later adopted Tupã as a name for the Christian God.

European writers of the sixteenth century describe frequent warfare between Tupi tribes, in which captured enemy warriors were later killed and eaten in public rituals. The German soldier Hans Staden, captured in 1552, made these accounts famous in Europe with a book published in 1557. Because the evidence comes mainly from outsiders, the anthropologist William Arens questioned whether such cannibalism happened at all. Most Brazilian scholars reject his doubts, pointing to Jesuit letters, anthropological studies and the testimony of the Ka'apor, a Tupi–Guarani people whose oral tradition, according to the anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro, recalls similar rites among their ancestors.

Portuguese settlers assumed that the Tupi had no religion and set out to convert them, gathering them into mission villages called aldeias. Colonists also put them to work, eventually enslaving many, and diseases from Europe and Africa spread among them on the plantations. Together these pressures almost destroyed the coastal Tupi, apart from some isolated communities. At the same time, the Tupi custom known in Portuguese as cunhadismo, by which an outsider who married into a community became kin to all its members, gave Portuguese men wives, allies and labour. A large population of mixed descent, the mamelucos, grew from these unions. Some Tupi groups also allied with the Portuguese Empire; the Potiguara chief Filipe Camarão was rewarded with a noble title for fighting the Dutch in the seventeenth century.

Old Tupi became a lingua franca of colonial Brazil, used by settlers and Indigenous people alike. Its descendant Nheengatu, carried inland by the bandeirantes of São Paulo in the seventeenth century, was widely spoken until the eighteenth century and is still used in parts of the Amazon. Portuguese later displaced it, but Brazilian Portuguese keeps many Tupi words, especially for animals and plants such as arara, jacaré, tucano, mandioca and abacaxi, and countless Brazilian place names are Tupi.

Descendants of the coastal Tupi live today in Indigenous territories or have been partly absorbed into wider Brazilian society. The Potiguara of Paraíba, for example, number about sixteen thousand people living in 26 villages across three Indigenous territories. Tupi–Guarani languages are still spoken in many Brazilian states and in neighbouring countries.

Our 800 and 900 maps label the Tupi homeland as "Tupis", drawing a broad area across eastern Brazil, including the coast around today's Rio de Janeiro and Salvador. The outline is approximate and does not mark when the Tupi arrived or left.