Tupinambás

Image description: The image is a black-and-white engraving. From left to right, we see two human figures dressed in traditional clothing, possibly Tupinambá. They are standing, one holding a sword and the other with a kind of bow. Both wear neck ornaments and are covered with fur and leaves. In the background, there are plant elements and clouds, suggesting a natural setting.

Ancestral myths are common to civilizations. In the original Rio, it was the descendants of Tupi who prevailed, with the term “tupi” designating the mythical ancestor from whom all the people of Brazil would descend.

The Tupinambás – "tupi + anam/a + mbá" – something equivalent to "all of the Tupi family," also associated with the "Tupi nation" – formed one of the most important ethnic groups of the Tupi people. They had populous communities from Cabo de São Tomé, in Rio de Janeiro, to the beach of São Sebastião, on the coast of São Paulo, where communities flourished living off fishing at river mouths and off the variety of fauna and flora of the Atlantic Forest of five hundred years ago. They also grew cassava and other crops, which gave them a great advantage over peoples who were more focused on gathering and hunting.

Image description: This is a black-and-white engraving. The image shows a scene with a large circular structure surrounded by a high wall made of straw and wooden logs. At the center of the structure is an open field where four human figures are in motion, possibly practicing some kind of sport or physical activity. On the left, an individual is standing, holding a bow and arrow. In the lower part of the image, three boats are stopped near the water. On the right, two individuals are in action near the river, while another is lying in the water.

They were concentrated mainly around Guanabara, with more than eighty tabas documented in historical records. Starting from the shore where the city of Rio de Janeiro emerged, at least twenty communities were spread along the coastal inlets, with large populations on Ilha do Governador and inland, in what are now the city's Zona Norte and Zona Oeste. There were also tabas throughout the Baixada Fluminense all the way to the headwaters of the Paraíba do Sul River, where Tupinambás lived alongside other Tupis and other indigenous peoples from the coast and inland areas of São Paulo.

The most accepted hypothesis is that the Tupinambá arrived in Guanabara at least 2,000 years before the Portuguese. They came in waves down the coast, warring and migrating from the Amazon interior in search of a “Guajupiá,” an ideal place to live. They had a warrior spirit, and predominated in the main bays along the Brazilian coast: Guanabara, Angra dos Reis, Todos os Santos, and São Marcos. Their greatest enemies were the Goitacás, who lived in the Serra do Mar and the plains of Campos, in the state of Rio.

Although sharing the same historical, cultural, and ancestral roots, the various Tupinambá family lineages or clans could also wage war against one another for the most diverse reasons. Intertribal attacks and kidnappings were part of their social way of life and were a condition for men to become leaders. The practice of anthropophagic rituals with the captured enemy was the rite of passage for young warriors into the category of "true men." The confrontations were meant to carry out revenge passed down from generation to generation. There was a permanent state of war, intricately woven into their social and religious culture.

Political power was exercised by the taba's council of elders, in which the oldest and most experienced men decided what to do during collective smoking sessions, while the power of mobilization and action was exercised by a morubixaba (a "chief of people"), a notorious warrior over 40 years of age. It was during the period of the colonial conquest war that they split into factions, and other names appeared in historical documents, such as tamoios, maracajás, and temiminós.

Image description: The image is a black-and-white engraving. It shows a scene of conflict between groups of people. On the left, there is a group of figures in canoes, while on the right, another group is on the beach. In the center, figures in canoes are being attacked by other characters with weapons. In the background, there is an island with a fortification and a house. The inscription "Brikioka" is at the top left, and "Boi-bom-kinge" is at the center right.

In the work Viagem à Terra do Brasil, a primary source for the history of Rio de Janeiro, the Protestant Jean de Léry, who was in Guanabara in 1557, uses a single term, "tououpinambaoults," in the French original, to designate the people who lived here before the founding of the city of São Sebastião. "We found on Praia Grande a number of savages called Tupinambás," he says.

The Tupinambá people were the "owners" of the lands of Guanabara and, just like the other pre-Columbian native peoples of the Americas, they also built a civilization with its own characteristics, adapted to the environment where they lived. French chroniclers recorded overpopulated communities with thousands of people, many of them where several neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro stand today. They are the original cariocas, lying in thousands of funerary urns beneath the city's ground, and they remain alive in our ancestry.