Amazon frontier: The defeat of the Brazilian Indians

by John Hemming

A compelling account of the tragic destruction of Brazil's Indian tribes by colonial settlers from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.

Genres: History

647 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Dr. John Hemming, CMG is one of the world's experts on Brazilian Indians, the Amazon environment, the Incas, Peruvian archaeology, The Royal Geographical Society, and the history of exploration generally. He is also Chairman of Hemming Group Ltd., a company that publishes trade magazines and organises trade exhibitions and conferences.

Reviews

[Czarny Pies · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an outstanding synthesis of Brazil's Indian population from dissolution of the Jesuit Missions in the 1750s to the creation of the Indian Protection Service in 1910. The bare facts indicate a great calamity. It is estimated that 3.0 million Indians lived in Brazil in the 16th century when European settlers first arrived. The Indians had no resistance to the diseases that accompanied the Europeans so their population fell dramatically. In 1760 when this book starts, there will only 2 million Indians left. In 1910, the point where the book closes only 1 million tribal indians were still left. In other words, the book describes how the Indian population fell by 50% during a period when the European population increased from 2 million to 22 million or 11 times. Despite the extent of the catastrophe, the author maintains a very calm tone.

The diseases brought by the Europeans and later their African slaves continued to extend deeper into the Indian territory over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but increasingly the decline in the Indian population was the result of the policies of the Brazilian government and the aggression of the settlers. In 1755 slavery for Indians was abolished. It was briefly legalized again in 1808 but the main problem was that the army, provincial administrators, settlers and rubber planters were all allowed at different times to empress Indians into forced labour which had the same effect as formal, legally instituted slavery. The Indians died like flies in forced labour. Whenever the Indians tried to make war on the settlers to drive them out of their territories, the settlers retaliated massively. Such is the big picture that emerges from Hemming's book.

The true strength of the book is the rigour and detail with which, Hemming examines the phenomenon. Brazil is comprised of many different geographic zones which attracted settlers at different points in time. Hemming tells the story in each region explain the historical and economic circumstances under which the clashes between the Indians and the Settlers occurred. He describes the characteristics of the different tribal and linguistic groups amongst the Indians and attempts to give the specifics of the history of each major grouping.

At the same time, Hemming demonstrates a strong understanding of how the political context changed and what the implications were for the Indians. During the colonial period, the Jesuits had up until 1760 great influence establishing thirty reductions or missions where Indians were gathered into agricultural communes. In 1760 the Jesuit reductions were abolished and for the rest of the century a highly inept Directorate attempted to manage the Indians.

In 1808, the Portuguese court fled Napoleon and established itself in Brazil lasting until 1889 when Brazil became a Republic. The period of the Kingdom was characterized by well intentioned government policy and naked aggression on the part of the settlers. The situation resembled that of the American Wild West as different waves of settlers arrived, aggressively expelling the Indians from the regions they wished to settlers. In 1879, the Amazon rubber boom brought a new group of exploiters into the Amazon basin vigorously pressing Indians into forced labour. After the creation of the Republic of Brazil, in 1889 the status quo with respect to the Indians continued for another twenty-one years until when the Indian Protection Service was created which managed to significantly improve the lot Brazil's Indians.

Hemming's knowledge and erudition are impressive. His Amazon Frontier is an excellent history that takes into account all the geographic, linguistic, cultural and political factors that had a significant impact on the fate of Brazil's indians. He manages to tell a very sad story without ever descending into melodrama. This is an outstanding book.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a deeply-researched and densely-packed study, with tons of historical and anthropological detail. Hemming did his homework, and it shows on every page. The problem I have with this book is its organization; I guess I would have to describe it as being organized primarily geographically. The larger sections of the book go more or less chronologically, but the smaller chapters within those sections each focus on a particular region of the country. That makes sense— different regions had different experiences, different peoples, different problems— but it has the effect of making the book as a whole read more like a series of vignettes than a single coherent narrative, and the reader has to do a lot of work to fill in the blanks between those vignettes. This will particularly be a problem if you don't know Brazilian history fairly well; for instance, Hemming mentions the war with Paraguay several times, in at least one case spending a good deal of time on its effects in one region in particular, but it isn't until well after page 400 that he actually tells you when that war occurred and why.

So, this probably isn't the book to start with on this topic, but if you have a bit of the background already it will certainly add both depth and breadth to your understanding of Brazilian Indians and their history with the various governments of Brazil.