This extract from a conversation between a native-Brazilian from the Tupinambá tribe and a French visitor in the beginning of the 17^th century gives the idea of how the natives had perceived the progressive transformations of the conquers’ politics: visitors, traders, invaders, and finally masters. Different from Spain that had founded well-established kingdoms in America with well-constructed urban spaces; Portuguese invaders entered in contact with what became known as the "straw civilization". The natives in Brazil were dispersed in different nations with distinct languages and sharing in common the intimacy of the forest. Nomad par excellence, they were in constant migration, some peaceful, other warriors, some cannibal others not, but all of them living in straw huts of different shapes, built with palm three leaves, compatible with the tropical weather and environment. All of them naked or very little covered. Their millenary history and language were always present in their bodies in the shape of tattoos, piercing, scarification, painting, sometimes body modifications, use of ornaments of plumes, beads, seeds and native cotton; their language was also articulated by the movement of their dancing and singing. However, they were considered savage and dangerous specimens. The Portuguese decided to exterminate their culture in order to transform them into slaves; the excuse given was to save their soul from that dangerous body, which by staying nude kept the secrets of their own culture written in the several drawings and layers of a symbolic orthography. The masters created a special system of "aldeamento"( settlements) near the towns to take control over their lives and behaviors by applying the strategy of conversion into Catholicism since their way of life and the way they treat own body was plain of sin and their devilish behavior. The leadership of these settlements was given to the Company of Jesus priests (Jesuits).

The analysis of the pre-colonial period is a challenge for scholars in developing an understanding of the performance traditions of those groups and their further transformations after the encounter with conquers. Historians and anthropologists have studied separately indigenous cultural production such as clay, tools, society organization, ritual, and other kind of celebrations, but only a few of them has have concentrated in comparative studies of the ways the Indians performed their sacred rituals, their particular dance styles as they had learned them with their ancestors in order to maintain their own traditions.

By the end of the 18^th century the first expedition lead by Portuguese naturalist Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira opened the road for the scientific tradition that flourished in the 19^th century: German, Russian, North-American, Dutch, French researchers produced an ample documentation about the diversity of Amerindians in Brazil. In the 20^th century, an expedition lead by General Rondon brought Theodore Roosevelt to the Amazon Basin. Later on anthropologists and related researchers found a very fertile terrain for their work. Claude Levy Strauss is maybe the most famous with his outstanding book Tristes Tropicos. Although many serious books have been written about the diversity of Amerindian cultures and their importance in the formation of Brazil as a nation, none of them is specifically about Amerindian performance.

A rich field for scholarship in terms of performance studies is now open for future serious investigation. In fact, a formidable spectrum of records exists in major Brazilian archives -- from the early travelers’ reports to the old black and white films that pioneered an Amerindian ethno-filmography in the beginning of 20^th century. In addition, rich sources in terms of video tape and contemporary documents are found at the Museu do Indio, Museu Nacional and Biblioteca Nacional in Rio de Janeiro, as well as in Universidade de Sao Paulo and Universidade of Brasilia.

2

CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCES

Portuguese conquers met as large a variety of groups of indigenous people as they found in the plant and animal kingdoms in the tropics. How many millions of native Brazilian existed at that moment of the encounter, 6, 8 or 10? One century later, by the time of Tupinambá reported to the French man, historians believed that at least one quarter of that population had drastically already dropped due to the contact with European deceases, tortures and other sources of brutality. On in the coast where our native Brazilian had lived, the population dropped between 95 to 96%, and Tubinambá civilization has no longer existed since the XVII century. (Porro and Fausto) Today, the Amerindian population is estimated at less than 300.000 inhabitants and many groups are still not identified inside the Amazon rain forest, while others don’t call themselves Indies anymore but "bugres" or "caboclos" instead. Some had lost their languages and their identity, living in complete poverty around the outskirts of big cities. They are over 170 linguistic groups divided in four major languages: Je, Karib, Tupi and Arauak and another classified as "minor families", whose lexicon still is unknown. Only the Je group lives exclusively inside the country’s border. All of the other groups are dispersed throughout countries such as Paraguay, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela, Colombia, and Guiana. In Brazil, some of Amerindian groups have their own land and forest demarcated by the Brazilian Government, some of them are still struggling against cowboys from the South who invaded the Amazon forest with the military dictatorship's support during the 70’s, and are still invading the forest and killing or expelling native people from the land. Among the Indian groups oral tradition is a common trace, with exception of the Krenak group, which has their own written language although there is no a serious study about it. The existence of a such a large amount of distinct ethno-linguistic groups, the long history of internal migration, dispersion and forced mixing dating from the colonial period, as well the predominance of oral tradition across these cultures, makes the field of performance research in Brazil and in South America specially rich in complexity.

Writer and researcher Mario de Andrade in his book Danças Dramáticas do Brasil has documented a series of "folguedos", dramatic and ritualistic dances that incorporated traditional Amerindian dance styles. Although some of folguedos still exist, such as the Tore, scholars have categorized them as just a folkloric manifestation. Because very little was published about them, their various performative styles are packaged as a manifestation of "something lost in time". On the other hand, Amerindian populations are recuperating their own language. For example, the Kariri-Xocó group from the Northeast area has staged their own Toré in a sort of "restoration of behavior" using Richard Schechner’s definition. By learning with the elders, the ritual was reenacted and the dance is used again for healing as well as an entertainment. Master Tchydjo has taught the dance to his son Tekainan, and together they traveled throughout Brazil teaching the steps and movements to other groups. I had a chance to work with them when I staged the play Toré of the Sun and the Moon in Rio de Janeiro and when I brought them to the American Museum of Natural History and to the Department of Performance Studies in November 1999. I will show a fragment of their workshop with NYU students.

3

BLACK INDIANS

Slavery for native-Brazilians officially ended in 1750, while for Afro-Brazilians it ended only in 1888. However, Euro-Brazilians could purchase Native-Brazilian slaves since they captured them in wars, then, they created many wars just to capture more slaves. Escaping from slavery, individual or groups of native Brazilians ran back to the forest in the direction of the interior of the country where they met not only other groups of Indians still not in contact with Europeans but also with individuals or groups of Africans victims of the same destiny – slavery. But they had in common much more than this – a strong spirituality that they were able to express through their bodies, not only adorning them, sculpturing them or scarring them, but modeling them to incorporate nature as animal, wind, lighting, and other mysterious aspects through dance/music and trance. Both cultures Indian, African, had a deep respect for nature, which they believed to be the house of the sacred and the ancestors. During the colonial period, it was clear that they had to fight a common enemy: it does not matter if they were Portuguese, French, or Dutch. In fact, they were together in the most important revolutionary movements even during the Empire (1822 to 1889).

I have recently initiated a research about the Quilombos dos Palmares, a famous republic created by former slaves in the Northeast of Brazil between 1630 until 1695. Although some historians have seen Palmares exclusively as an afro-Brazilian revolutionary country inside Brazil, others believed that a large contingent of Native-Brazilian had joined the afro-Brazilian communities that formed Palmares as Clovis Moura points out:

The Kariri-Xocó group, which had lived near Serra da Barriga, Palmares’ area, still believed that they are the people that taught the Africans about the most important spots in the mountains where they could hide themselves and organize their defense as guerilla movements.

The Palmares population created their own language by fusing diverse African and Amerindian lexicons. For example: Francisco de Brito Freire, Governor of Recife, had noticed this in 1678, when received the great leader Ganga Zumba and his court who came to discuss a possible agreement with colonial power he reported: "They spoke a language of their own, sometimes similar to the one from Guinea or Angola, other times close to Portuguese or Tupy, but it was none of them, rather a new one (Clovis Moura, after Yeda Castro, p. 46). If in Quilombo dos Palmares they had created an Afro-Amerindian hybrid language, how were their performances? A fusion of their own believes and cultural patterns? Since there is no written record about it, we have to take into account only oral traditions. In which case, how is it possible to continue our investigation? If we take other more contemporary mixed quilombos, can we trace parallels? Palmares is just a primary example of the exploration of how a focus on performance can open significant new areas of investigation.

I will end my presentation by showing a sequence of the documentary Diary of Amazons by Jeffrey O’Connor. It shows a black missionary who has lived in the area of Yanomani for several years in a respect relationship with a native Brazilian shaman. She came to bring Christ to the Indians, the same way the Catholic priests came with the first conquers. However, after a strong and prolonged relationship with the tribe, it's interesting that this nurse, when she has headaches, closes a ceremony of healing ministered by the paje -the shaman. She has learned that the "passe", a spiritual massage, also used in the Umbanda religion, is a traditional healing process employed by the Native-Brazilian. On different occasions, and it could work better then Aspirin or Tylenol. And there is no collateral effect.