Tupi people

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section needs copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone or spelling.
You can assist by editing it now. A how-to guide is available. (September 2007)

"Tupinambá" redirects here. For the visual artist, see Yara Tupinambá.

A Tupi woman

The Tupi people is one of the main ethnic groups of Brazilian indigenous people, together with the related Guaraní. They first inhabited the Amazon rainforest^{[citation needed]}, then spread southward and gradually occupied the Atlantic coast. From the sixteenth century onward the Tupis, like other natives from the region, were assimilated, enslaved or simply exterminated by Portuguese and Spanish settlers, nearly leading to their complete annihilation, with the exception of a few isolated communities. The remnants of these tribes are today confined to indigenous reservations or acculturated to some degree into the dominant society. In southeastern Brazil they are an important presence in the genetic pool, while constituting a considerable portion of the lower classes in the North, Northeast, and Center-West. Their language originated from South America.

The Tupi people is a nation that inhabited almost all of Brazil's coast and the Amazon rainforest when the Portuguese first arrived there. Despite the fact that they were a single ethnic group that spoke a common tongue, the Tupi were divided into several tribes which were constantly engaged in war with one another. In these wars the Tupi normally tried to capture their enemies to later kill them in anthropophagic rituals, instead of just killing them in battle. Examples of tribes are: Tupiniquim, Tupinambá, Potiguara, Tabajara, Caetés, Temiminó, Tamoios and another one called the name Tupi itself, which shows that "Tupi" is a generic and specific term.

Tupi culture and language have a massive presence in Brazilian culture today and in the Brazilian Portuguese language. Some examples of Portuguese words that come from Tupi are: mingau, mirim, soco, cutucar, tiquinho, perereca, tatu The names of several local fauna and flora are derived from the Tupi language. A number of places and cities in modern Brazil are named in Tupi.

The tupinambá tribe is fictitiously portrayed in Nelson Pereira dos Santos' satirical 1971 film, Como Era Gostoso o Meu Francêsin (Oh, How My Lil' Frenchman Was Tasty).

The Guarani is a different nation inhabitant of southern Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay and northern Argentina that speaks Guarani, another language, but it is usually thought to be the same group as Tupi.