Gtac 047

THE UPROOTING OF INDIGENOUS
WOMEN’S HORTICULTURAL
PRACTICES IN BRAZIL, 1500–1650*
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/past/article/262/1/45/7087126 by guest on 26 May 2024

I
INTRODUCTION
In 1562 the missionary Leonardo do Vale informed the Jesuit pro-

vincial in Lisbon that ‘a disease so strange that, by chance, these
lands had never seen anything like it’ had arrived in Brazil. Writing
from Bahia in north-eastern Brazil, he reported to Gonçalo do Vaz
that the effects of smallpox had devastated the Indigenous popu-
lation along the coast and into the sprawling Atlantic Forest and
plains of the sertão (hinterlands). In the mission villages of Nossa
Senhora da Assunção, São Miguel and Santa Cruz de Taparica
(Itaparica), wrote Vale, 120 men had fallen ill, while many ‘fathers,
sons, and kinsmen’ had died. But ‘the worst thing is that the moth-
ers, the sisters, and the wives [are dying], for they are the ones
who do everything, except for cutting down trees, which men do’.
By contrast, the women ‘plant, grind, and gather [the mandioca
root], and make the flour and cook [it]’. When they fell ill, ‘there
is no one to care for the sick or to get water from the spring’.1
* I am grateful to the participants at the Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality–

Inequality in Latin America Colloquium, in particular Vanessa Massuchetto and Roberta
Hesse, for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article. I am further grateful
to Guilherme Horst Duque, Kate Fullagar, Emma Gleadhill and Carolyn James for their
comments and suggestions, which substantially improved the final version. I also wish to
thank the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung and the Renaissance Society of
America for supporting the research on which this article is based.
1
Leonardo do Vale to Gonçalo Vaz de Melo, Bahia, 12 May 1563, in Monumenta
Brasiliae, ed. Serafim Leite, 5 vols. (Rome, 1960) (hereafter MB), iv, 9 and 12. All
translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
Past & Present, no. 262 (February 2024) © The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford
University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society, Oxford.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial reproduction and distribution of the work, in any
medium, provided the original work is not altered or transformed in any way, and that the work is
properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com.
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtac047 Advance Access published on 27 March 2023
46 PAST AND PRESENT
Without women, the horticultural life of an Indigenous village

ground to a halt.2
The cultivation of mandioca (Manihot esculenta, or cassava)
was vital to sustaining both Indigenous and settler communities.3
(Manihot is known by many names (and species) throughout Brazil
and Latin America. I have used the species Manihot esculenta and
the word mandioca because they appear most frequently in the

sources.) The mandioca plant itself is a woody shrub, about 2 to
2.5 metres high, with large leaves, green flowers and tuberous roots
(see Plate 1). It grew quickly throughout Brazil, and its roots were
used to make a robust flour that served as a vital source of suste-
nance that supplemented a diet of fish, game, wild honey and fruits.
Among Tupi-speaking Indigenous peoples, women were respon-
sible for planting, cultivating, gathering and preparing mandioca,
which included the use of the tipití, a tube woven from strips of reed
to remove cyanogenic glycosides, which can be fatal if not extracted
correctly (see Plate 2).4 Tupi-speaking women ground at least two
different types of flour from the root: a longer-lasting, drier starch
that could be stored for up to a year, and a softer, fresher flour used
to make unleavened bread.5
2
Women’s responsibility for horticulture in contemporary Indigenous
communities in Brazil is the subject of current enthnographical research: see, for
example, Joana Cabral de Oliveira et al. (eds.), Vozes vegetais: diversidade, resistências
e histórias da floresta (São Paulo, 2020); Karen Shiratori, ‘O olhar envenenado: a
perspectiva das plantas e o xamanismo vegetal jamamadi (médio Purus, AM)’,
Mana, xxv, 1 (2019); Fabiana Maizza, ‘Sobre as crianças-planta: o cuidar e o seduzir
no parentesco Jarawara’, Mana, xx, 3 (2014).
3
Luís da Câmara Cascudo, História da alimentação no Brasil, 4th edn (São
Paulo, 2011), 90–1. Horticulture is subsistence agriculture that relies on small-
scale farming or gardening practised with simple tools. Agriculture and farming are
large-scale practices that require greater interventions than growing and harvesting
plants. Peter Bellwood, First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies (Malden,
MA, 2004), 13. Mandioca is still widely consumed today in Brazil and elsewhere in
Latin America, but the staple carbohydrate is probably rice. Wheat bread returned
to favour as a food of the elite as mandioca came to be associated with enslaved and
poorer people.
4
I use ‘Tupi-speaking’ to refer to Indigenous peoples who spoke the Tupi language
and shared what was later termed a ‘Tupi-Guarani culture’ owing to a lack of sources
correctly naming different nations: John M. Monteiro, Blacks of the Land: Indian Slavery,
Settler Society, and the Portuguese Colonial Enterprise in South America, ed. and trans. James
P. Woodard and Barbara Weinstein (Cambridge, 2018), 9.
5
João Azevedo Fernandes, De cunhã a mameluca: a mulher Tupinambá e o
nascimento do Brasil (João Pessoa, 2003), 64.
INDIGENOUS WOMEN’S HORTICULTURE IN BRAZIL 47
1. ‘Mandioqua’. From Frei Cristóvão de Lisboa, História dos animais e árvores

do Maranhão (c.1625–1631). Courtesy of the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino,
Portugal, Conselho Ultramarino, Livros do Maranhão e Grão-Pará, Cod. 1660, f.
110.
48 PAST AND PRESENT
When Europeans arrived at the turn of the sixteenth century,

mandioca flour (or farinha) quickly replaced wheat bread as the
staple carbohydrate for colonists.The Jesuit Luís de Grã reported
in 1554 that ‘we have not consumed wheat bread since we were
in Portugal . . . the land’s victuals are wooded roots, which they
call mandioca, aipim, and carimã’.6 In 1587 the plantation owner
Gabriel Soares de Sousa wrote that the first governors-general

of Brazil, the highest authorities in the colony, all ate mandi-
oca bread because wheat bread ‘did not agree with them, and
many other people did likewise’.7 Similarly, slave raiders, both
European and mameluco (of both Indigenous and European
descent), relied on farinha to sustain their ventures into the
sertão in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries because it
was an energy-dense starch that could supplement game and
fish on expeditions.8 It was also exported to Luanda in the six-
teenth century, where it was used to feed enslaved Africans on
the voyage to Brazil.9 Mandioca horticulture, in other words,
was crucial to the colonization of Portuguese America.10
There is a large body of scholarship on natural knowledge and
its centrality to early modern European expansion.11 Historians
6
Luís de Grã to Ignatius of Loyola, Bahia, 27 Dec. 1554, MB, ii, 131. Grã
goes on to say that aipim (sweet mandioca) can be eaten raw because it lacks the
poisonous fluid in bitter, or bravo ‘angry’, mandioca.
7
Gabriel Soares de Sousa, Tratado descritivo do Brasil em 1587, ed. Francisco
Adolfo de Varnhagen (São Paulo, 1971), 180.
8
Mameluco is a word originally of Arabic origin to refer to Caucasian slaves.
The Portuguese, or rather, the Jesuits, adopted it to refer to children born of a
Portuguese father and an Indigenous mother. Alida C. Metcalf, Go-Betweens and
the Colonization of Brazil, 1500–1600 (Austin, 2005), 95; Frei Vicente do Salvador,
História do Brasil, 1500–1627 (Brasilia, 2010), 84.
9
Francisco Alfredo Morais Guimarães, ‘Povos indígenas no Brasil e as lições da
floresta cultural: a revolução da cultura da mandioca na economia do atlântico sul
e no continente africano’, Pontos de Interrogação, iv, 2 (2014). See also Frederico
Freitas, ‘The South Atlantic Columbian Exchange’, Europe, x (2019); Luiz Felipe
de Alencastro, O trato dos viventes: formação do Brasil no Atlântico Sul, séculos XVI e
XVII, 1st edn (São Paulo, 2000), 91–2.
10
Fernandes briefly mentions the practice in De cunhã a mameluca, 76. See also
Roberto Cruz, ‘Usos e apropriações da farinha de mandioca na colonização do
estado do Maranhão e Grão-Pará’, Fronteras de la Historia, xviii, 1 (2013).
11
See, for example, James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (eds.), Science and Empire
in the Atlantic World (London, 2007); Daniela Bleichmar et al. (eds.), Science in the
Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800 (Stanford, 2009); Zaheer Baber, ‘The
Plants of Empire: Botanic Gardens, Colonial Power and Botanical Knowledge’,
Journal of Contemporary Asia, xlvi, 4 (2016).
2. Tipití, a tube made from reed strips, braided diagonally to allow the tube to expand and extend during juicing.
Courtesy of the Museu do Índio Embú das Artes, São Paulo, Brazil. Foto Arena LTDA/ Alamy Stock Photo.
INDIGENOUS WOMEN’S HORTICULTURE IN BRAZIL
49

50 PAST AND PRESENT
of science and medicine have amply demonstrated how colo-

nial collectors, naturalists and healers were fundamental to the
growth of commercial enterprises and the establishment of colo-
nial hospitals and healthcare systems.12 From the acquisition of
profitable goods to the identification of botanicals with signif-
icant curative properties, the accumulation of natural knowl-
edge enabled European powers to consolidate their claims to

overseas territories in diverse ways. Various groups, including
missionaries, merchants and naturalists, have been the sub-
ject of engaging analyses that chart the collection and classifi-
cation of plants native to the Americas, Asia and Africa.13 The
results of their efforts circulated in sixteenth- and seven-
teenth-century European salons, and in private and public
botanical gardens, which led scholars like Bruno Latour to
emphasize the importance of these European ‘centres of calcu-
lation’ where specimens were exposed to assiduous study and
practical application by men of science.14
While these studies have shed considerable light on early
modern European epistemologies, the treatment of natu-
ral knowledge as a set of ‘universal, transportable facts’ has
attracted significant criticism for its erasure of Indigenous
agency.15 Recent scholarly investigations have instead favoured
12
See, for example,Vinita Damodaran, Anna Winterbottom and Alan Lester (eds.),
The East India Company and the Natural World (London, 2015); Pratik Chakrabarti,
Medicine and Empire, 1600–1960 (Basingstoke, 2013); Londa Schiebinger and
Claudia Swan (eds.), Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early
Modern World (Philadelphia, 2007); Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature:
The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution (Austin, 2006).
13
Steven J. Harris, ‘Jesuit Scientific Activity in the Overseas Missions, 1540–
1773’, Isis, xcvi, 1 (2005); Andrés I. Prieto, Missionary Scientists: Jesuit Science in
Spanish South America, 1570–1810 (Nashville, 2011).
14
Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans.
Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA, 2004), 136.
15
Jordan Kellman, ‘Nature, Networks, and Expert Testimony in the Colonial
Atlantic: The Case of Cochineal’, Atlantic Studies, vii, 4 (2010), 374. See too David
Turnbull, ‘Travelling Knowledge: Narratives, Assemblage and Encounters’, in Marie
Noëlle Bourguet, Christian Licoppe and H. Otto Sibum (eds.), Instruments,Travel and
Science: Itineraries of Precision from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (London,
2002); Neil Safier, ‘Global Knowledge on the Move: Itineraries, Amerindian
Narratives, and Deep Histories of Science’, Isis, ci, 1 (2010); Pablo F. Gómez, The
Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic
(Chapel Hill, 2017); Kathleen S. Murphy, ‘Translating the Vernacular: Indigenous
and African Knowledge in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic’, Atlantic Studies,
viii, 1 (2011).
an approach that examines how Indigenous communities
shared or withheld knowledge.16 As Anna Winterbottom has
suggested, Indigenous informants were not ‘passive yielders of
information’ but historical actors who interacted with settlers
based on individual and group dynamics.17 As a result, the his-
toriography has moved away from metropolitan centres to the
sites and communities in which knowledge was originally cir-

culated. This has also allowed for the introduction of African
actors whose botanical and medical knowledges during the
Columbian Exchange were vital to the successful transplanta-
tion of crops between different biomes.18
Analyses of the interactions and tensions between local,
African and settler epistemologies have yielded significant fruit,
but gender is curiously absent from most scholarly approaches.
With the exception of Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s formulation
of ‘chivalric epistemology’, examinations of the ways in which
gender norms affected the production of scientific knowledge
are an infrequent feature of the history of science and medi-
cine.19 This is perhaps due to the complex nature of any inquiry
into historical Indigenous knowledges. Descriptions of cultural
traditions at the time of contact survive in a fragmented source
base constructed exclusively from colonizer records, which, as
the environmental historians Melissa Leach and Cathy Green
argue, make it dangerous to generalize about resource strategies
16
Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of
Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (Basingstoke, 2007), 138.
17
Anna Winterbottom, Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World
(Basingstoke, 2016), 19.
18
Alfred W. Crosby Jr, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences
of 1492, 1st paperback edn (Westport, CT, 1972). See, for example, Júnia Ferreira
Furtado, ‘Tropical Empiricism: Making Medical Knowledge in Colonial Brazil’,
in Delbourgo and Dew (eds.), Science and Empire in the Atlantic World; Judith A.
Carney, ‘“ With Grains in her Hair ”: Rice in Colonial Brazil’, Slavery and Abolition,
xxv, 1 (2004); Robert Voeks, ‘Ethnobotany of Brazil’s African Diaspora: The Role
of Floristic Homogenization’, in Robert Voeks and John Rashford (eds.), African
Ethnobotany in the Americas (New York, 2013); Case Watkins, ‘African Oil Palms,
Colonial Socioecological Transformation and the Making of an Afro-Brazilian
Landscape in Bahia, Brazil’, Environment and History, xxi, 1 (2015).
19
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History
of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford, 2007), ch. 1.
52 PAST AND PRESENT
and attitudes towards the land.20 Nevertheless, these are the

sources that remain.21 Despite their limitations, they can reveal
much about the connections between Indigenous women and
their knowledges of the land, and the appropriation of these
knowledges by settlers.
Drawing on a broad body of sources to historicize Indigenous
peoples and their charged interactions with settlers, missionaries

and naturalists, this article investigates how European colonists
identified, exploited, assimilated, suppressed and, finally, alien-
ated Indigenous women’s knowledges from their original hold-
ers between 1500 and 1650. In four sections, I demonstrate that
travellers initially commented extensively on female leadership
in Indigenous communities in relation to mandioca. However,
the arrival of the Jesuits and the increase in sugar plantations
and enslaved Africans in north-eastern Brazil culminated in the
decreased presence of Indigenous women in European textual
sources as they were replaced by mameluca and enslaved African
women. By the 1630s and 1640s, Indigenous women’s involve-
ment had been expunged. This story of forgetting reveals that
Europeans exploited and erased Indigenous knowledge hold-
ers and used the knowledges they had acquired to facilitate the
economic, religious and scientific colonization of the land now
known as Brazil.22
20
See Melissa Leach and Cathy Green, ‘Gender and Environmental History:
From Representation of Women and Nature to Gender Analysis of Ecology and
Politics’, Environment and History, iii, 3 (1997), 353. See also Nancy C. Unger,
‘Women and Gender: Useful Categories of Analysis in Environmental History’, in
Andrew C. Isenberg (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History (Oxford,
2014).
21
See Kate Fullagar, The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age
of Empire (New Haven, 2020), 7–10. There are no sources written by Indigenous
women during this period; their voices survive in missionary records, chronicles,
traveller accounts and scientific treatises. However, six letters exchanged by
Indigenous men in the mid seventeenth century were found in the Dutch archives:
Theodoro Sampaio, ‘Cartas tupis dos Camarões’, Revista do Instituto Arqueológico
Histórico e Geográfico Pernambucano, xii, 68 (1906).
22
See Paul Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and
David Pellauer (Chicago, 2004).
II
GENDERING AGRICULTURE
Between two and ten million women and men lived in the
land today known as Brazil (see Map) and spoke between six
hundred and a thousand languages prior to the arrival of the
Europeans.23 The latter first came into contact with groups of

coastal Indigenous peoples who had migrated from the valleys of
the Amazon and spoke languages that belonged to the Tupi lan-
guage family.24 These Tupi-speaking peoples had named the lit-
toral Pindorama (Land of the Palms) and lived in semi-nomadic
communities where they cleared the land to grow a variety of
tubers, legumes and gourds.25 They had taken mandioca with
them from the Brazilian Cerrado, a region of savannah south of
the Amazon rainforest, where they had domesticated the plant
in the early Holocene, at least ten thousand years ago.26 The
agricultural knowledge required to remove the poison from cer-
tain species of mandioca was, in one version of the myth, trans-
mitted by Sumé, a cultural hero among Tupi-speaking peoples
who was either an older man or an older woman sent by Tupã, a
thunder deity, after a great flood.27
23
On the number of Indigenous peoples in Brazil at the time of colonization, see
Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, ‘Introdução a uma história indígena’, in Manuela
Carneiro da Cunha and Francisco M. Salzano (eds.), História dos índios no Brasil
(São Paulo, 1992), 14. On Indigenous languages, see Luciana Storto, Línguas
indígenas: tradição, universais e diversidade (Campinas, 2019).
24
Moacyr Soares Pereira, Índios Tupi-Guarani na pré-história: suas invasões do
Brasil e do Paraguay, seu destino após o descobrimento (Alagoas, 2000), esp. ch. 10.
On later interactions, see Marta Amoroso, Terra de índio: imagens em aldeamentos do
Império (São Paulo, 2015).
25
Pereira, Índios Tupi-Guarani na pré-história, 13, 66.
26
Christian Isendahl, ‘The Domestication and Early Spread of Manioc (Manihot
esculenta Crantz): A Brief Synthesis’, Latin American Antiquity, xxii, 4 (2011), 456.
See also, more broadly, Laura P. Furquim et al., ‘Facing Change through Diversity:
Resilience and Diversification of Plant Management Strategies during the Mid
to Late Holocene Transition at the Monte Castelo Shellmound, SW Amazonia’,
Quaternary, iv, 1 (2021); Michael J. Heckenberger et al., ‘Pre-Columbian Urbanism,
Anthropogenic Landscapes, and the Future of the Amazon’, Science, cccxxi, 5893
(2008).
27
Manuel da Nóbrega to Simão Rodrigues, Bahia, 15 Apr. 1549, in Cartas dos
primeiros Jesuítas do Brasil (1538–1553), ed. Serafim Leite, 4 vols. (São Paulo, 1956)
(hereafter CPJB), i, 117. Manuel da Nóbrega to Martin de Azpilcueta Navarro,
Salvador, 10 Aug. 1549, MB, i, 138. See also the myth of Mani: Daniel Munduruku,
Como surgiu: mitos indígenas brasileiros (São Paulo, 2020), ch. 5. There are, however,
many variations of this myth among different nations.
54 PAST AND PRESENT
The first Europeans to arrive in Pindorama in the early six-

teenth century were astounded by the abundant nature of the
land. Pêro Vaz de Caminha (c.1450–1500), a Portuguese fidalgo
(noble) who had accompanied the fleet of Pedro Álvares Cabral
(c.1467/8–1520) to Nhoesembé (Porto Seguro) in modern-day
Bahia, reported in a letter to Manuel I that the Tupiniquim peo-
ple who lived along the river Buranhém (or Peixe) ‘do not work

the land nor raise [livestock]’; indeed, ‘they do not eat unless it
is this inhame [yam] that is bountiful here’.28 Three years later,
Amerigo Vespucci (1451–1512), who claimed to have lived
in a Tupiniquim village for a month, clarified that ‘there are
innumerable different kinds of fruits and herbs, of which they
make bread and excellent food’.29 Vespucci did not comment
on women as the primary producers, instead describing their
nudity and their participation in ritual cannibalism.
At this time, Europeans had not yet learned the names for
mandioca, but its ubiquity among the Tupi-speaking peoples
along the coast was evident to observers like Caminha and
Vespucci, who emphasized its abundance to prospective colo-
nists.30 Although Caminha’s letter was not published until 1817,
Vespucci’s letters describing South America circulated widely
throughout western Europe in the early sixteenth century.31
Audiences were captivated by his prurient tales of nudity, polyg-
amy and sexual practices among the Tupi-speaking peoples as
well as the role of women in ritual cannibalism. For a time, his
letters were the main source of information about Brazil, until
European colonization gathered pace between 1530 and 1550.
In the 1530s, João III divided Portuguese America
into fifteen captaincies, which he apportioned to twelve
28
Caminha likely confused West African inhame with the similar-looking
mandioca: A carta de Pêro Vaz de Caminha, ed. Jaime Cortesão (Lisbon, 1967), 124.
29
Amerigo Vespucci to Lorenzo Pietro Francesco di Medici, Mar. (or Apr.) 1503,
in The Letters of Amerigo Vespucci, and Other Documents Illustrative of his Career, trans.
Clements R. Markham (London, 1894).
30
Alida C. Metcalf suggests that Vespucci was aided by a degredado (exiled
convict) left by Cabral, who acted as an interpreter: Metcalf, Go-Betweens and the
Colonization of Brazil, 37.
31
Ibid., 277 n. 1. There were at least fifty editions of the so-called Mundus Novus
letter in various languages by 1550: Alida C. Metcalf, Mapping an Atlantic World,
circa 1500 (Baltimore, 2020), 178 n. 32.
MAP OF BRAZIL IN 1534 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/past/article/262/1/45/7087126 by guest on 26 May 2024

The coloured portions demarcate the traditional lands of different Indigenous
peoples at c. 1500. The map of the captaincies is based on the work of Jorge
Pimentel Cintra, ‘Reconstruindo o mapa das capitanias hereditárias’, Anais do
Museu Paulista: História e Cultura Material 21 (December 2013), 11–45. The
distribution of Indigenous peoples is based on Atlas histórico escolar, 8 ed. Rio de
Janeiro: FAE, 1991, 12. Produced by the author.
56 PAST AND PRESENT
donataries.32 By 1548 this system had largely failed, and he

introduced a governor-general to oversee the remaining col-
onies.33 In particular, two captaincies thrived, São Vicente
in the south and Pernambuco in the north, and its settlers
began to build engenhos (mills), staffing them with enslaved
Indigenous women and men.34 Europeans built the engenhos
to process and export sugar to Europe, and they mostly

traded with Indigenous communities for stores of farinha
or relied on their Indigenous wives to produce flour for
the household.35
Europeans learned how to plant, harvest, prepare and store
mandioca from Indigenous women with whom they lived or
whom they had enslaved.While few settlers’ records have survived
from the first decades of colonization, many proto-ethnographic
traveller and missionary accounts recorded the agricultural
subsistence and cultural practices of Tupi-speaking Indigenous
peoples who lived in villages several leagues from European
settlements.36 One of the earliest bestsellers was Warhaftige
Historia und beschreibung eyner Landtschafft der Wilden Nacketen,
Grimmigen Menschfresser-Leuthen in der Newenwelt America gele-
gen (True History and Description of a Land of Wild, Naked,
Ferocious, Man-Munching People Situated in the New World
of America), written by the German mercenary Hans Staden
(c.1525–1576), published by Andreas Kolbe in 1557, and con-
sisting of 178 folios, fifty-five woodcut illustrations and a map.37
Staden was shipwrecked on his second voyage to Brazil and
captured by the Tupinambá people, who took him to modern-day
32
Américo Jacobina Lacombe, ‘Capitanias hereditárias’, Revista Portuguesa de
História, xvi, 1 (1976).
33
Siegmund Ulrich Kahn, ‘As capitanias hereditárias, o Governo no geral, o
Estado do Brasil-administração e direito quinhentistas’, Revista de Ciência Política,
vi, 2 (1972).
34
See Monteiro, Blacks of the Land, 34, 104.
35
Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society:
Bahia, 1550–1835 (Cambridge, 1985), 31.
36
Generally, archival records for the sixteenth century are scant owing to the
destruction of records through disaster or misadventure: see Marcelo Thadeu
Quintanilha Martins, ‘Resgatando arquivos: história custodial do fundo Secretaria de
Governo da Capitania de São Paulo’, Revista Brasileira de História, xxxviii, 78 (2018).
37
It was published in several languages and as many editions in the following
centuries: Hans Staden’s True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil, ed.
and trans. Neil L. Whitehead and Michael Harbsmeier (Durham, NC, 2008).
Ubatuba in the state of São Paulo. Fluent in Tupi thanks to his
military service, Staden persuaded the Tupinambá to spare his
life by curing a villager and correctly predicting a Tupiniquim
raid, thus impressing the village pajé (shaman). His linguistic
expertise enabled him to survive nine months in captivity, but
also to contextualize his experiences and observations through
a proto-ethnographical lens. The True History contains fif-

ty-three chapters followed by a thirty-six-chapter description of
Tupinambá customs. An entire chapter, the eleventh, is entitled
‘What They Eat for Bread; What Their Fruits Are Called; and
How They Plant and Prepare Them so that They Are Edible’.38
It is one of the longest and most densely illustrated sections.
In this eleventh chapter, Staden explains how women planted,
harvested and prepared different mandioca species according to
traditional knowledges. After the men had cleared the land by
cutting down trees and setting fire to the vegetation, the women
planted, ‘roots between the stubs’, using a stick to make holes
in the ground (see Plate 3). Within six months, the roots of the
trees could be harvested and prepared in three ways. First, they
could be ground against a stone to form fine crumbs and the poi-
sonous sap extracted using a tipití. The crumbs were then dried
and sieved to produce a bright white flour that was eaten fresh. A
second method involved soaking the roots in water, then drying
them over a fire to create a longer-lasting flour stored in clay pots
that were also made by women. The final method involved mix-
ing fermented mandioca with dried immature roots to produce
another type of flour that could be kept for up to a year. Staden
also describes the production of cauim, an alcoholic beverage
made by women, who fermented mandioca with their saliva, as
well as the prevalence of cauim in monthly festivities, also led by
women (see Plate 4).39 As a testament to mandioca’s spiritual
and nutritional importance to the Tupinambá, the True History
contains two detailed woodcuts showing the cycle of mandioca
cultivation, preparation and celebration as carried out by women
(see Plates 3 and 4). This is noteworthy because the publisher
38
Ibid., pp. xx, 114.
39
Ibid., 114–19. See João Azevedo Fernandes, ‘Cauinagens e bebedeiras: os
índios e o álcool na história do Brasil’, Revista Anthropológicas, xiii, 2 (2002); Renato
Sztutman, ‘Cauim pepica: notas sobre os antigos festivais antropofágicos’, Campos:
Revista de Antropologia, viii, 1 (2007).
58 PAST AND PRESENT
limited the number of woodcuts, reserving space for those that

depicted the most significant elements of Tupinambá culture.
The accounts of two French missionaries provide further
evidence of women’s agricultural practices and highlight their
importance to colonial and Indigenous societies. In 1555 Nicolas
Durand de Villegaignon (1510–71) led six hundred soldiers
and colonists in two ships to an island the Tupinambá people

called Serigipe (River of the Crabs) at the mouth of Guanabara
Bay in modern-day Rio de Janeiro.40 Two clerics, André Thevet
(1502–90), a Franciscan priest and cosmographer, and Jean de
Léry (1536–1613), a reformed pastor, founded Fort Coligny at
Serigipe, and both wrote discursive accounts of life among the
Tupinambá. Although these two men were compatriots, Thevet’s
cosmography situates Tupinambá culture within Western and
Christian paradigms, while Léry engages in proto-ethnography
and provides a largely culturally relativistic description of local
practices.41 As a result, Thevet delivers little insight into the
complex knowledge systems employed by Indigenous women,
instead lamenting how Tupinambá fathers offered unmarried
daughters to foreigners in exchange for items of value: ‘She is
beautiful’, one father told Thevet, ‘and will serve you well in all
your needs. She will provide you with fish, farinha and other
produce of the land; and will come and go on your errands’.42
Although Thevet was using the anecdote to criticize this parent,
he also inadvertently highlighted the economic and social value
of women’s knowledges to Indigenous and settler populations.
By contrast, Léry expands upon Staden’s account of mandioca
production and its socio-cultural context. Like Staden, he devotes
a whole chapter to the ‘big roots and the millet of which the sav-
ages make flour that they eat instead of bread; and of their drink,
which they call caouin’. He distinguishes between bitter and sweet
mandioca, the former containing lethal amounts of cyanide if
not prepared correctly, while the latter could be eaten roasted
40
Vasco Mariz and Lucien Provençal (eds.), Villegagnon e a França Antártica: uma
reavaliação (Rio de Janeiro, 2000).
41
See Driton Nushaj, ‘Topography and Cosmography in the Sixteenth Century:
A Window into Early Ethnography’, in Regna Darnell and Frederic W. Gleach
(eds.), Tracking Anthropological Engagements (Lincoln, NE, 2018).
42
André Thevet, La Cosmographie universelle (Paris, 1575), in André Thevet, Le
Brésil et les Brésiliens, ed. Suzanne Lussagnet (Paris, 1953), 137.

3. Men clearing the land and women planting mandioca. From Hans Staden,
Warhaftige Historia und beschreibung eyner Landtschafft der Wilden Nacketen,
Grimmigen Menschfresser-Leuthen in der Newenwelt America gelegen (Marburg, 1557),
139. Courtesy of the Bavarian State Library.
with little preparation. He then moves to cultivation, describing

how the women pulled up the roots, ‘for the men do not con-
cern themselves with this’, dried them over a fire, or ‘sometimes
[took] them green, and [grated] them on a flat piece of wood in
which certain little pointed stones have been set, just as we grate
cheese and nutmeg’. Léry praises the earthenware produced by
Indigenous women to store and cook mandioca and describes the
types of flour previously recorded by Staden. He emphasizes the
importance of cauim to Tupinambá society and the aversion men
displayed towards ‘meddl[ing] in the making of it’.43
43
Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Otherwise Called America:
Containing the Navigation and the Remarkable Things Seen on the Sea by the Author; the
Behavior of Villegagnon in that Country;the Customs and Strange Ways of Life of the American
Savages, together with the Description of Various Animals, Trees, Plants, and Other Singular
Things Completely Unknown Over Here, trans. Janet Whatley (Berkeley, 1992), 69, 71, 73.
60 PAST AND PRESENT
Léry was more attentive than Thevet to the gendered relation-

ship to mandioca and the cultural importance of women to its
preparation. After providing a recipe for cauim, he repeats that ‘it
is women who perform this task . . . the men hold the firm opin-
ion that if they were to chew the roots or the millet to make this
beverage, it would be no good’. He further explains that the men
‘even consider it as unseemly for their sex to deal with it as peo-

ple over here find it strange (rightly, I think) to see those great
clumsy peasant men of Bresse take the distaff to spin’.44 Léry
lived in an Indigenous community, but similar reactions were
observed in European settlements where Indigenous labourers
and enslaved men objected to agricultural work.45 This dissent
partly encouraged settlers to increase the traffic of West Africans
from the Gulf of Guinea to produce greater quantities of sugar.
It also helped to garner support for the Jesuits, who claimed that
their mission villages would transform young Indigenous boys
into Christian labourers and women into homemakers who
sewed and cooked but did not venture onto the land.46
III
INDIGENOUS WOMEN’S LEADERSHIP
The arrival of the Jesuits in March 1549 coincided with a

significant intensification of the colonization of Brazil, which
required, among other things, food security.47 The first mem-
bers of the Society of Jesus arrived in Bahia together with
the first governor-general, Tomé de Sousa (1503–79). Led by
Manuel da Nóbrega (1517–70), the first provincial of Brazil,
the Jesuits dedicated themselves to missionary work and
learning the Tupi language in order to convert from within
Indigenous villages by using local forms of persuasion.48
Jesuits also took converts to mission villages, where they built
churches and schools for evangelized Indigenous women
44
Ibid., 74.
45
Monteiro, Blacks of the Land, 20–2.
46
Manuel da Nóbrega to Simão Rodrigues, Pernambuco, 9 Aug. 1549, MB, i, 120.
47
Alida C. Metcalf, Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil: Santana de Parnaíba,
1580–1822 (Austin, 2005), 32–3.
48
See Adone Agnolin, Jesuítas e selvagens: a negociação da fé no encontro catequético-
ritual americano-tupi (séculos XVI–XVII) (São Paulo, 2007). See also Manuela L.
Carneiro da Cunha and Eduardo B. Viveiros de Castro, ‘Vingança e temporalidade:
os Tupinambás’, Anuário Antropológico, x, 1 (1986).

4. The production of cauim and its use in seasonal festivities. From Staden,
Warhaftige Historia und beschreibung eyner Landtschafft der Wilden Nacketen,
Grimmigen Menschfresser-Leuthen in der Newenwelt America gelegen, 143. Courtesy of
the Bavarian State Library.
and men as well as prepared land for larger-scale farming.

In August 1549, Nóbrega wrote that the ‘Indians of the land
help to build houses’, and that they had already started to
help the Jesuits to construct sugar mills, cotton plantations
and farms.49 The following year, converted Indigenous men
in Bahia spent ‘the whole week on the roças [cultivated farm
plots]’ to plant and harvest food, which ‘before only the
women did’.50 However, such compliance among Indigenous
men was not common. In general, the Jesuits found it dif-
ficult to persuade male converts to work the land. In late
August 1552, Nóbrega wrote to Simão Rodrigues de Azevedo
49
Manuel da Nóbrega to Martin de Azpilcueta Navarro, Salvador, 10 Aug. 1549,
MB, i, 135.
50
João de Azpilcueta to the Fathers and Brothers of Coimbra, Bahia, 28 Mar.
1550, CPJB, i, 179.
62 PAST AND PRESENT
(1510–79), a founder member of the Society of Jesus, men-

tioning that he had purchased enslaved Indigenous women
because ‘otherwise it is not possible to have roças in this land,
because females make the farinha and all other important
tasks are theirs. The males do little more than clear the land,
fish and hunt’.51
This was a rare example of reports of Indigenous women’s

practices reaching Jesuits in Europe. Many early letters from
Jesuit residents in Brazil describe the importance of farinha to
the health of the mission communities, but early items of cor-
respondence destined for Europe do not mention women at all.
In August 1549, Manuel da Nóbrega conveyed the potential of
Brazil to his colleagues in Coimbra in a wide-ranging report that
began with a brief description of the peoples who lived along the
coast, the climate and, almost immediately, a clear statement
that ‘the primary victual of the land is a wooded root, which
they call mandioca, from which they create flour, which we all
eat’. There is no mention of the technologies used in its produc-
tion or the gendered division of labour.52
Similar letters from the Jesuit missionaries Luís de Grã
(1523–1609) and José de Anchieta (1534–97), written in 1554
and addressed to Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), also omit
women’s knowledges.53 Anchieta, like Staden, explained that
mandioca was fatal if prepared incorrectly, but that the flour,
once roasted, would keep for months in clay pots.54 However,
confusing decomposition with sprouting, the latter of which
indicated that the starches had been converted into sugars,
Anchieta erroneously claimed that mandioca roots were soaked
until they rotted, and once decomposed were pulverized into
flour. On the contrary, placing the sprouted roots into sunlight
delayed rotting by creating solanine, a method also known as
chitting. Indigenous women understood these processes, and
51
Manuel da Nóbrega to Simão Rodrigues de Azevedo, Bahia, [late Aug.] 1552,
in Cartas do Brasil e mais escritos do P. Manuel da Nóbrega, ed. Serafim Leite (Coimbra,
1955), 141.
52
Manuel da Nóbrega to the Fathers and Brothers of Coimbra, Bahia, Aug.
1549, MB, i, 148–54.
53
Luís de Grã to Ignatius of Loyola, Bahia, 27 Dec. 1554, MB, ii, 131.
54
José de Anchieta to Ignatius of Loyola, São Paulo de Piratininga, 1 Sept. 1554,
MB, ii, 112.
Anchieta and Grã, who lived in Indigenous villages, presumably
witnessed their practices, but these missionaries chose to avoid
reporting on what they achieved. Unlike the French writers, the
Jesuits censored most signs of the knowledges generated and
sustained by women, as well as their broader cultural signifi-
cance for their European colleagues.
In correspondence and in practice, Nóbrega and his col-

leagues quickly sought to alienate Indigenous women from their
traditional cultivation practices. In 1550 Juan de Azpilcueta
Navarro (c.1520–1557) wrote to his colleagues in Coimbra to
describe how young Indigenous women had begun to inter-
nalize Christian doctrine and abandon Indigenous beliefs. He
recounted how ‘a young woman ignorantly went to the roça to
work and, beginning to toil, she developed a pain in her stom-
ach so strong that she was forced to return home immediately’.
When she arrived, the other women told her, to her shame, that
it ‘was a feast day, and that she was guilty of having gone to the
roça’. However, a priest appealed to God on her behalf and ‘God
used his mercy on her, because she only did it out of ignorance.
And from that moment, she was cured’.55 The anecdote serves
to show that conversion had begun to suppress cultivation prac-
tices as a source of individual and community identity among
Indigenous peoples.56
The Jesuits also repressed Tupi and other aspects of
Indigenous culture, such as nudity, to recast Indigenous women
as Christians.57 Indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans and set-
tlers all spoke Tupi, and some Jesuits learned the language to
fluency to produce catechistic tools, particularly for women,
who were not formally taught European languages.58 Since
not all Jesuits were fluent Tupi speakers, women who attended
church for confession did so through interpreters. The Society
of Jesus, however, did not welcome the use of interpreters; its
members claimed that allowing women to use their native lan-
guage was dangerous because it encouraged their traditional
55
João de Azpilcueta Navarro to the Fathers and Brothers of Coimbra, Bahia, 28
Mar. 1550, CPJB, i, 179.
56
John Hemming, Red Gold:The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians (London, 1978), 27.
57
See Roberto Gambini, O espelho índio: os jesuítas e a destruição da alma indígena
(Rio de Janeiro, 1988).
58
Hemming, Red Gold, 43.
64 PAST AND PRESENT
practices, including plant cultivation. According to the Jesuits,

language shaped one’s world view, and ‘as long as they do not
speak [Portuguese], they do not cease to be heathens in their
customs’.59 For this reason, they instructed young women to
wear European clothes and to learn to sew in order to approxi-
mate European examples of womanhood.60 Indigenous women
wore these European shirts and slippers with apparent discom-

fort, but the Jesuits generally praised their dedication to the
Christian faith.61
By contrast, older women, ‘who are so attached to their cus-
toms’, eschewed conversion and encouraged their communities
to decline baptism.62 In 1556 José de Anchieta reported that
‘some old women return to this [wild] life soon after baptism’,
and that an old wife of a baptized man, ‘no matter how many
times we teach her, can only learn just about nothing’.63 In
Espírito Santo (in the south-east) in 1559, a letter writer, proba-
bly António de Sá, reported to his colleagues in Bahia that many
older women refused baptism, even when close to death.64 This
was a surprise because the Jesuits had learned that the Tupi-
speaking peoples intensely feared death and often accepted bap-
tism when reminded of their mortality.65 Sá claimed that there
was nothing that the Jesuits could do to persuade the women,
and ‘many die in their stubbornness’. One elderly woman
on her deathbed initially agreed to be baptized, ‘but quickly
changed her mind to say no’.66 Such accounts frequently appear
throughout Jesuit correspondence, perhaps to emphasize the
59
Pedro Fernandes to Simão Rodrigues, Bahia, July 1552, CPJB, i, 361, 362, 365.
60
Rui Pereira to Fathers and Brothers of Portugal, Bahia, 15 Sept. 1560, MB, iii,
391.
61
Luís da Grã to Inácio de Loyola, Piratininga, 8 June 1556, MB, ii, 294.
62
Pedro Fernandes to Simão Rodrigues, Bahia, July 1552, CPJB, i, 365.
63
José de Anchieta to the Provincial of Portugal, São Paulo de Piratininga,
Salvador, [late] Dec. 1556, MB, ii, 314–15.
64
António de Sá[?] to the Fathers and Brothers of Bahia, Espírito Santo, [Feb.?]
1559, MB, iii, 20.
65
Metcalf, Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 99. On Tupi metaphysics,
see Hélène Clastres, La Terre sans mal: le prophétisme tupi-guarani (Paris, 1975);
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, ‘The Marble and the Myrthe: About the Inconstancy
of the Savage’s Soul’, Revista de Antropologia, xxxv (1992).
66
António de Sá[?] to the Fathers and Brothers of Bahia, Espírito Santo, [Feb.?]
1559, MB, iii, 20.
importance of educating young people, who would yield more
easily to Christian doctrine, the practice of which older women
declined in favour of their traditional horticultural and spiritual
practices.
Older women were also vocal opponents of the Jesuit recruitment
of young boys to mission settlements.67 According to a letter from the
Jesuit missionary António Blásquez to Ignatius of Loyola, mothers

and grandmothers resisted attempts to remove their children, some
as young as 6 years old, by physically blockading the paths out of
their villages. The morubixaba (headman) did not stop the women,
and there is evidence to suggest that the morubixaba were deferen-
tial towards certain older women who held significant authority in
Indigenous communities. In a letter written in 1552, putatively from
the ‘Boys of the College of Jesus in Bahia’, the correspondents wrote
about the ‘old women, whose advice men young and old are ruled
by’.68 Indeed, in Tupi communities, even the chief could be swayed by
his mother-in-law because on marriage a man moved into the maloca
(longhouse) of his wife’s family.69 Similarly, in a report from 1557,
António Blásquez describes how
The ancient witches rule the villages, and it is through them that [the
men] receive their counsel on war, and if [the women] wanted to per-
suade more to come to the doctrine, without a doubt they would be
more useful, and there would be a greater number of Indians, but it
is the exact opposite. They thwart and do not embrace the doctrine
and do not follow our customs. And, as a result, to work with [the
women] is almost in vain. They will never abandon the cultivation of
new plants, and the children.70
Here, Blásquez laments not only the domestic leadership of older

women, but also their connection to their spiritual-horticultural
practices, ‘the cultivation of new plants’, and links such customs
to the considerable influence they had as counsellors to the
headmen. Moreover, by labelling such customs as ‘witchcraft’
67
António Blásquez by order of Manuela da Nóbrega to Ignatius of Loyola,
Bahia, 10 June 1557, MB, ii, 379.
68
‘Letters from the Boys of the College of Jesus in Bahia to Pedro Domenech’,
Bahia, 5 Aug. 1552, in Novas cartas jesuíticas (de Nóbrega a Vieira), ed. Serafim Leite
(São Paulo, 1940), 148–9.
69
Hemming, Red Gold, 114.
70
‘Quarter of September of 1556 to January of 1557 by Brother António
Blásquez’, Bahia, 1 Jan. 1557, MB, ii, 352.
66 PAST AND PRESENT
(violations of natural law), and their practitioners as ‘witches’,

Blásquez invalidates their knowledges. In an age of witchcraft
and Knox’s ‘monstrous regiment of women’ rulers in Europe,
the influence and spirituality of Indigenous women challenged
Christian dogma and European gender norms in ways that frus-
trated members of the Society of Jesus.71 Even where mission-
aries relied on women’s knowledges in a secular context, it was

always framed negatively.
For example, in 1565, while living in an Indigenous village,
José de Anchieta learned how to cut an umbilical cord. After
he had concluded mass one day, he heard a great commotion
and interrupted an Indigenous woman, who was crafting clay
pots, to ask what had happened. She explained that a woman
had conceived a child with one man but, during gestation, had
begun to live with another man. As a result, the baby was con-
sidered illegitimate because it had been ‘mixed with two seeds’,
and an older woman, the mother-in-law, ordered that the baby
be buried. When Anchieta arrived at the infant’s grave, the child
was still alive, and he told the growing crowd that he would
raise him. The declaration generated laughter, except from one
older woman, who was moved to help Anchieta cut the umbili-
cal cord. According to the Jesuit,
Since I knew little about midwifery, I went to cut the umbilical cord
from the stomach, but an old woman grabbed my hand and said to
me: ‘Don’t cut it [like that] because [the baby] will die!’ And she
taught me how to cut [the cord]. I grabbed a cloth and gave it to one
of the women with whom I was lodging and who took care of me.
[She] and several other women came to nurse the child in such a way
that it lived for a month. He would have lived and grown had he not
lacked [a woman’s] chest, but for a lack of it he died. To be truthful,
he was wise to flee such bad people and go to heaven to enjoy his
Creator, who blesses him always.72
Older women, whether assisting or hindering the missionaries,

were always the target of their ire. Even though Anchieta was
lodging with and being cared for by women, he found all their
71
See Laura de Mello e Souza, The Devil and the Land of the Holy Cross:Witchcraft,
Slavery, and Popular Religion in Colonial Brazil, trans. Diane Grosklaus Whitty
(Austin, 2010); Sharon L. Jansen, The Monstrous Regiment of Women: Female Rulers in
Early Modern Europe (New York, 2002).
72
José de Anchieta to Diego Laines, São Vicente, 8 Jan. 1565, MB, iv, 152–3.
practices — horticultural, medical and otherwise — abhorrent
to such an extent that death was preferable to life among them.
After the 1560s and 1570s, either through natural causes or,
more likely, through the deadly epidemics and wars that dis-
proportionately affected the Tupi-speaking peoples, the Jesuits
reported fewer instances of women horticulturists. In the latter
half of the sixteenth century, settlers, who needed cheap labour

to work on the sugar plantations, subjected to slave raids the
Indigenous peoples who had survived the biological and mar-
tial assaults earlier in the century.73 Although the Portuguese
Crown introduced legislation to constrain Indigenous slavery
and force settlers to rely on day labourers resident in Jesuit mis-
sion villages, this was not successful, and increasingly settlers
and Jesuits sought enslaved Africans, especially in the north-
east.74 Indeed, Jesuit requests for West Africans began as early
as the 1550s, with a bid for ‘males and females, to produce food
and provision the household’.75 However, Indigenous peoples
still constituted the majority of the enslaved labourers who
sustained the economic projects of the settlers. The availability
of Indigenous workers was emphasized in late sixteenth- and
early seventeenth-century chronicles, which elided the conflicts
between European and Indigenous peoples in favour of narra-
tives that highlighted their simple nature and implicitly effort-
less enslavement. These same narratives also reframed mandioca
and other plants as crops given to Europeans from a bountiful
land, free of human agency.
73
Monteiro, Blacks of the Land, 39. Indigenous peoples could be enslaved
through ‘just war’, barter or by being ‘rescued’ (resgate) from ritual cannibalism.
The Portuguese Crown at times allowed and forbade Indigenous slavery based on
advocacy made by the Jesuits, but practice rarely aligned with royal mandates. See
Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society, 53.
74
Monteiro, Blacks of the Land, 39. The Jesuits tacitly condoned the bloody
campaigns led by Mem de Sá (1500–72), the governor-general of Brazil between
1557 and 1572, against coastal Indigenous peoples in Bahia and Ilhéus that resulted
in the surrender of formerly independent morubixaba. Their communities were
consolidated into existing settlements. Metcalf, Go-Betweens and the Colonization of
Brazil, 111–12. On disease, see Dauril Alden and Joseph C. Miller, ‘Out of Africa:
The Slave Trade and the Transmission of Smallpox to Brazil, 1560–1831’, Journal of
Interdisciplinary History, xviii, 2 (1987).
75
Manuel da Nóbrega to Miguel de Torres, Bahia, 8 May 1558, CPJB, ii, 455.
68 PAST AND PRESENT
IV
THE BOUNTIFUL LAND AND THE ERASURE OF ITS CAREGIVERS
Several secular chronicles from the late sixteenth century trum-

peted the abundance of mandioca to potential European col-
onists. Pero de Magalhães Gândavo (c.1540–1579); Gabriel
Soares de Sousa (1540–91); and an anonymous colonist, pos-

sibly Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão (1555–1618), a planta-
tion owner, or Bento Teixeira (c.1561–1600), a Portuguese
poet who lived in the north-eastern captaincy of Paraíba: all
wrote accounts of Brazil designed to attract Catholic settlers to
Portuguese America.76 The first chronicle, written by Gândavo,
appeared in 1576, published by Antônio Gonçalves of Lisbon.
Born in Braga in Portugal, Gândavo worked for the royal trea-
sury in Bahia between 1558 and 1572, and his experiences
formed the basis of the Tratado da terra do Brasil. In the chapter
entitled ‘Victuals of the Land’, the primary source of nutrition
for all inhabitants is said to be mandioca.77 Gândavo praises the
plant, its flour, its preparation and its recipes, providing more
or less the same knowledges previously conveyed by Staden,
Léry and members of the Society of Jesus.78 However, the chap-
ter concludes by stating that ‘with these victuals, the residents
of Brazil sustain themselves without spending excessively or
reducing their patrimony’. There is no mention of Indigenous
knowledges; instead their practices are buried in a later discur-
sive chapter that does not attribute cultivation to either sex. This
chapter frames the Tupi-speaking Indigenous peoples of Brazil
as naive and, implicitly, no barrier to Portuguese colonization.79
Ten years later, Gabriel Soares de Sousa wrote a descrip-
tive treatise of Brazil that included some details on the gen-
dered nature of Indigenous cultivation. Born in the province of
76
An anonymous manuscript also appeared in Purchas’s Pilgrims in 1625, which
briefly mentioned mandioca: ‘A Treatise of Brasill, Written by a Portugall Which
Had Long Lived There’, in Hakluytus posthumus: or, Purchas his Pilgrimes: Contayning
a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Lande Travells by Englishmen and Others, ed.
Samuel Purchas, 20 vols. (Glasgow, 1905), vii, 474.
77
Pêro de Magalhães Gândavo, Tratado da terra do Brasil: história da província
Santa Cruz, a que vulgarmente chamamos Brasil (1576; Brasília, 2008), 59–60.
78
On translations more broadly, see Larissa Brewer-García, Beyond Babel:
Translations of Blackness in Colonial Peru and New Granada (Cambridge, 2020).
79
Gândavo, Tratado da terra do Brasil, 60, 133–8.
Ribatejo in central Portugal, Soares arrived in Bahia in 1569,
where he established himself as one of the wealthiest colo-
nists.80 He owned two sugar mills and was the proprietor of
large swaths of land, cattle ranches, a residence in the capital
and many enslaved West African and Indigenous people.81 In
the 1580s, Soares travelled to the court of Philip II of Spain
(r. 1556–98; ruled as Philip I of Portugal, 1580–98) to petition

the monarch for access to lands along the river Opará (São
Francisco). In order to persuade the king, the colonist wrote
the 196-chapter Tratado descritivo do Brasil (1587) based on
his experiences in the Recôncavo region of Bahia. He used the
Tratado to demonstrate the fertility of the land in order to jus-
tify his proposed expedition.82 In this he was successful, and the
king made him the hereditary ‘Captain-Major and Governor
of the conquest and discovery of the river São Francisco’ in
1590.83
In the Tratado’s section on Tupinambá customs, Soares
observes that the Tupinambá people had developed gendered
horticultural practices to work the land. Like Staden and Léry,
he notes that men cleared the forest while the women were
responsible for cultivating and harvesting the tubers, grains and
legumes. However, Soares goes into greater detail than either of
his predecessors. Women, he writes, also planted ubtaim, a type
of maize, which they cooked or fermented, as well as yams called
yeti caraçi, and a sweet potato, jatica. They also understood ele-
ments of nutrition and energy density. When mandioca was in
short supply, they produced coconut oil from the coconut palm
to sustain their families. Peanuts (mãdu’bi), ‘something known
to exist only in Brazil’, were also a favoured crop to Indigenous
peoples and settlers alike. Tupinambá women planted mãdu’bi
by hand, a foot apart, in February and harvested in May. Indeed,
Soares makes it clear that women did not permit anyone else to
plant it:
80
Cláudio Ganns, ‘O primeiro historiador do Brasil em espanhol’, Revista do
Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, ccxxxviii (1958), 148.
81
J. F. de Almeida Prado, A Bahia e as capitanias do centro do Brasil (1530–1626):
história da formação da sociedade Brasileira, 3 vols. (São Paulo, 1945), ii, 247.
82
Serafim Leite, História da Companhia de Jesus no Brasil, 4 vols. (Lisbon, 1938),
iii, 453–4.
83
Francisco Weffort, Espada, cobiça e fé: as origens do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 2013), 134.
70 PAST AND PRESENT
Men are not allowed to plant or take care of [the peanut]; only Indian
and mameluca women may plant them. This is because their husbands
do not understand anything about farming, and if they or their [male]
slaves plant them, they will not grow. The females will [then] harvest
them, and, according to their custom, it has to be the same person
who planted them.
This short passage grants substantial insight into the relation-

ship between Tupinambá women and cultivation. Soares sug-
gests that they cared about the processes and rituals associated
with horticulture, particularly crops of significant cultural
value. He notes that after the women harvested the peanuts in
May, they did so ‘with much festivity’.84 Given that the harvest
occurred only once a year, it seems that the women took great
measures to ensure its success.
The belief that the person who planted the seed must also
harvest the plant is another sign that the crop, and the women
who tended to it, held an important place in Tupinambá culture.
Such beliefs must have evolved in conjunction with other ele-
ments of Tupi cosmology, elevating cultivation as a practice that
was more than subsistence agriculture: it structured society and
was a source of meaning. These rituals extended to the hearth,
where ‘These Indian women believe that if another person cooks
with a pot that they did not fabricate themselves, it will crack in
the fire’.85 It is clear from these snapshots of Tupinambá cul-
ture that women were proud of their horticultural and culinary
knowledges and positioned themselves as experts, especially in
relation to their menfolk. When Soares recorded details of the
seeds, the cultivation and the harvest, he was registering wom-
en’s knowledges that must have been shared only among other
women.
In the early seventeenth century, the anonymous author of
the Diálogos das grandezas do Brasil offered a similar vision of
Brazil to that of Gândavo, erasing Indigenous intervention
to suggest that the earth produces on its own, not because
of human (female) agency. The author celebrates the fer-
tility of Brazilian soil and its capacity to provide for all who
live on the land, ‘white, Indian, and slaves from Guiné’. Food
84
Sousa, Tratado descritivo do Brasil, 311, 182, 197, 184–5.
85
Ibid., 184–5.
security is promised without reference to Indigenous peoples
and their practices: a long section praises mandioca, describing
its preparation and the variety of dishes that could be made
from it. However, Indigenous women are only mentioned in
the context of their integration into colonial society: one of the
interlocutors notes that they wore long white linen shirts with
their hair tied with silk ribbon, ‘habits that the fathers of the

Society introduced among them assiduously’. Otherwise, the
author repeats the same tropes that extol the humble lifestyles
of Indigenous peoples in a tone similar to that of Gândavo. He
briefly mentions that the role of women was to make farinha
ready for when ‘their husband returns [home] from the roça’,
erroneously ascribing to men the responsibility for horticulture
and distorting Indigenous practices to reflect European gender
norms.86
About the same time, two Capuchin missionaries sent to an ill-
fated French colony produced writings that approximated the same
model. Claude d’Abbeville (d. 1632) and Yves d’Évreux (1577–
1632), along with one other companion, accompanied a fleet of
five hundred colonists sent by Marie de’ Medici (1575–1642), the
queen regent of France, to modern-day Maranhão in north-east-
ern Brazil, where they founded the city of Saint-Louis (São Luís)
to produce and export brazilwood and tobacco. Abbeville and
Évreux both prepared accounts of their time in Brazil, published by
François Huby in Paris in 1614.87 Like the Luso-Brazilian chroni-
cles, both treatises were designed to promote colonization to their
countrymen and stimulate investment in the new colonies. For
example, Abbeville notes that the primary victual of the land was
flour produced from mandioca roots; he explains the methods of
production and consumption, and he lists recipes for prospective
settlers.88 However, these texts also marked a transition away from
86
Diálogos das grandezas do Brasil, ed. Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão (Brasília,
2010), 207–11, 298, 304.
87
Claude d’Abbeville, Histoire de la mission des pères capucins en l’isle de Maragnan
et terres circonvoisines: où est traicté des singularitez admirables et des mœurs merveilleuses
des Indiens habitans de ce pais (Paris, 1614); Miguel de Asúa and Roger French, A
New World of Animals: Early Modern Europeans on the Creatures of Iberian America
(Aldershot, 2005), 148.
88
Abbeville, Histoire de la mission des pères capucins en l’isle de Maragnan et terres
circonvoisines, 229–30.
72 PAST AND PRESENT
the ethnographical texts of the sixteenth century to the empirical

treatises of the seventeenth century. Abbeville and Évreux were
entomologists, and they named many insects using the Tupi lan-
guage in treatises they wrote for European colleagues.89

CATALOGUING THE LAND AND RECASTING ITS INHABITANTS
The French Maranhese texts discussed above represent a tran-

sitional genre from Brazil’s initial ethnographical and mission-
ary accounts to the classification of the land following European
knowledge systems. The transition corresponds to a similar shift
in the social and economic landscapes of the colonies. In 1570
Indigenous labour constituted two-thirds of a plantation’s work-
force, while enslaved Africans constituted one-third, a pattern
that continued until the 1590s.90 In 1595, however, the number of
enslaved Africans trafficked to Brazil increased fourfold and con-
tinued to grow until, by 1650, the enslaved in Bahia were mostly
African.91 This was in response to the rapid rise in demand for
Brazilian sugar from the European market.92 In 1600 sugar repre-
sented 90 per cent of exports from Brazil, and in 1627 almost half
of Crown revenue was derived from sugar taxation.93 As demand
for sugar grew, Portuguese immigration and the Atlantic slave
trade increased, and the number of Indigenous peoples notice-
ably waned: mission villages in north-eastern Brazil had declined
between 1550 and 1590 from twelve to three, and Indigenous
peoples formed just 10 per cent of the population in the colony.94
Indigenous culture, knowledges and gender were discouraged in
89
Asúa and French, New World of Animals, 148.
90
91
Russell Menard and Stuart B. Schwartz, ‘Why African Slavery? Labor Force
Transitions in Brazil, Mexico, and the Carolina Lowcountry’, in Wolfgang Binder
(ed.), Slavery in the Americas (Würzburg, 1993), 96. The situation was different in
São Paulo: Monteiro, Blacks of the Land, 39.
92
93
Mircea Buescu, História econômica do Brasil: pesquisas e análises (São Paulo,
1970), 60; Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to
the Modern, 1492–1800 (London, 2010), 167.
94
Stuart B. Schwartz, ‘Indian Labor and New World Plantations: European
Demands and Indian Responses in Northeastern Brazil’, American Historical Review,
lxxxiii, 1 (1978), 51–2.
favour of European paradigms, particularly following the arrival
of the Inquisition in the 1590s.95
Among the late sixteenth-century arrivals were the Dutch,
in 1594, who had been granted permission to trade by Philip
II.96 This agreement was extended by the Twelve Years’ Truce
(1609) between Spain and the Dutch, and by the time the truce
ended, Dutch exports amounted to more than half of Brazilian

trade in Europe.97 However, the establishment of the Dutch
West India Company in 1621 precipitated the resumption of the
Dutch–Portuguese War (1602–63) and led the Dutch to invade
Portuguese America.98 An unsuccessful attempt in 1624 was fol-
lowed by a successful invasion six years later, in 1630, when the
Company gained control of the towns of Olinda and Recife in
the captaincy of Pernambuco, the largest producer of sugar in
Brazil, and gradually expanded control over the northern coast-
line.99 In 1637 it handed over control of Dutch Brazil (New
Holland) to Johann Moritz von Nassau-Siegen (1604–79), who
also captured the state of Ceará, on the north-east coast, and
Maranhão.
During his tenure, Johann Moritz invited the Dutch physi-
cian Willem Pies (or Piso; 1611–78) and the German botanist
Georg Marggraf (1610–44) to gather information on Brazil’s
natural world.100 As a result, the Historia naturalis Brasiliae was
published in two parts in 1648; the first, De medicina Brasiliensi
by Pies, and the second, Historiae rerum naturalium Brasiliae by
Marggraf.101 The Historia naturalis Brasiliae contains approxi-
mately 350 species and was the Urtext for Brazilian botany for
95
Ronaldo Vainfas, A heresia dos índios: Catolicismo e rebeldia no Brasil colonial (São
Paulo, 1995).
96
David Onnekink and Gijs Rommelse, The Dutch in the Early Modern World: A
History of a Global Power (Cambridge, 2019), 71.
97
98
Jonathan Irvine Israel and Stuart B. Schwartz, The Expansion of Tolerance:
Religion in Dutch Brazil (1624–1654) (Amsterdam, 2007), 8.
99
See C. R. Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654 (Oxford, 1957); Schwartz,
Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society, 177.
100
See E. van den Boogaart, H. R. Hoetink and Peter James Palmer Whitehead
(eds.), Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen, 1604–1679: A Humanist Prince in Europe
and Brazil. Essays on the Occasion of the Tercentenary of his Death (The Hague, 1979).
101
Georg Marggraf, História natural do Brasil, trans. José Procópio Magalhães (São
Paulo, 1942).
74 PAST AND PRESENT
almost 150 years.102 The detailed entry on mandioca is repre-

sentative of Marggraf ’s methodology: he explains that it was
native to Brazil; describes its appearance, height and flower,
and the type of soil and climate required for its growth; and
affirms that it grew indiscriminately, including in Angola. In
addition, he presents both the Tupi and the Portuguese words
for each term, demonstrating familiarity with Indigenous ways

of knowing. Finally, he provides recipes for the different types
of farinha and reserves special praise for the longevity of the
drier flour.103 A contemporary of Marggraf, another agent of the
Dutch West India Company, also notes that Indigenous, African
and European residents of Pernambuco used the plant’s leaves
for salads.104 However, aside from a brief mention of cauim and
the role of women in its preparation, women are not mentioned
at all.
By the seventeenth century, the strict division of labour
among Indigenous women and men had been erased in
European texts. A Dutch woodcut from 1624 of a sugar mill
in Pernambuco reveals the extent to which colonialism had
already significantly altered Indigenous practices (see Plate 5).
The print, published during the short-lived Dutch occupation
of Salvador, Bahia, between 1624 and 1625, depicts enslaved
workers milling sugar, farming and processing mandioca.
The image reads ‘mandioca [being] prepared for farinha’ and
shows the different stages of the plant’s production, just like
Staden’s woodcut (Plate 3). However, unlike Staden’s, this
cycle is worked solely by men. From the harvest and the rins-
ing of the mandioca to the grating, cooking and storing of it,
no women are involved in preparing the root for consumption.
Other Dutch accounts also observed Indigenous men working
fields to raise crops, especially mandioca, as well as serving in
the Dutch army. These seventeenth-century Dutch accounts
bear little similarity to the sixteenth-century descriptions of
102
Julie Berger Hochstrasser, ‘Visual Impact: The Long Legacy of the Artists of
Dutch Brazil’, in Michiel van Groesen (ed.), The Legacy of Dutch Brazil (Cambridge,
2014), 276.
103
Marggraf, História natural do Brasil, trans. Magalhães, 66.
104
Johannes Nieuhof, Memorável viagem marítima e terrestre ao Brasil, trans. Moacir
Nascimento Vasconcelos (São Paulo, 1942), 289.
5. ‘Pernambuco’. The different stages of mandioca production. From Reys-Boeck van het rijcke Brasilien, Rio de la Plata ende Magallanes
INDIGENOUS WOMEN’S HORTICULTURE IN BRAZIL
([Dordrecht?], 1624). The book is signed N.V.G. [Nicolas van Geelkercken?]. Paper. Engraving. 20.2 cm × 31 cm. © Brown University,
Providence, RI, 02912, John Carter Brown Library, box 1894.
75

76 PAST AND PRESENT
Staden, Léry and Sousa: the people are clothed, the women
are absent from the fields, and, most notably in the portraits
by Albert Eckhout (c.1610–1665), everyone is integrated
into society and, as Rebecca Parker Brienen argues, coded as
semi-civilized.105
In 1641 Eckhout was invited by Johann Moritz to paint a series
of eight portraits of men and women, including Tupi-speaking

Indigenous Brazilians (Plates 6 and 7), Tapuia (non-Tupi)
Indigenous Brazilians, enslaved West Africans and mamelucos.106
Three of the four groups are depicted as ‘recruits to civility’,
shown in plantation landscapes, clothed and either (in the case
of the women) offering the bounties of the fertile land to the
viewer, or carrying weapons suggestive of loyalty to Moritz (in
the case of the men).107 The Tapuia, however, are shown naked
and skulking among wild landscapes holding human body parts.
By contrast, the portrait of the Tupi-speaking woman (Plate 6)
emphasizes her colonized state: she works with bananas and
citrus, which were not native to Brazil, she offers her land to
the plantation owner, and she remains, in the words of a Dutch
clerk and illustrator, Zacharias Wagenaer (1614–68), ‘always
happy and well-humoured, notwithstanding [her] poverty and
misfortune’.108
In comparison, the portrait of the Tupinambá man (Plate 7)
shows a fresh mandioca root at his feet. Behind him, Indigenous
men hunt and fish to gather food for plantation owners, while
the mandioca root represents the farinha of the colonies. He still
has his bow, but he is clothed and ready to serve Moritz. In both
portraits, Tupi-speaking men and women are depicted with
food and linked to its abundance. As Brienen points out, the
cycle shows how the women and men of Brazil and Africa who
represented the Dutch West India Company’s presence in both
locations offered the colonizers gendered labour according to
European norms. The bountiful nature of the colony is further
105
Rebecca Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise: Albert Eckhout, Court Painter
in Colonial Dutch Brazil (Amsterdam, 2006), 112, 97.
106
On their diplomatic use, see Susan Broomhall and Jacqueline Van Gent,
Dynastic Colonialism: Gender, Materiality and the Early Modern House of Orange-
Nassau (Abingdon, 2016), 234.
107
Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise, 128.
108
Dutch Brazil, ed. Cristina Ferrão and José Paulo Monteiro Soares, ii, The
‘Thierbuch’ and Autobiography of Zacharias Wagener (Rio de Janeiro, 1997), 164.
6. Albert Eckhout, Tupi Woman, Brazil, 1641. Oil on canvas. 163 × 227 cm. Used
by permission of the National Museum of Denmark.
78 PAST AND PRESENT
depicted in Eckhout’s still lifes of both native and European

flora, including mandioca. The mandioca is portrayed in the
same way as Old World vegetables, representing the incorpo-
ration of Brazil’s natural resources and native peoples into the
Dutch colonial order and European scholarship (see Plates 8
and 9).109
Dutch representations of the colonial order in Brazil offer

no trace of the extent of women’s spiritual connection to the
land. The Historia naturalis Brasiliae, a text based on Indigenous
knowledges, was written in Latin and organized using Western
scientific paradigms. Perhaps more than any of the texts ana-
lysed here, it alienated women from their traditional knowl-
edges. Indigenous and mameluca women spoke Tupi and did
not attend school. The text appropriated knowledge without
attribution and without any means for women to access what
had been recorded and reordered about their practices. It was
not designed to attract settlers; instead, it represented a kind of
European ownership over local ways of knowing that had been
reformatted into European scientific knowledge. According to
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Western gender and episte-
mological norms, women could not be holders of knowledge, and
Indigenous peoples could not generate knowledge.110 However,
Europeans like Marggraf could take their ‘know-how’ and trans-
form it into valid scientific knowledge.111 The text’s publication
in 1648 coincided with the decline of Indigenous women and
men in European coastal settlements owing to disease and dis-
placement, as well as the ‘Golden Age’ of sugar production in
Brazil, which stimulated enormous imports of enslaved African
labour.112 Mandioca was food: its history irrelevant to the raid-
ers and plantation owners.
109
Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise, 193, 196.
110
Dorinda Outram, ‘Gender’, in The Cambridge History of Science, iii, ed.
Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge, 2006). On European perceptions
of Indigenous knowledges, see Justin E. H. Smith, Nature, Human Nature, and
Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton, 2017), 84.
111
Smith, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference, 84.
112
C. R. Boxer, The Golden Age of Brazil: Growing Pains of a Colonial Society, 1695–
1750 (Berkeley, 1969).
7. Albert Eckhout, Tupi Man, Brazil, 1641. Oil on canvas. 163 × 272 cm. Used by
permission of the National Museum of Denmark.
80 PAST AND PRESENT
VI
CONCLUSION
When the colonization of Pindorama began in the 1530s and

increased in the 1550s, Tupi-speaking women’s knowledges
were transmitted to Europeans, who learned the complex pro-
cesses of mandioca production. Portuguese and French settlers

were unfamiliar with the flora and fauna of the land, and there-
fore relied on Indigenous women, either directly or through
intermediaries, to share their understanding of roots like mandi-
oca and other native plants like peanuts, cashew and pumpkin.
The earliest written sources made clear that horticulture was a
gendered practice and that the cultivation, harvest and gather-
ing of crops held profound meaning for Tupi-speaking women.
Each woman cultivated her plot of land, and only she could
pull a root from her field or cook it using earthenware made by
her hand. Thus, cultivation was both a practical necessity and a
ritual that structured the social lives of Indigenous peoples and
their communities.
Over time, female leadership in the growing and production
of mandioca, as conveyed in European sources, was altered,
suppressed and finally erased through colonization. The Jesuits
described how they encouraged women to leave the fields and
replaced them with men and enslaved Africans. Alienating
Tupi-speaking women from their land constrained and suffo-
cated their cultural practices, especially the rituals associated
with mandioca. Although the Society of Jesus condemned the
enslavement of Indigenous peoples, the forced translocation of
Indigenous communities into mission settlements facilitated
their spiritual and cultural conversion into Christian agricul-
tural labourers. This, along with the repression of Indigenous
cultural expression and the devastation wrought by disease and
war, contorted Indigenous practices into acceptable Christian
forms, and thus, mention of women planters and advisers faded.
This silencing likely occurred in practice as well as in discourse,
such that the chroniclers were recording features of daily life
that they had witnessed.
By the seventeenth century, Brazil had attracted many colo-
nists who were tempted by sugar profits and an apparently abun-
dant land. Luso-Brazilian chronicles written to entice potential
settlers offered straightforward instructions on large-scale farm-
ing and agriculture deprived of their Indigenous context. Brazil

8. Albert Eckhout, Mandioca, Brazil, 1641. Oil on canvas. 93 × 93 cm. Used by
permission of the National Museum of Denmark.
was presented as a land of opportunity that provided freely to its

inhabitants with limited intervention required of the colonizer.
Most chronicles erased the connection between Indigenous
peoples and their ways of knowing, which facilitated the estab-
lishment and growth of plantations along the coast, fuelled by
the high carbohydrate content of Manihot esculenta. The femi-
nine ecological agency that had directed colonists to this plant
was ignored in favour of a narrative that encouraged settlers to
embrace a land that produced abundantly and with credulous
labourers who possessed no notion of money or want.
The invasion of the Dutch in 1630 heralded the arrival of
European humanism, and the desire to observe and record the
natural history of Brazil. The Historia naturalis Brasiliae increased
the separation between cultivation of the land and its knowl-
edge holders, justified by Western epistemological models. The
text treated the strip of north-eastern coastline under the con-
trol of Johann Moritz von Nassau-Siegen as an object of scien-
tific study, and barely acknowledged Indigenous collaborators.
82 PAST AND PRESENT

9. Albert Eckhout, Citrus, gourd and fruits, Brazil, 1641. Oil on canvas. 94 × 94 cm.
Used by permission of the National Museum of Denmark.
Although the entry on mandioca referenced Indigenous prac-

tices and offered instructions and recipes for the preparation
and roasting of the root, women were mentioned only briefly
in relation to the alcoholic beverage used in Indigenous rituals.
Their primary role in cultivation is only visible to readers with
knowledge of earlier European iterations of the plant’s utility.
Ultimately, European representations of Indigenous women’s
ecological knowledge of mandioca functioned like a palimp-
sest: their knowledge was erased and rewritten several times
over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries until it no longer
resembled the initial observations of Staden, Léry and Sousa.
This story of the diffusion, devaluation and textual disappear-
ance of Indigenous women as knowledge holders in settler
sources provides three contributions to colonial historiography.
Firstly, retracing the history of forgetting Indigenous women’s
agricultural practices has revealed historically silenced voices
in Western sources. Although the sources analysed here rarely
specified which peoples conveyed knowledge, let alone the
names of women, the early attribution of plant and horticul-
tural knowledge to women makes it clear that Tupi-speaking

women were environmental agents in Pindorama and early
colonial Brazil. Secondly, the textual decline of Indigenous
women’s interventions in cultivation indicates that their role
in colonial Brazil changed over time: from highly visible and
othered cultural informants to partially assimilated enslaved
or freed workers, wives and daughters (at least, in European
representations). Finally, interrogating the disappearance of
women provides texture to the peripheries of the primary colo-
nial narrative, writing women into a story that traditionally pri-
oritizes the macro-societal and economic patterns produced by
the sugar trade.
Jessica O’Leary
Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia

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THE UPROOTING OF INDIGENOUS

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In 1562 the missionary Leonardo do Vale informed the Jesuit pro-

* I am grateful to the participants at the Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality–

Without women, the horticultural life of an Indigenous village

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1. ‘Mandioqua’. From Frei Cristóvão de Lisboa, História dos animais e árvores

When Europeans arrived at the turn of the sixteenth century,

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of science and medicine have amply demonstrated how colo-

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and attitudes towards the land.20 Nevertheless, these are the

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The first Europeans to arrive in Pindorama in the early six-

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MAP OF BRAZIL IN 1534 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/past/article/262/1/45/7087126 by guest on 26 May 2024

donataries.32 By 1548 this system had largely failed, and he

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limited the number of woodcuts, reserving space for those that

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with little preparation. He then moves to cultivation, describing

Léry was more attentive than Thevet to the gendered relation-

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The arrival of the Jesuits in March 1549 coincided with a

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and men as well as prepared land for larger-scale farming.

(1510–79), a founder member of the Society of Jesus, men-

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practices, including plant cultivation. According to the Jesuits,

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Here, Blásquez laments not only the domestic leadership of older

(violations of natural law), and their practitioners as ‘witches’,

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Older women, whether assisting or hindering the missionaries,

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Several secular chronicles from the late sixteenth century trum-

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This short passage grants substantial insight into the relation-

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the ethnographical texts of the sixteenth century to the empirical

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The French Maranhese texts discussed above represent a tran-

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almost 150 years.102 The detailed entry on mandioca is repre-

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