Six letters in the Tupi language exchanged between indigenous peoples in the 17th century during the Dutch invasion of the Northeast Region were translated into Portuguese by Eduardo Navarro, professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences of the University of São Paulo (USP). For the first time, a researcher was able to translate the documents in their entirety.
“These letters are the only documents that exist, so far discovered, that were written by Indians in colonial Brazil, there is nothing left. Everything that is known about the Tupi language was written by Europeans. We had no documents written by Indians other than these single letters. They were then written during the Pernambuco Insurrection”, said Navarro, explaining that the modern historical study values the original sources.
In the letters, there are reports of indigenous people who were fighting in the war waged between the Portuguese and the Dutch. The natives converted to Protestantism were on the side of the Dutch who invaded Brazilian lands, which at the time was a Portuguese colony, while with the Portuguese were the natives catechized to Catholicism.
“In 1645, the war broke out, and it was there that some Indians on the Portuguese side, among whom the most famous was Felipe Camarão, wrote letters to their relatives who were fighting in the Dutch countryside, asking them to return to the Portuguese side, saying that the Protestant religion was sinful, that that was the same thing as being with the devil, things like that, saying if they don’t get off the Dutch side they’d be killed [pelos portugueses]”, said the teacher.
In the letters, according to the professor, Camarão asks his relatives Pedro Poti and Antônio Paraupaba, Protestant indigenous people, to abandon the Dutch. The natives on the Portuguese side also said that if the Portuguese won the war, the natives on the Dutch side would not be spared, they would be killed.
“The Dutch were spared to later serve as a bargaining chip when they were trapped like that in war. But not Indians, they were all murders. And that’s what he was saying in his letters: come over to our side while you can,” said Navarro.
According to the researcher, there is a lot of interesting historical information that will enrich knowledge about this war and that moment in Brazilian history.
Eduardo Navarro recalls that, when talking about indigenous people, what is known was written by Europeans. “These are letters that have greater value than other sources because they are writing what they feel. Felipe Camarão speaks, for example, of his anguish of no longer being able to live according to the traditions of his grandparents, that he wanted to gather all the Indians so they could return to the old life they had.”
The researcher points out the historical importance of the letters “which bring us information about the very pity of those who were dominated in colonial Brazil, the pity of the defeated in history, the Indians. And also from a linguistic point of view, it reveals the Tupi language that was slightly modified in the mid-17th century”.
This was the main language spoken in the first 200 years of the country’s colonial period, he said.
Translation
Studied since the 19th century, Navarro explains why it was only possible to translate them in full now. “First, spelling is difficult, these Indians were literate in Portuguese. Now, when writing the Tupi language, they used the Latin alphabet and wrote the way they heard, the way they spoke, there were no very precise rules and all this makes reading difficult for those who do not understand the language well.”
Navarro further explains that “afterwards, there was no dictionary that would bring together all this knowledge of the language [tupi] from Portuguese, French, and Dutch sources, all these nationalities produced texts. The Portuguese and French missionaries wrote grammars, dictionaries, vocabularies, but it was necessary to gather everything that was known in a single text”.
The professor was the first to bring together all these sources, when he published a Tupi dictionary eight years ago. From then on, according to him, it was possible to arrive at the complete translation of the six letters that are kept in Holland, in the Royal Library in The Hague.
“These documents are the most precious that exist in the field of Tupi studies, because they are written by the Indians themselves, there is nothing else that we know about that comes from the Indians in the Brazilian colonial period, from 1500 to Independence.”
The translation will be published in the Bulletin of the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, in Belém (PA).
Brazilian historian José Hygino Pereira was in Holland, where he found the letters. “He photographed the letters, in the year 1885, and delivered the letters into the hands of the engineer Teodoro Sampaio, who was also a student of Tupi. And he will try to translate these letters in the year 1906”.
Navarro said that Sampaio wrote an article saying that he had only managed to understand something about two of the letters, but that the others were a real mystery to him.
Later, there was another attempt by another scholar at the translation, but also without success. “I learned about these letters in the 1990s, when the professor at Unicamp, called Aryon Rodrigues, tried to translate them. He went to Holland to get these letters, at that time there was no internet yet, but he couldn’t translate.”
Regarding the outcome of the situation of indigenous people on the Dutch side after the war, Navarro said that the warning made in the letters came to pass. “The natives on the Dutch side were killed because the Dutch lost the war, there was no forgiveness for the Indians who were with the Dutch. Regarding Antônio Paraupaba, he died in Holland. He left with the Dutch and died there”.
Pedro Poti was captured by the Portuguese, suffered torture and died in 1649, according to the professor. “There are those who say that he died in a Portuguese prison and there are those who say that he died on the ship going to Portugal. In both cases, he was tortured, he was really badly treated,” he said.
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