page_title: Indigenous peoples in Brazil
section_title: The Jesuits: Protectors of the Indians
hierarchical_section_title: Indigenous peoples in Brazil / Native people after the European colonization / The Jesuits: Protectors of the Indians
caption_attribution_description: English: Map of Indian Reserves in Brazil. Deutsch: Karte der Indioreservate in Brasilien
context_page_description: Indigenous peoples in Brazil or Indigenous Brazilians once comprised an estimated 2000 tribes and nations inhabiting what is now the country of Brazil, prior to the European contact around 1500. Christopher Columbus thought he had reached the East Indies, but Portuguese Vasco da Gama had already reached India via the Indian Ocean route, when Brazil was discovered by Portugal. Nevertheless, the word índios was by then established to designate the people of the New World and continues to be used in the Portuguese language to designate these people, while a person from India is called indiano in order to distinguish the two.
  At the time of European contact, some of the Indigenous people were traditionally semi-nomadic tribes who subsisted on hunting, fishing, gathering and migrant agriculture. Many tribes suffered extinction as a consequence of the European settlement and many were assimilated into the Brazilian population.
  The Indigenous population was decimated by European diseases, declining from a pre-Columbian high of 2 to 3 million to some 300,000 as of 1997, distributed among 200 tribes. By the 2010 IBGE census, 817,000 Brazilians classified themselves as Indigenous.
context_section_description: The Jesuit priests, who had come with the first Governor General to provide religious assistance to the colonists, but mainly to convert the Pagan people to Catholicism, took the side of the Indians and extracted a Papal bull stating that they were human and should be protected.
  Jesuit priests such as fathers José de Anchieta and Manuel da Nóbrega studied and recorded their language and founded mixed settlements, such as São Paulo dos Campos de Piratininga, where colonists and Indians lived side by side, speaking the same Língua Geral (common language) and freely intermarried. They began also to establish more remote villages peopled only by "civilized" Indians, called Missions, or reductions (see the article on the Guarani people for more details).
  By the middle of the 16th century, Catholic Jesuit priests, at the behest of Portugal's monarchy, had established missions throughout the country's colonies. They became protectors of the Indians and worked to both Europeanize them and convert them to Catholicism. The Jesuits provided a period of relative stability for the Indians.
  In the mid-1770s, the Indians' fragile co-existence with the colonists was again threatened. Because of a complex diplomatic web between Portugal, Spain and the Vatican, the Jesuits were expelled from Brazil and the missions confiscated and sold.
  By 1800, the population of Brazil had reached approximately 3.25 million, of which only 250,000 were indigenous. And for the next four decades, the Indians were largely left alone.
caption: Map of indigenous territories in Brazil.
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