page_title: Indigenous peoples in Brazil
section_title: Origins
hierarchical_section_title: Indigenous peoples in Brazil / Origins
caption_attribution_description: Português: Aldeia Ipatse (Parque Indígena do Xingu) - A principal comunidade dos Kuikuro.
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: Questions about the original settlement of the Americas has produced a number of hypothetical models. The origins of these Indigenous people are still a matter of dispute among archaeologists.
caption: Xingu, an Indigenous territory of Brazil
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