Camarão Indians' letters

'''Camarão Indians' letters** () is the name for six letters the Potiguara Indians wrote during 1645. They were written because of the Dutch Invasion of Brazil. They are also known as **Tupi letters from Camarão Indians''' ().   They are the only known texts written by Brazilian Indians until the Independence of Brazil. The Camarão Indians' letters are also the only record of Old Tupi writing in Colonial Brazil. Today, the letters are in the archives of the Royal Library of the Netherlands; they have been there for almost 400 years.

The letters are known since 1885. People tried to translate them, but failed.  Eduardo de Almeida Navarro, a philologist , published the first complete translation in October 2022. He also transcribed the letters, and left some comments.

A seventh letter was later found in the National Archive, in the city of Rio de Janeiro.

## Context 
In 1624, the Dutch organized an invasion of the Brazilian Northeast. They did this using the West India Company. They were not successful. They later returned to Europe with some natives. Among them we Antonio Paraupaba and Pedro Poti. Both converted to Calvinism in Europe, where they lived for five years. Sampaio confessed that only with great difficulty could he understand them, and he could not translate them all. He therefore limited himself to only two letters.

Until the 1990s, there are no other documented attempts at translating them. In the 1990s, Aryon Rodrigues, a professor at Unicamp and a linguist went to the Netherlands, to look for them. He tried to translate them, but was unable to.  At the same time, philiogist  Eduardo de Almeida Navarro came in cxontact with the letters. He said the were hard to translate, because there were no Tupi dictionaries. In 2013,  Eduardo Navarro published published a dictionary. He also devoted himself to the letters, and produced a microfilm version.  This versionis at the Hague Library.

Eight years later, in 2021, , Eduardo Navarro announced that he had translated the six letters. This was widely covered by the Brazillian press. The transcription and annotated full translation of the Camarão Indians' letters were published in the periodical *Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi* in October 2022.

### Challenges 
According to Eduardo Navarro, the letters' contents were mysterious because few people knew about the  Tupi language,  Few systematic studies about the language, such as dictionaries, had been created.

In general, the letters show that the  Indians were disstified with the dituation  they were in. They are desperate efforts in an attempt to save their people from destruction,

Furthermore, the letters of the Camarão Indians also help to understand the linguistic evolution of Old Tupi, influenced by Portuguese. In fact, these writings display the use of the gerund in constructions analogous to the Portuguese "" (I'm speaking), when it was Tupi's nature to invert this logic and say "falo estando" ([I] speak being).

The letters also reveal the predominance of a subject-verb-object syntax ( — "" [I have sent my soldiers there]), although there were still examples of subject-object-verb syntax ( — "" [there also two women I sent]), primitive Tupi tendency, as recorded in  texts.

### Popular culture 
In March 2022, Natal mayor  met with Eduardo Navarro and agreed that the city would distribute didactic material about the letters to public school students and tourists. The mayor showed his intention to democratize the access to information about the correspondence between the Potiguaras.

## Related pages 
* Protestantism

## Notes 
## References 
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## Other websites 
* *Cartas tupis dos Camarões*, by Teodoro Sampaio, at 
* *Cartas de indígenas potiguaras*, by Cerno e Obermeier, at Curt Nimuendajú Digital Library
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