WITHOUT THE 'TAPUIAS' THE ‘SERTÃO’ IS NOT CONQUERED

MILITARY ACTION AND NEGOTIATION OF ARCHERS, GUIDES AND TRANSLATORS KARIRI AND TARAIRIÚ IN THE CONQUEST OF BRAZIL’S NORTHERN CAPTAINCIES IN THE XVIITH CENTURY

Resumen

This paper studies the military performance of the Kariri and the Tarairiú in the conquest of the hinterlands of the northern captaincies of the State of Brazil in the seventeenth century, reading their political agendas and their negotiation strategies from their engagement in colonial military structures. Considering the colonial war machine as fundamentally based on indigenous services and skills, but also on derogatory representations of these social actors, the paper analyses the diversity of forms of indigenous military action made indispensable in colonial expansion, as well as the bargains and negotiations that these actors built from their awareness of the dependence that the military structure had of themselves. To this end, it proceeds to a discursive analysis of the administrative correspondence between different instances of the colonial government of the State of Brazil according to the concept of indigenous protagonism as well as rethinking the very notion of conquest.