Cinta Larga

The Cinta Larga ('broad belt', after the bark sashes men once wore) call themselves Matetamãe. They speak a Mondé language of the Tupi trunk and live in a large contiguous set of Indigenous Lands — Roosevelt, Serra Morena, Aripuanã, and Parque do Aripuanã — covering some 2.7 million hectares on the Rondônia–Mato Grosso border.

Theirs is historically a society of hunters, for whom the hunt is ritually elaborated and symbolically tied to warfare, complemented by fishing, swidden gardens, and gathering. Villages were traditionally autonomous, organized around big men and extended households.

The Cinta Larga's recent history is among the most violent in Amazonia. Rubber and mineral frontiers reached them in the twentieth century, including the notorious 1963 'Massacre of the 11th Parallel', in which prospectors attacked a village from the air. After official contact, the discovery of one of the world's richest diamond deposits inside the Roosevelt land drew waves of illegal miners; confrontations culminated in 2004 in the deaths of 29 prospectors, followed by federal interventions and repeated attempts to regulate or close the mines. The community continues to negotiate between mining pressure, timber interests, and the defense of an exceptionally large forest territory.