Karajá

The Karajá call themselves Iny, a word that simply means 'us' or 'we'; the fuller collective form is Iny mahãdu, 'the Iny people'. 'Karajá' is an exonym of Tupi origin usually glossed as something close to 'big monkey', and it is the name outsiders imposed rather than the one the people use among themselves; the older Portuguese spellings Carajá and Carajás are best avoided in favour of Iny or Karajá as the community itself now writes it. They live along the middle and lower Araguaia river and its floodplain in central Brazil, across parts of the states of Tocantins, Goiás, Mato Grosso and Pará. Instituto Socioambiental's Povos Indígenas no Brasil records 4,373 people in 2020 from the federal indigenous health system Siasi/Sesai, against 2,532 recorded by Funasa in 2006 and around 2,900 estimated by ISA in 1995; English Wikipedia's claim of 45,000 members in the early twentieth century is not matched by any source consulted here and should be treated as unverified. The Iny are conventionally described in three subgroups whose names encode their position along the river: Karajá proper as Ibòò Mahãdu, 'people above'; Javaé as Itu'a Mahãdu, 'people in the middle'; and Xambioá as Iraru Mahãdu, 'people below'. Their language belongs to the Macro-Jê stock. Iny self-understanding is riverine to its core: origin narratives describe an emergence from a world beneath the waters of the Araguaia onto its banks, and the river remains the axis of both mythology and everyday life.

Iny territory is the Araguaia corridor: the river itself, its lakes, side channels and seasonally flooded grasslands, and the gallery forest that threads through the surrounding cerrado. Its centre is Ilha do Bananal, described as the largest fluvial island in the world at roughly two million hectares, formed where the Araguaia divides into a main channel and the Javaés arm before rejoining downstream. The year turns on the flood: waters rise through the rainy season, spread across the várzea and lake system, then fall to expose beaches where turtles nest and fish concentrate, and the ritual calendar tracks this cycle closely. Villages are sited on high banks that stay dry when the river is full. Several overlapping legal designations cover the island and the wider valley. Terra Indígena Parque do Araguaia occupies the southern and much of the western portion of Ilha do Bananal; Terra Indígena Inãwebohona and Terra Indígena Utaria Wyhyna / Iròdu Iràna also lie there, with Karajá and Javaé communities. The federal Parque Nacional do Araguaia covers the northern and northeastern part of the island and overlaps these Indigenous Lands substantially, reported at about 67 per cent of Inãwebohona and about 33 per cent of Utaria Wyhyna / Iròdu Iràna, a double designation that has produced persistent management conflict. Smaller Karajá areas exist further up and down the Araguaia, including communities in Goiás and in Tocantins outside the island.

The language is called inyrybe, 'the speech of the Iny', and belongs to the Karajá family within the Macro-Jê stock. Sources differ on how to count its varieties: Povos Indígenas no Brasil treats Karajá, Javaé and Xambioá as three languages, while English Wikipedia describes four dialects, Northern Karajá, Southern Karajá, Javaé and Xambioá; the disagreement is one of classification rather than of fact and should be flagged rather than resolved here. The best-known structural feature is systematic gender-differentiated speech: men's and women's forms of the same words differ regularly, and children acquire both. Vitality varies sharply by community. On Ilha do Bananal transmission is strong and children acquire inyrybe at home before meeting Portuguese at school; in communities with the longest and closest contact with surrounding Brazilian towns, notably Xambioá in Tocantins and Buridina at Aruanã in Goiás, Portuguese dominates and intergenerational transmission has weakened. Many Iny are fluent bilinguals and work as teachers, health agents, nurses and lawyers in Brazilian institutions. Documentation is comparatively good: the Museu do Índio's Prodoclin programme ran a dedicated Karajá language documentation project, producing a preliminary grammar and teacher-training workshop materials, and Karajá-language schooling operates in the larger villages.

Iny livelihood is built on the river. Fish from the Araguaia, its lakes and its side channels are the staple animal food, taken with hooks, nets, bows and traps, and in some seasons through collective operations using plant-derived fish stupefacients in enclosed water. Turtles and their eggs from the exposed beaches are a valued seasonal food. Gardens are opened in the forested strips on higher ground and planted with bitter and sweet manioc, sweet potato, banana, watermelon, maize, peanuts and beans; cerrado fruits, notably pequi and oiti, and wild honey are gathered in their seasons. Manioc is processed by women into flour, into beiju, the flat unleavened bread baked on a griddle that is eaten with fish at almost every meal, and into thick porridge-like drinks. The division of labour is broadly gendered without being rigid: men fish, hunt, clear and burn garden plots and build houses; women plant, harvest and process manioc, cook, and hold the entire ceramic tradition. Cash enters through several channels: sale of ritxòkò ceramic figures and other craft, salaried posts as teachers, health agents and nursing technicians, retirement pensions and federal transfers, and in some communities tourism along the Araguaia. For many families the sale of dolls is the single most important source of income, which ties an artistic tradition directly to household survival.

Iny visual culture is dominated by two bodies of work: ceramic figuration and body and feather adornment. The ritxòkò ceramic figures, made only by women, are the best-known Indigenous ceramic sculpture tradition in Brazil and are treated separately below. Body painting is equally diagnostic. The characteristic Karajá facial mark is a pair of circles, one on each cheek, applied in the blue-black dye obtained from genipap; red from annatto and white from clay round out the palette, and larger geometric designs in genipap are painted over the body for ritual occasions. Featherwork is highly developed and has been the subject of dedicated museum ethnography, with headdresses, diadems and ornaments composed from the plumage of macaws, parrots and other birds according to fixed colour and placement conventions. Basketry and mats are made by both men and women; men also carve wooden objects and stools. The tall ijasò or Aruanã dance costumes and headdresses, built from buriti palm fronds and worked fibre and always paired, are among the most striking objects produced anywhere in central Brazil, and examples are held by major collections including the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. Named individual makers are recorded in the IPHAN heritage documentation and in museum catalogues, but this session's sources did not yield a reliable public list of living master ceramists, so none is asserted here.

The Iny population has grown steadily since the mid-twentieth century, and Iny people now hold professional and political positions in Brazilian institutions, including teachers, nurses, lawyers and municipal councillors. Each village has a leader who handles external relations, alongside customary authority; the historic chiefly office is called ióló, with a designated successor known as deridu. The pressures on the territory are severe and mostly environmental. Terra Indígena Parque do Araguaia was the most-burned Indigenous Land in Brazil in 2021, with 1,358 fire hotspots recorded, close to eighteen per cent of all hotspots on Indigenous Lands that year; in 2024 fires on Ilha do Bananal were reported to have burned more than a million hectares. The drivers reported by Fiocruz's environmental conflict mapping and by press investigations are illegal cattle ranching inside and around the Indigenous Lands, irregular occupation, logging, deforestation and criminal burning to open pasture, compounded by illegal commercial fishing. IBAMA opened Operação Parque do Araguaia in 2025, notifying irregular occupants. The long-proposed Tocantins-Araguaia waterway, which would require channel excavation and repeated dredging of the riverbed, is opposed on the grounds that it would destroy fish and turtle habitat and with it the main food source of Indigenous and riverine populations. Overlapping federal conservation designations on Ilha do Bananal remain a source of jurisdictional friction. Fires, siltation and changing hydrology have also prompted public debate about whether the island itself is degrading.

Fibre work among the Iny runs from everyday cordage to the most elaborate ritual objects in the region. Buriti palm is the dominant material: its fronds and fibre are worked into mats, carrying baskets, cord and, above all, the skirt-like body coverings of the ijasò dance costumes, which enclose the dancer from the head to below the knees in two large tiers of worked frond while leaving the arms free. Cotton is spun and used for cord, bands and ties, and worked into arm and leg bands and into the fittings of feather ornaments. Feather-and-fibre construction is a single craft in practice: diadems, headdresses and pendants combine a woven or bound fibre armature with plumage attached in fixed patterns. The dye plants are the standard central Brazilian pair, genipap for blue-black and annatto for red, with clay-derived white; these colour both bodies and worked objects. Iny fibre and feather pieces circulate through craft outlets, Indigenous art shops and museum collections, though the ceramic figures dominate the market. This session's sources gave less detail on Iny weaving specifically than on ceramics or featherwork, and hammock and loom technique in particular is a gap that contributors should fill.

Ceramic figure-making is the signature Iny art and an exclusively female one. The figures are called ritxòkò in women's speech and ritxòò in men's speech, the two forms reflecting the language's gendered registers. They are modelled by hand from river clay, dried and fired, then painted; the older pieces are small and were made as children's toys, and their function is genuinely pedagogical, since a child handling them learns kinship roles, ritual sequences, dress, body paint and animal species, and in the words used in the heritage documentation learns to be Karajá. The iconography is a compact encyclopedia of Iny life: mother-and-child groups, paired figures, ritual scenes including masked dancers, everyday activities such as fishing and manioc processing, and a wide range of fauna. Surface decoration reproduces the same graphic vocabulary used in body painting, including the paired facial circles. In January 2012 IPHAN, the Brazilian national heritage institute, registered the tradition as Ritxòkò: artistic and cosmological expression of the Karajá people in the Book of Forms of Expression, with the associated knowledge and practices of doll-making entered in the Book of Knowledge. Contact with the market has changed the work: pieces are made much larger than the old toys and industrial dyes are now common, but the figurative motifs and decorative patterns have been maintained. The trade is central to household income, and for many families it is the principal or only cash source.

Iny musical life is organised around the ritual calendar rather than around a concert repertoire. The largest body of song belongs to the ijasò or Aruanã complex, in which the songs are understood as messages carried by the ijasò beings from the world beneath the waters of the Araguaia; the dancers are accompanied by gourd rattles, and the tall headdresses and their rattles are made and used in pairs. Aerophones are documented, including paired flutes whose two pipes sound at intervals close to a second, producing a beating, insistent texture. Women hold a distinct and highly valued vocal genre, the ritual lament or ceremonial weeping known in the ethnomusicological literature on Iny music as ibru. Transmission is through participation: children learn by attending, and the elders who lead singing hold the authoritative versions. This session's sources on Iny music were thinner than for the other domains. Beyond academic conference papers on Iny/Karajá music, cosmology and education, no publicly released commercial recording or named Iny musical artist was confirmed, and readers should treat the absence as a documentation gap rather than as evidence that none exists.

Two large ceremonies anchor Iny ritual life. Hetohoky, named for the Great House built for it, is the boys' initiation and rite of passage into adult life. The initiates are secluded in the Great House for a period reported as around seven days, emerging only for fishing and hunting, and the festival brings the whole community into weeks of preparation, food accumulation and dancing; otter dances and Aruanã dances are performed during it. The Festa do Aruanã, the ijasò complex — irasò among the Javaé — is the great public masked dance. It takes place during the high water of the Araguaia. Dancers wear the tall paired headdresses and buriti-frond body coverings, and the ijasò are understood as spirit beings from beneath the water, called to visit the villages, who deliver messages through song; anthropologists have described the complex as a way of making relations with the underwater world visible and manageable. Around these sit smaller collective rites: the honey feast, the fish feast, and collective fishing operations that are themselves ritualised. Political life has its own ceremonial ground: decisions are taken by male household heads meeting in the men's house on the village plaza. Some elements of the Aruanã complex are held as restricted knowledge within the community and are not discussed publicly by the Iny themselves; where sources treat material as closed, it is left closed here.

Healing among the Iny combines specialist ritual practice with a broad household knowledge of plants. Specialist knowledge is held by shamanic practitioners who work with the beings of the river and forest world, and it is acquired over years through apprenticeship, seclusion and personal experience rather than through open instruction; the transmission is relational and is not public property. Plants from the cerrado, the gallery forest and the floodplain are used in healing contexts, and that knowledge is held by the community and its specialists as their own intellectual property. This scaffold names no plant-and-preparation combinations, plant parts, doses or methods, and contributors should not add them: that information belongs to the community and to Brazil's access-and-benefit-sharing law, not to an encyclopedia. State health provision reaches Iny communities through the federal Indigenous health subsystem, with local health posts and Indigenous health agents recruited from the villages; a significant number of Iny work professionally as health agents, nursing technicians and nurses, which has made the interface between the two systems unusually staffed from within. No biopiracy case specific to the Iny surfaced in this session's sources. Brazil's best-known ethnopharmacology dispute of this kind involved the Krahô people and Federal University of São Paulo researchers, a different people entirely, and it should not be transferred to the Iny; whether comparable episodes have affected Iny knowledge is an open question for contributors.

Iny villages are built on high river banks that stay above the flood, and their plan is linear rather than circular, in contrast to the Upper Xingu pattern. Houses are laid out in two roughly parallel lines facing one another, and the settlement is conceptually divided into three segments corresponding to the upriver, middle and downriver divisions that also organise Iny cosmology and the naming of the three subgroups. The men's house, the Casa de Aruanã on the plaza between the rows, is the political and ceremonial centre: it is where male household heads meet to decide village affairs, where ritual gear is kept, and where the masked dance complex is staged from. For the Hetohoky initiation a dedicated Great House is built, and the ceremony takes its name from that structure. Traditional dwellings are pole-framed and thatched with palm; contemporary villages mix these with sawn-timber, brick and tile houses, and the larger communities have schools, health posts and electricity, brought to some villages from the late 1990s. This session's sources described the village plan and the men's house clearly but gave little technical detail on framing, thatching technique or roof form, which is a gap contributors with field knowledge should close.