Xavante

The people Brazil calls Xavante call themselves A'uwẽ, meaning people, and in emphatic contexts A'uwẽ Uptabi, the real or true people. Xavante is an outsiders' spelling, one of several in the old records alongside Chavante and Shavante; Akwẽ, or Acuen, is the wider label they share with the Xerente, their nearest linguistic relatives, who live far to the northeast in Tocantins.

They live in eastern Mato Grosso, in the central Brazilian cerrado around the Serra do Roncador and the Rio das Mortes, in roughly two hundred villages across nine Indigenous Lands. Their history with the Brazilian state is unusually sharp. They withdrew west across the Araguaia between about 1830 and 1860 to escape settlement in Goiás, held that distance for nearly a century, and were then drawn into contact during the government's March to the West in the 1940s and 1950s — a period that brought epidemics, massacres and, in 1966, the forced removal by air of an entire community from Marãiwatsédé.

The demographic recovery since then is one of the most striking in Brazil. Roughly 1,100 Xavante were recorded in 1958; the Instituto Socioambiental gives 22,256 for 2020, and figures of about 30,000 circulate in other reference works. Growth has run at about five per cent a year since land demarcation began in the 1970s.

They speak Xavante, a Central Jê language. Society is built on two interlocking systems: exogamous matrimonial moieties, usually named Poreza'õno and Öwawẽ, and a sequence of age sets that carries men through named grades across their lives. The warã, the men's council that meets in a circle at the edge of the village plaza at dawn and dusk, is the visible centre of public life, and skill in speech there is what political standing is made of.

Xavante country is cerrado — the central Brazilian savanna, not Amazon forest — and the distinction matters both ecologically and legally, since the cerrado has weaker protection under Brazilian law than the Amazon biome. The landscape runs from open grassland through campo sujo scrub to cerradão, a low closed woodland, threaded everywhere by ribbons of gallery forest along the watercourses. The Rio das Mortes is the spine of the territory, joined by the Serra do Roncador uplands to the east. Fire is part of the system: the cerrado burns naturally in the dry season, and Xavante burning of patches to flush game and stimulate new growth is an old management practice rather than an accident.

The year divides cleanly. Rains fall from about October to April, greening the grassland and filling the rivers; the dry season from May to September hardens the ground, drops the water, ripens cerrado fruits and opens the country for long-distance movement and collective hunting.

Nine demarcated Indigenous Lands, grouped into seven contiguous blocks, hold the population: Pimentel Barbosa, at 328,966 hectares the largest and the best conserved; Areões; Parabubure with the adjoining Chão Preto and Ubawawe; Marechal Rondon; Sangradouro/Volta Grande; São Marcos; and Marãiwatsédé at roughly 165,000 hectares. These are fragments of a much larger territory occupied for at least 180 years, cut into islands by the agricultural frontier that arrived with the March to the West from the 1930s onward. Marãiwatsédé, whose name means dense forest, is the extreme case: about three quarters of its native vegetation was destroyed during the decades it was illegally occupied.

Xavante, called A'uwẽ mreme by its speakers, belongs to the Central Jê or Akuwẽ branch of the Jê family, within the Macro-Jê stock. That branch contains only one other living language, Akwẽ-Xerente, plus two that are dormant or extinct, Xakriabá and Akroá. Xavante and Xerente are close enough that the two peoples recognize the relationship without being able to converse freely.

Ethnologue recorded about 9,600 first-language speakers in 2006, below the ethnic population of the time, and classes the language as stable: it is used by everyone in the community and taught as a school subject. Children acquire Xavante first and meet Portuguese at school, so the language is transmitted intact even where communities live close to towns.

Schooling has been bilingual since the 1970s, first through the Salesian missions at Sangradouro and São Marcos and later through state schools staffed by Xavante teachers trained in Mato Grosso's intercultural degree programmes. Written material includes school books authored by Xavante teachers, dictionaries and grammatical descriptions produced from the 1960s onward, and a Bible translation.

The language is also notable for its registers. Formal oratory in the warã has its own delivery, rhythm and vocabulary, and is a learned skill rather than ordinary speech. Linguistic anthropologists have documented a distinct playful register called a'ãma mrémé, associated with holders of a particular ceremonial role, which works by systematic substitution of nouns and verbs — a coded speech that has to be decoded by listeners in real time. Song recordings, oratory archives and documentation projects, including work through the Museu do Índio, have built a substantial recorded corpus.

The classic Xavante economy was not built on farming. Agriculture had a secondary role; the core was long trekking expeditions in which whole villages moved through the cerrado for weeks or months, gathering and hunting as they went, returning to a base village between journeys. Women's gathering was the reliable base of the diet: wild roots and tubers dug from the savanna, and the seasonal fruits the cerrado produces in quantity — buriti and bacaba palm fruit, pequi with its strong yellow oily flesh, mangaba, murici, jatobá, babaçu — along with wild honey taken from nests in trees and in the ground.

The small riverbank gardens grew maize, beans and squash. Xavante maize is not incidental: a distinct landrace maize carries ceremonial weight and appears in specific festivals, which ties the planting calendar to the ritual one. Men hunted deer, peccary, armadillo, giant anteater, tapir, rhea and land tortoise, and fished the Rio das Mortes and its lagoons with hook and with crushed vine poison in the dry season. Collective fire-drive hunts in the dry months are organized to provision large ceremonies — most importantly the initiation cycle, danhono, which recurs roughly every five years and requires enough game to feed an entire village and its guests for the duration.

Today the diet has shifted. Rice, manioc, bananas and purchased staples do much of the work that gathering once did, partly because soy fields and cattle pasture around the Indigenous Lands have removed the game and the gathering grounds outside the boundary. Income comes from crafts in buriti fibre, cotton and seeds, from salaries as teachers and health agents, and from federal benefits; a Funai-run mechanized rice scheme in the 1970s and 1980s largely failed. The dietary change is directly visible in rising rates of diabetes and obesity.

Xavante aesthetics are physical and public. Bodies are painted with red annatto and black genipap: broad fields of red across chest, arms and legs, crossed or bordered by black bands, with patterns varying by moiety, age set and occasion. The most recognizable Xavante ornament is the ear plug, a small polished wooden cylinder worn in a pierced lobe; the object is publicly documented and photographed, but the initiation at which it is conferred is restricted knowledge and its content is not described here. Cotton cords are worn at neck, waist and ankle, and feather ornaments are made for festivals.

Craft work runs on buriti palm, cotton, hardwoods and seeds. Buriti fibre is stripped, dried and worked into cord, mats, fans and bindings; women spin and weave cotton; men carve clubs, bows and arrows from dense woods such as aroeira. Seed necklaces use cerrado species and are among the crafts sold outside.

The uiwede, the buriti log relay, is the great public Xavante performance. Two teams from different groupings run a course of several kilometres carrying a section of buriti trunk weighing up to about eighty kilos, passing it from shoulder to shoulder without stopping, and finish in the village plaza. It is a race in form and a statement about collective strength in effect, and it is the image of the Xavante most widely reproduced.

Song and dance in the plaza at dawn and dusk are a daily practice, and Xavante singing has been recorded and released publicly, notably the album Etenhiritipá: Cantos da Tradição Oral Xavante, made with the community of Pimentel Barbosa. Divino Tserewahú, from Sangradouro, is a well-known Xavante film-maker whose work has circulated internationally through Vídeo nas Aldeias. The wai'a is a restricted men's ritual and no detail about it is published here.

Xavante land was demarcated in stages from the 1970s, and the case that still defines their politics is Marãiwatsédé. The community there was removed by air force aircraft in 1966 and the land handed to a large ranch; recovering it took nearly half a century. The Supreme Federal Court ruled in October 2012, removal of more than four hundred occupying families began that December under federal police and National Force escort, and the operation was completed during 2013. The territory was returned in poor condition: about three quarters of its native vegetation had already been cleared, and criminally set fires have continued since.

The surrounding economy is soy and cattle. Xavante leaders have named the major grain traders operating around their lands and pointed to agrochemical drift, silted and contaminated watercourses and the loss of hunting and gathering ground outside the boundaries. Because the cerrado enjoys weaker legal protection than Amazon forest, clearing right up to the demarcation line is often lawful. Pressure to lease land inside Indigenous Lands for mechanized soy is a recurring internal dispute. Health services report high rates of diabetes, hypertension and child malnutrition linked to sedentary settlement and dietary change, and Covid-19 hit Xavante communities hard in 2020 and 2021.

Organizations include the Associação Xavante Warã, led by Hiparidi Top'tiro, and village-level associations such as those at Pimentel Barbosa. Mário Juruna, elected in 1982, was the first Indigenous federal deputy in Brazil's history and became nationally famous for carrying a tape recorder to hold officials to their promises. Xavante communities take part in cerrado and headwater seed-collection and restoration networks in the Xingu basin, and the population continues to grow.

Xavante (A'uwẽ) making is fibre work rather than cloth weaving, and one palm dominates it: buriti, Mauritia flexuosa. Women split and interlace buriti leaf into sleeping mats, floor mats and the screen panels used at house openings, which filter light and can be worked from inside or outside — a woven element doing the job of a door. The same technique produces storage and carrying baskets, containers for valuables and food, and the slings in which babies are carried. Buriti fibre is also twisted into cordage, and the buriti trunk supplies the logs used in the relay races that structure the Xavante ceremonial calendar, which makes a single palm simultaneously the material of domestic life and of public ritual. Cotton is spun by hand and used for cords, arm and leg bands, and the ties that secure ornaments, but there is no loom-woven cloth tradition, and it would be wrong to invent one. Colour comes chiefly from urucum, applied red to bodies, hair and objects, with charcoal and dark plant dye giving black. Ornament is highly legible socially. Men receive small wooden cylinders in the pierced earlobes at initiation, and the size of these ear ornaments is increased across a lifetime, so that ornament records age and status; the profiles record that these are linked to the capacity to dream. Women wear long necklaces, and a capybara-tooth necklace is documented as part of the marriage ceremony. Xavante buriti basketry is sold through Brazilian fair-trade craft networks and Indigenous associations, and historical pieces are held in the Museu do Índio and the Museu Nacional collections.

The Xavante have no living ceramic craft, and this entry says so directly rather than constructing continuity out of nothing. The published profiles of Xavante material culture describe buriti fibre, wooden objects, gourds and ornament, and give no account of clay working, forming or firing. Containers are organic and light, which fits a people whose historical pattern divided the year between settled village life and long trekking expeditions in which everything had to be carried. Gourds serve as water vessels, bowls and dippers. Buriti-leaf baskets and mats handle transport and storage, including the harvest from gardens and the produce of long collecting trips. Wooden bowls, mortars and troughs cover processing, and cooking is largely done by roasting directly on fire or by baking food wrapped in leaves in a heated earth pit, a method that removes the everyday need for a fired pot. Metal pots are now standard for boiling. The wider claim deserves a flag rather than a verdict. Early European ethnographers characterised the Northern and Central Jê, including the Xavante, as having a poor material base marked by the absence of ceramics, and archaeologists working on Macro-Jê material culture have since argued that this reading reflects colonial expectations about what constitutes sophistication, and that ceramics found archaeologically in central Brazil were routinely assigned to Tupi or colonial makers by default. So the accurate statement is that there is no documented Xavante pottery tradition to describe, while whether Jê-speaking populations in central Brazil ever made pots remains an open archaeological question.

Xavante music is central to Xavante identity and is unusually well described in public sources. The core form is da-nho're, collective singing and dancing performed by men in the central plaza, typically at dawn and dusk, with the performers arranged so that the dual moiety division of the community is visible in the formation itself. Xavante accounts describe these songs not as composed but as received: they come from ancestors in dreams, and the capacity to receive them is associated with initiated adult status and with the ear ornaments given at initiation. Performing a dream as song in the plaza is therefore both an aesthetic act and a demonstration of adult standing. Vocal style is male chorus in unison and near-unison with a heavy rhythmic pulse; the accompaniment is the body and the ground — stamping, the movement of the dance line, and rattles carried by dancers. Women hold their own song forms. Recordings exist commercially: Etenhiritipá – Cantos da Tradição Xavante, recorded with the Pimentel Barbosa community and released in 1994 through Núcleo de Cultura Indígena with a 1996 reissue, remains the best-known published album, and Xavante material appears in Brazilian educational projects on Indigenous music. Transmission runs through the age-set system and the bachelor house, where boys learn repertoire alongside their cohort, and increasingly through village schools. One restriction applies: songs belonging to the men-only wai'a are not public, and this entry does not describe them, name their content or place them in sequence.

Xavante ceremonial life is organised around age sets and around the two moieties, and its public dimension is unusually visible because much of it happens in the open plaza. Several ceremonies are publicly documented as existing. The danhono is the initiation that moves a cohort of boys — the wapté — out of the bachelor house into adult male status, involves ear piercing, and takes place when a new age set matures rather than annually; its interior is restricted and is not described here. The oi'ó are formalised club-fighting contests in which the two moieties confront each other publicly. The uiwede are relay races in which teams run into the village carrying heavy buriti palm logs, reported at up to around eighty kilograms for men, with women's races also held. Marriage ceremony is publicly documented, including the capybara-tooth necklaces worn by women. Their social function is legible from outside: these events reproduce the age-set and moiety structure that organises Xavante political life, distribute prestige, mark the passage of cohorts through the life course, and bring dispersed households together on a predictable calendar. Communities speak about them publicly and on their own terms — Xavante filmmakers working within the Vídeo nas Aldeias project produced community-authored documentation of initiation, and Xavante associations foreground ceremony in territorial disputes, notably around Marãiwatsédé, as evidence of continuous occupation and of a functioning social order. Deliberately withheld here: the wai'a in its entirety, which the sources describe only as a men-only ritual concerned with supernatural knowledge, and the interior content, sequence and teaching of the danhono initiation.

Everyday Xavante health care draws on plant knowledge held broadly in households and in more concentrated form by ritual specialists and elders, learned through apprenticeship, participation and — in a channel the sources treat as characteristically Xavante — through dreaming. This entry names that plants are used in healing contexts and gives nothing further: no plant parts, no preparations, no doses, no methods. That detail is the community's intellectual property, and Xavante experience specifically illustrates why the boundary matters. State care runs through SESAI and the Xavante Special Indigenous Health District in Mato Grosso, serving the São Marcos, Sangradouro/Volta Grande, Pimentel Barbosa, Marãiwatsédé and other territories. The epidemiological record has two phases. Contact in the mid-twentieth century brought measles and influenza epidemics with heavy demographic loss, a pattern documented in historical demographic studies of Xavante population recovery. The second phase is a nutrition transition with severe consequences: a population survey of 932 adults aged twenty and over in São Marcos and Sangradouro/Volta Grande between 2008 and 2012 found a high prevalence of metabolic syndrome, with 246 individuals identified as having type 2 diabetes in a related sample of 948, and further studies have documented diabetic retinopathy and elevated cardiovascular risk. COVID-19 was reported as severe among Xavante communities in Mato Grosso in 2020, compounding pressure from surrounding agribusiness. On research ethics, Xavante communities were sampled alongside the Yanomami by the same North American genetics programme in the 1960s, and Xavante blood and genetic material entered the same long controversy over consent; the specific misconduct allegations were formally disputed and remain unresolved.

The Xavante village is laid out as a horseshoe: a broken ring of houses opening at one end onto a large cleared central area, so that every doorway faces the middle. That central ground is not empty space but institution — it is the warã, the men's meeting ground where adult men gather to debate and decide, and it is also the stage on which ceremonial performance takes place with the two moieties visibly arranged. The bachelor house, where the wapté age set lives during the years before initiation, stands at a defined position on the horseshoe, which makes the age-set system architecturally legible. The traditional house is a dome. A central pole receives converging poles that are bound in circular courses with bamboo or vine rings, and the whole frame is thatched with palm leaf; documented dimensions run to roughly six or seven metres in diameter and about four and a half metres high, with a single doorway oriented toward the village centre and a hearth in the middle of the floor for cooking by day and warmth at night. Buriti-leaf mats supply the screening at the opening. Residence after marriage is uxorilocal, so a house grows around a line of women. Building is collective and seasonal, and roofing in particular is group work. Practice is changing substantially: government housing programmes have introduced rectangular houses in sawn timber, brick and block with zinc or fibre-cement roofs, and many communities now keep the horseshoe plan and the warã while the dwellings themselves are rebuilt in industrial materials, with some villages maintaining traditional houses for ceremonial use.