O quadrilátero cabano e as cabanagens nos Sertões da Amazônia: guerra, índios, rios e matas (1790-1841)

Abstract

This study covers indigenous participation in the Cabanagem Revolution. From a historical narrative, this thesis sets out to understand the Cabanagem Revolution that took place in Amazon backlands based on the indigenous protagonism around the actions of three ethnic groups, the Mura, the Munduruku and the Mawé. Inhabitants and masters of an immense area, the interfluve of the Madeira, Tapajós and Amazonas rivers, these indigenous people have printed their cultural marks with their arts of war and own interests, leading the cabanagem battles in the interior of the province towards increasingly radicalized directions, shaping their territory into a Cabano Quadrilateral. Through ancestral knowledge of forest, the indigenous people were able to act in an imperative way, determining in a large extent the advances and setbacks of the Cabanagem Revolution. In this sense, within a chronological arrangement, the thesis develops its narrative supporting its main argument that the Cabanagem lasted so long, leading to a process that was difficult to resolve due to its radicalization by the effective indigenous participation. Throughout the eight chapters the thesis is based, showing how indigenous actions from the second half of the 18th century, but especially 1790, and in the first two decades of the 19th century, went through a process of reworking their ways of opposing the colonial project. Thus, in the 1830s, their actions were radicalized, broking with the institutional channels of resolving their issues, and deciding for armed struggle, taking part in the civil war that broke out in Grão-Pará. Using the method of the indicative paradigm and the methodology of Ethnohistory, we located, through the traces left in the documentation, the indigenous evidence in the Cabanagem built in the Amazon backlands.