Until recent decades, Brazilian scholarship was not particularly kind or faithful in narrating the historical experience of the nation's Indigenous peoples. Neither was public policy for that matter, built on similarly racist, paternalistic, or evolutionist premises. In the nineteenth century, historians such as Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen called for the forced integration or elimination of Indigenous peoples, while public officials and intellectuals espousing protectionism aimed ultimately for their disappearance as well. Twentieth-century historiography tended to romanticize Indigenous peoples' colonial-era cross-cultural interactions, while national-period narratives largely silenced their histories. Anthropologists often conjured cultural isolates who faced possible extinction. Nevertheless, Indigenous political mobilization accompanying late military rule and democratization in Brazil in the 1980s, alongside the efflorescence of social, environmental, and cultural history among professional historians, prompted new perspectives on the past. Heather Roller's richly empirical work adds to this revisionist scholarship, foregrounding and complexifying the role of Indigenous agency in the...
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