Xingu River

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Xingu River

Xingu River, a large southern tributary of the Amazon in north-central Brazil; it rises in Mato Grosso, flows north into Pará, then enters the Amazon west of the island of Marajó. The Xingu's total length approaches 1,230 miles, but it is navigable only for the lower 96 miles. Its chief tributary is the Iriri, whose branches flow through Xingu National Park, in northeast Mato Grosso.

In lieu of more efficient alternatives, the Xingu River provided essential access to Brazil's interior for the earliest Catholic missionaries, as well as for Brazilian frontiersmen, traders, and slave raiders. In 1961 the Xingu National Park was created by Orlando and Claudio Villas Boâs to protect the Amerindians from extermination. The park was enlarged from 8,800 to about 10,400 square miles in 1968, and now includes the Tupi, Carib, Arawak, and Gê linguistic groups. In 1979 the Villas Boâs brothers estimated the park's population at 1,800. Non-Indian settlement, missionary activity, commercial exploitation, and tourism are prohibited within the park, but pressure from property developers continues. The controversial Transamazon Highway passes through the north section of the park, threatening the Indians' autonomy and isolation, and effectively reducing the park territory by 50 percent. Plans for a Xingu hydroelectric complex threaten more than 9,000 people along the Xingu with resettlement.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adrian Cowell, The Heart of the Forest (1961).

Orlando Villas Bôas and Claudio Villas Bôas, "Saving Brazil's Stone Age Tribes from Extinction," in National Geographic 134, no. 3 (1968): 424-444, Xingu: The Indians, Their Myths (1973), and Xingu: Tribal Territory (1979).

Additional Bibliography

Goulding, Michael, Ronaldo Barthem, and Efrem Jorge Gondim Ferreira. The Smithsonian Atlas of the Amazon. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2003.

Heckenberger, Michael. The Ecology of Power: Culture, Place, and Personhood in the Southern Amazon, A.D. 1000–2000. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Santos, Leinad Ayer O. and Lúcia M. M. de Andrade. Hydroelectric Dams on Brazil's Xingu River and Indigenous Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Cultural Survival, 1990.

Carolyn E. Vieira

Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture