Trumai

The Trumai live distributed in three villages and in the FUNAI administration posts in the Xingu Indigenous Park. They are regarded as the last people to have settled in the Upper Xingu, where they arrived in the 19th century. At this time, they were quite numerous, but conflicts and wars with other peoples, added to measles and dysentery epidemics, reduced them to eighteen individuals in 1952. Today there are around 258.

Despite being associated to the Upper Xingu complex, the Trumai are not totally integrated into it; they preserve certain peculiarities that differentiate them from other groups in the area. Their language is considered isolated, that is, it does not show any genetic kinship with any other language of the Xingu, or with any other indigenous linguistic family. Contact with other people from the Upper Xingu, however, has resulted in an exchange of influences regarding customs, rituals, material culture, and productive activities.

The Trumai say that their ancestors slept on mats and used clubs and dart throwers as weapons; after their arrival in the Upper Xingu, they began to assimilate habits common to the peoples of the area—sleeping in hammocks and using bows and arrows.

On the other hand, it was the Trumai who introduced the Jawari ritual to the Upper Xingu. This is a ritual dedicated to dead warriors and the central event is the contest between two groups armed with dart-throwers. There is extensive singing during the ritual, with several references to animals—monkeys, jaguars, wildcats—, also depicted on their wooden stools. In most of these songs, birds, cats, and several mammals “sing” in their own name, which indicates a society more focused on hunting than fishing.

The Trumai language is under threat of extinction today. Most children speak Portuguese as their first language; some also speak other languages of the Xingu, such as Awweti or Suyá. Various attempts have been made to encourage the use of Trumai, notably the educational work of indigenous teachers.