Guaraní

There is a place called Guarani in Brazil. There are also football clubs in South America with this name: Guarani Futebol Clube (Brazil), Club Guaraní (Paraguay). Guaraní is also the national currency unit of Paraguay..

Guaraní was one of the most important tribal groups of South America, formerly living mostly between the Uruguay and lower Paraguay Rivers in what is now Paraguay, and the Corrientes and Entre Rios Provinces of Argentina.

Features

The name Guaraní means "warrior." Guaraní called themselves Abá (men). They belong to the great Tupí-Guaraní stock, which extends almost continuously from the Paraná River to the Amazon River, including most of eastern Brazil, with outlying branches in the eastern Andes slopes. The Tupí-Guaraní dialect the basis of the língua geral or indigenous trade language of the Amazon basin.

The Guaraní are best known for their connection to the early Jesuit missions of Paraguay, the most notable mission foundation ever established in the Americas, and for their later heroic provocation of a major expansionist war as the State of Paraguay, against the combined powers of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay — until practically all their able-bodied men had been exterminated.

They lived in palisaded villages of communal houses, of ten to fifteen families. There was no central government: the village communities were united only by common interest and language, and tended to form tribal groups by dialect. They numbered at least 400,000 people when they were first encountered by Europeans. They were sedentary and agricultural, subsisting largely on manioc (the root from which tapioca is made), maize, game, and wild honey. They were expert and artistic at pottery and woodcarving. Theiy used bows and the blowguns as weapons.

They are short and stout, averaging little over five feet, and have relatively light skin. The men wore only a G-string, labrets on the lower lip, and feather crowns. The women wore woven garments covering the whole body. Polygamy was allowed but uncommon. They practiced animistic Pantheism, usual among native northern South Americans. According to the Jesuit missionary Dobrizhoffer, they were cannibals, as were many other South American tribes, and even ate their own dead in ancient times, but later disposed of them in large jars placed inverted on the ground.

History

First contacts

In 1511, Spanish navigator, Juan de Solis was the first European to enter Rio de la Plata, the estuary of the Paraná or Paraguay River, followed by Sebastian Cabot in 1526. In 1537 Gonzalo de Mendoza ascended the Paraguay to about the present Brazilian frontier, and on returning made acquaintance with the Guaraní and founded Asuncion (later capital of Paraguay).

The first governor of the Spanish territory of Guayrá initiated a policy of intermarriage of Europeans with Native American women, which gave rise to the Paraguayan nation. He also initiated the enslavement of the natives who had no protector until the arrival of Jesuit missionaries.

The first two Jesuits were Fathers Barcena and Angulo, in 1585, in what is now the State of Paraná, Southern Brazil, by land from Bolivia. Others soon followed, and a Jesuit college was established at Asuncion, a provincial named for Paraguay and Chile. In 1608, thanks to strong Jesuit protest against enslavement of Native Americans, King Philip III of Spain gave authority to the Jesuits to convert and colonize the tribes of Guayrá. It should be noted that in the early period the name Paraguay was loosely used to designate all the basin of the river, including parts of Uruguay, Argentina, Bolivia, and Brazil.

As usual in Spanish colonies, exploring expeditions were accompanied by Franciscan friars. Early in the history of Asuncion, Father Luis de Bolanos translated the catechism into Guaraní language to preach to Guaraní in the neighbourhood of the settlement. In 1588-9 the celebrated St. Francis Solanus crossed the Chaco wilderness from Peru and stopped at Asuncion, but gave no attention to the Guaraní. His recall left the field clear to the Jesuits, who assumed the double duty of "civilizing" and Christianizing the Native Americans and defending them against the cruelty of slave dealers and employers, practically all the European population, lay, clerical, and official. "The larger portion of the population regarded it as a right, a privilege in virtue of conquest, that they should enslave the Indians" (Page, 470). The Jesuit provincial Torres arrived in 1607, and "immediately placed himself at the head of those who had opposed the cruelties at all times exercised over the natives" (Ibid).

Slavery

The centre and depot of the slave trade was the town of São Paulo, below Rio de Janeiro in the south of Brazil. Originally, a rendezvous of the Portuguese, Dutch, and Spanish pirates, it had become a refuge for the criminals of all nations, who mixed with Native American and African women, producing a mixed race, many of whom had turned into men without law, religion, mercy, or good faith. "Slave dealers of profession, they speedily overrode the influence and power of the Church, and drove out its ministers. Their town became the great slave market whence issued thousands and thousands of Indians to be bartered away on the public squares of the Atlantic cities. Here they assembled day after day as party after party returned from its inhuman expedition, the crowds of trembling, bleeding wretches who had been hunted and captured in some distant wilds . . . . These well-trained, well-armed, roaming, pillaging Paulistas, or Mamelucos as they were popularly called, became the dread and scourge of this beautiful land" (Page 476).

To oppose these armed and organized robbers, the tribes had only their bows, since the Spanish government prohibited firearms, even to "civilized Indians". It is estimated that two million Native Americans were slain or enslaved by these Brazilian slave-hunters during 130 years.

Jesuit missions

With the royal protection, the first Guayrá mission, Loreto, was established on the Paranapané by Fathers Cataldino and Marcerata in 1610. The Guaraní flocked there in such numbers, as the missions afforded the only possible protection against enslavement, that twelve missions rose in rapid succession, containing in all 40,000 Indians. Stimulated by this success, Father Gonzalez with two companions in 1627 journeyed to the Uruguay and established two or three small missions, with good promise for the future, until the wild tribes murdered the priests, massacred the neophytes, and burned the missions.

But the slave raiders saw the Guaraní missions grew as "merely an opportunity of capturing more Indians than usual at a haul" and as "nest of hawks, looked at their neophytes as pigeons, ready fattening for their use" (Graham). In 1629, an army of Paulistas with horses, guns, and bloodhounds together with a horde of wild Indians shooting poisoned arrows suddenly surrounded San Antonio mission, set fire to the church and other buildings, butchered those who resisted or were too young or too old to travel, and carried the rest into slavery. San Miguel and Jesu Maria quickly met the same fate. In Concepción, Father Salazar defended his flock through a regular siege even when reduced to eating snakes and rats. Eventually, reinforcements, gathered by father Cataldino, though armed only with bows, drove off the enemy. No other mission was so fortunate. Within two years, all but two of the establishments were destroyed, the houses plundered, the churches pillaged of their rich belongings upon which almost the whole surplus of the mission revenues had been lavished, the altars polluted with blood in sacrilegious frenzy and 60,000 Christian and "civilized" converts carried off for sale to São Paulo and Rio Janeiro. The attacks were usually on Sunday, when the whole mission population was gathered for Mass. Usually, the priests were spared, probably from fear of government reprisals, but several were killed while ministering to the wounded or pleading with the murderers. Father Maceta and Mansilla even followed one captive train on foot through swamps and forests, confessing the dying who fell by the road and carrying the chains of the weakest, despite threats and pricks of lances, to plead with the Paulista chiefs in their very city, and then to Baja, five hundred miles beyond, to ask the mediation of the governor-general himself, but all in vain.

It was now evident that the Guayrá missions were doomed. The few thousand Indians left of nearly 100,000 just before the Paulista invasion scattered to the forests, and could hardly be made to believe that the missionaries were not in league with the enemy. Father Antonio Ruiz de Montoya was able to buy 10,000 cattle, and thus transform his Indians from farmers to stock raisers. Soon again the work was on a prosperous basis, and under Fathers Rançoncier and Romero the Uruguay missions were re-established, only to be again destroyed in 1632 by the old enemy, the Mamelucos, who had discovered a new line of attack from the south. This time the neophytes made some successful resistance, but in 1638 all of the twelve missions beyond the Uruguay were abandoned and their people consolidated with the community of the Missions Territory. In the last raid Father Afaro was killed, which at last brought about tardy interference by the governor.

In the same year Father Montoya, after having successfully opposed the governor's and Bishop of Asunción's attempts to reduce the liberties of the Indians and the mission administration, sailed for Europe, accompanied by Father Diaz Taño, and succeeded in getting from Urban VIII a letter forbidding the enslavement of the mission Indians under the severest church penalties, and from King Philip IV, at last permitted for Indians to carry firearms for defense, and to be trained to use them by veteran soldiers who had become Jesuits.

When the next Paulista army, 800 strong, attacked in 1641, a body of Christian Guaraní armed with guns and led by their own chief met them on the Acaray River. In two battles, they inflicted a severe defeat that stopped the invasions for ten years. Differences about jurisdiction and privilege with the Franciscans and with the Bishop of Paraguay were only a temporary setback to the missions, now numbering twenty-nine. In 1651, the war between Spain and Portugal encouraged another Paulista attack intended to wipe out every mission and hold the territory for Portugal. But before any Spanish troops arrived to defend the missions, the fathers themselves led a Guaraní army against the enemy and repulsed them at every point, and then turning, scattered a horde of savages who had gathered in the rear in the hope of plunder. In 1732, at their greatest prosperity, the Guaraní missions were guarded by a well-drilled and well-equipped army of 7,000 Indians. On more than one occasion this mission army, accompanied by their priests, defended the Spanish colony.

Layout

The ruins of several missions still remain. The missions were laid out in a uniform plan. The buildings were grouped about a great central square, the church and store-houses at one end, and the dwellings of the Indians, in long barracks, forming the other three sides. Each family had its own separate apartment, but one veranda and one roof served for perhaps a hundred families. The churches were of stone or fine wood, with lofty towers, elaborate sculptures, richly adorned altars, and the statuary imported from Italy and Spain. The priests' quarters, the commissary, the stables, the armoury, the workshop, and the hospital also usually of stone, formed an inner square adjoining the church. The plaza itself was a level grass plot kept cropped by sheep. The Indian houses were sometimes of stone, but more often of adobe or cane, with home-made furniture or religious pictures, often made by the Indian themselves.

Life at the missions

Smaller missions had two priests, larger ones had more. Populations varied from 2,000 to 7,000. Everything moved with military precision, lightened by pleasing ceremonial and sweet music, for both of which the Guaraní had an intense passion. The rising sun was greeted by a chorus of children's hymns, followed by Mass and breakfast, after which the workers went to their tasks. "The Jesuits marshalled their neophytes to the sound of music, and in procession to the fields, with a saint borne high aloft, the community each day at sunrise took its way. Along the way at stated intervals were shrines of saints where they prayed, and sang hymns between shrines. As the procession advanced it became gradually smaller as groups of Indians dropped off to work the various fields and finally the priest and acolyte with the musicians returned alone" (Graham, 178-9). At noon each group assembled for the Angelus, after which came dinner and a siesta; work was then resumed until evening, when the labourers returned singing to their homes. After supper came the rosary and sleep. On rainy days they worked indoors. Frequent festivals with sham battles, fireworks, concerts, and dances, prevented monotony.

Besides the common farm each man had his own garden. In addition to agriculture, stock raising, and the cultivation of the maté or native tea, which they made famous, "the Jesuits had introduced amongst the Indians most of the arts and trades of Europe. Official inventory after the order of expulsion, shows that thousands of yards of cotton were sometimes woven in one mission in a single month." In addition to weaving, they had tanneries, carpenters, tailors, hat makers, coopers, cordage makers, boat builders, joiners, and almost every industry useful and necessary to life. They also made arms. powder, and musical instruments, and had silversmiths, musicians, painters, turners, and printers to work their printing presses; for many books were printed at the missions, and they produced manuscripts as finely executed as those made by the monks in European monasteries (Graham). The produce of their labour, including that from the increase of the herds, was sold at Buenos Aires and other markets, under supervision of the fathers, who portioned the proceeds between the common fund and the workers and helpless dependents, for their was no provision for able-bodied idleness. Finally "much attention was paid to the schools; early training was very properly regarded as the key to all future success" (Page, 503). Much of the instruction was in Guaraní, which was still the prevailing language of the country, but Spanish was also taught in every school. In this way as the Protestant Graham notes (183), "without employing force of any kind, which in their case would have been quite impossible, lost as they were amongst the crowd of Indians", the Jesuits transformed hordes of cannibal savages into communities of peaceful, industrious, highly-skilled Christian workers among whom idleness, crime, and poverty were alike unknown.

In 1732, the Guaraní missions numbered thirty, with 141,252 Christian Indians. Two years later a smallpox epidemic, that great destroyer of the Indian race, killed 30,000. In 1765 a second visitation carried off more than 12,000 more, and then spread westward through all the wide tribes of the Chaco.

Uruguai missions saved

In 1750, a treaty between Spain and Portugal transferred to Portugal the territory of the seven missions on the Uruguay, and the Indians were ordered to be removed. But those Indians knew the Portuguese as slave-hunters, and refused to leave. Led their chiefs, they defied Spanish and Portuguese armies. Seven years of guerrilla warfare slaughtered thousands of Indians and nearly ruined the missions. The Jesuits secured a royal decree restoring the disputed mission territory to Spanish jurisdiction. In 1747 two missions, and in 1760 a third were established in the sub-tribe of the Itatines, or Tobatines, in Central Paraguay, far north of the older mission group. In one of these, San Joaquin (1747), the celebrated Dobrizhoffer ministered for eight years.

Jesuits expelled

But in 1767 the Jesuits were expelled from Spanish dominions, by royal edict. Fearing the event, viceroy Bucareli entrusted the execution of the mandate in 1768, to two officers with a force of some 500 troops. Despite the mission army of 14,000 drilled warriors of proved courage, the fathers, as loyal subjects, submitted without resistance, and with streaming tears turned their backs on a century and a half of work and devoted sacrifice. With only their robes and their breviaries, they went down to the ship that was waiting to carry them forever out of the country. The Paraguay missions so called, of which, however, only eight were in Paraguay proper, were then thirty-three in number, with seventy-eight Jesuits, some 144,000 Christian Indians, and a million cattle.

Decline of the missions

The missions were turned over to priests of other orders, chiefly Franciscans, but under a code of regulations drawn up by the viceroy and modelled largely upon the very Jesuit system which he had condemned. Under divided authority, uncertain government support, and without the love or confidence of the Indians, the new teachers soon lost courage and the missions rapidly declined. The Indians went back by thousands to their original forests or become vagabond outcasts in towns. By the official census of 1801, less than 45,000 Indians remained, cattle, sheep, and horses had disappeared, the fields and orchards were overgrown and cut down and the splendid churches were in ruins. The long period of revolutionary struggle that followed completed the destruction. In 1814 the mission Indians numbered but 8,000 and in 1848 the few who remained were declared citizens.

However, the Guaraní race persists. Nearly all the forest tribes on the borders of Paraguay are Guaraní. Many of them are descendants of mission exiles. In Paraguay Guaraní blood predominates in the population and Guaraní is still the main language in most of the provinces to this day.

Language

The Guaraní language has been much cultivated, its literature covering a wide range of subjects. Many works written by the fathers, and wholly or partly in the native language, were issued from the mission press in Loreto. Among the most important treatises upon the language are the "Tesoro de la Lengua Guaraní (Madrid, 1639), by Father Montoya, the heroic leader of the exodus, published in Paris and Leipzig in 1876; and the "Catecismo de la Lengua Guaraní" of Father Diego Díaz de la Guerra (Madrid, 1630).

The Guaraní were also later described, amongst many other historical documents in existence today, in 1903, by Croatian explorers Mirko and Stjepan Seljan. Several English words can be traced to Guaraní roots, such as "tapioca", "toucan" and "jaguar."

Media

Roland Joffe's 1986 film The Mission was about the Guaraní and their role in a battle between the Jesuits and Portuguese Government over them. Though the specific battle was fictitious, it is heavily allegorical to the situation of many real Guaraní throughout the ages.