Qualla: Tariana people

Tariana people: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Décio Villares, Public domain. In their own language, the Tariana call themselves bipó diroá masí - the children of the blood of the thunder. The other peoples of the Uaupés River accept the name. It comes from an origin story set at the Uapuí waterfall on the upper Aiari River, where the Tariana say their ancestors emerged and began the journey that took them to the rivers where they live now. Six hundred years ago, potters were firing ceramic vessels the shards of which archaeologists still turn up in the Jurupari region. Those six centuries are the sliver of Tariana history that can be dated. The rest is much longer and has never stopped.

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Image: Décio Villares | Public domain

Tariana people: The River That Speaks Many Languages

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. The Tariana live along the Uaupés River - called the Vaupés in Colombia - which forms part of the border between northwestern Brazil and southeastern Colombia. They number roughly 2,684 in Brazil according to a 2014 health service count, with an additional 205 in Colombia as of 2...

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Image: Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Tariana people: Exogamy and the Architecture of Marriage

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dornicke, CC BY-SA 4.0. Tariana society is patrilineal, exogamous, and patrilocal - lineage passes through the father, marriage is required to be with someone from a different ethnic group, and the wife moves to her husband's community. Tariana women typically marry Tucano or Piratapuyo men. This is the...

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Image: Dornicke | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tariana people: Epidemics and Missions

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dornicke, CC BY-SA 4.0. The upper Rio Negro region was devastated by smallpox in 1740 and by measles in 1749 and 1763. Franciscan missionaries arrived and found the town of Ipanoré filled with Tariana. In the mid-nineteenth century the newly formed Province of Amazonas began what it called a program of ...

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Image: Dornicke | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tariana people: The Salesians at Iauaretê

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dornicke, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the first decades of the twentieth century the Salesians of Don Bosco established missions along the Uaupés and effectively became the local representatives of the Brazilian state. When the German-Brazilian ethnologist Curt Nimuendajú visited in 1927, he found Iauaretê had bec...

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Image: Dornicke | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tariana people: Choosing an Indigenous Territory

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dornicke, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the late 1980s, under the military-led Calha Norte Project, the Brazilian government proposed converting Tariana lands into an Indigenous Colony - a status that would have granted the residents education, health care, and economic support, but opened their territory to miners ...

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Image: Dornicke | CC BY-SA 4.0