Qualla: Xingu Indigenous Park

Xingu Indigenous Park: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. Orlando and Claudio Villas-Boas walked into the upper Xingu in 1947 with an idea that was heretical for its time: that indigenous peoples did not need to be absorbed, relocated, converted, or civilized. They needed to be left alone, on land that was theirs, and visited only as friends, helpers, and equals. Fourteen years of fighting later, on 14 April 1961, a Brazilian president finally signed a decree that carved 26,420 square kilometers out of Mato Grosso and handed it to the people who had always lived there. It was the first protected territory in the world created solely for indigenous inhabitants, and it would become the template for nearly every indigenous territory in Amazonia that followed.

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Xingu Indigenous Park: A Fan of Rivers

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ian Starr, CC BY-SA 3.0. At the heart of the park, eight rivers braid together into what will become the Xingu itself. Counter-clockwise from the east, they are the Ferro, the Steinem, the Ronuro, the Jatoba, the Batavi, the Auiiti, the Culiseu, the Culuene, and the Tonguro. In the south, the park still ...

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Image: Ian Starr | CC BY-SA 3.0

Xingu Indigenous Park: A Pre-Columbian Metropolis

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Noel Villas Bôas, CC BY 2.5. The popular story of Amazonia imagines untouched wilderness until the Europeans arrived. The upper Xingu tells a different story. Between roughly 1200 and 1600 CE, this landscape was a densely settled, highly organized anthropogenic system. Villages of a few thousand people each ...

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Image: Noel Villas Bôas | CC BY 2.5

Xingu Indigenous Park: Sixteen Peoples, Fourteen Languages

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pedro Biondi/ABr, CC BY 3.0 br. The park today is home to sixteen peoples whose ancestors arrived at different moments over the past several hundred years, drawn together by the rapids at the Xingu's lower gorges that kept outsiders out. The southern, or Upper Xingu, peoples share a common ceremonial life despi...

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Image: Pedro Biondi/ABr | CC BY 3.0 br

Xingu Indigenous Park: The Ten Years that Made the Park

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit E-GIACOMAZZI, CC BY 2.0. The Villas-Boas brothers first proposed the park to Brazil's vice president in 1952. Mato Grosso opposed them. The state had already begun selling the land to colonizing companies. Nine bitter years followed, fought in newspapers, in Brasilia hallways, and on the ground where the...

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Image: E-GIACOMAZZI | CC BY 2.0

Xingu Indigenous Park: Fawcett and the Forest

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Didier Descouens, CC BY-SA 4.0. In June 1925, a British lieutenant colonel named Percy Harrison Fawcett passed through here with his son Jack and a friend named Raleigh Rimell. He spent a few days among the Aweti and Kalapalo, then walked east and vanished. A veteran surveyor who had mapped Bolivia's borders be...

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Image: Didier Descouens | CC BY-SA 4.0