ABSTRACT
The 1617 Tupinambá rebellion, led by a native known as Amaro, was a decisive episode in the Portuguese conquest of the Maranhão and Grão Pará regions. However, very little is known about a conflict that halted the expansion of the Iberian Union and requested the peninsular authorities' full attention for five years. The rebellion's analysis written by Governor Bernardo Pereira de Berredo in the first half of the eighteenth century is still the only available (and reproduced) narrative on the uprising. Using archival material, this article unveils the bias of the governor's narrative, constructed to legitimize the colonial authority, and proposes a new analysis in which the rebels' agency and the complexity of their actions are fully exposed.
Keywords:
Tupinambá; rebellion; ethnohistory; Amazon, Brazil.