When Pêro Vaz de Caminha arrived in Brazil on the 22nd of April 1500 aboard Pedro Alvares Cabral’s voyage of ‘discovery’, he was awestruck. The letter he wrote to the Portuguese King Manuel I is in stark contrast to those written by other explorers of the period. Caminha admired the innocence of the natives who were unashamed of their nakedness. He does not portray the natives as barbaric but, rather, as noble savages. He calls them “handsome” and even says of one woman, “she was so well-shaped and so rounded, and her private parts so graceful that many women of our land…would feel embarrassed for not having theirs look like hers”.

Pêro Vaz de Caminha’s letter is celebrated in Brazil as the country’s birth certificate and yet, the text highlights a key challenge in the retelling of Brazil’s colonial history. There are a plethora of European accounts of this history, but the viewpoints of the natives, who lacked literacy, are difficult to recover. Many of the European accounts dehumanised the natives, portraying them as noble savages, sensationalising the practice of cannibalism amongst them as Michel de Montaigne did in his essay “Of Cannibals” from 1580 and Hans Staden did in his account True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil from 1557. This is not to say these accounts are not valuable, they serve an important role in the retelling of the history of colonialism in Brazil, but they tell a one-sided history without indigenous voices balancing them out.

The question of identity in Brazil is a complicated subject. Miscegenation of Brazil’s multiracial society means that Brazilians are mostly of mixed heritage. Miscegenation of the natives by the Europeans became commonplace soon after European ‘discovery’, assimilating many natives and acculturating them. The usage of the Nheengatu and Tupi Austral, indigenous languages that acted as lingua francas in Brazil for much of the colonial period, were widespread, and both languages were spoken by natives and Europeans alike. Nevertheless, the literature remained dominated by the Europeans who used the language as an additional means of deculturating the natives as many natives became monolinguistic, losing their native languages and part of their identity.

However, contemporary indigenous retellings of Brazil’s colonial history aid in the recovery of indigenous viewpoints. Indigenous authors such as Kaka Werá Jecupé and Daniel Munduruku have written books attempting to reclaim their side of history and are contributing to the literary body of Brazil’s colonial past in an invaluable manner. However, recovering the native viewpoint of Brazil’s past remains difficult with the deculturation of the natives through miscegenation and language and the dominance of European perspectives in the colonial period.