The Colonial Experience

In the beginning, the natives facilitated the Portuguese’s adjustment to the new land by teaching them the best methods of hunting and fishing, the value of drugs the forests offered, the quickest way to clear lands, and methods of cultivating the crops of the New World (D).  The Portuguese then depended on the Indians as a labor force in their growing colony.  The Portuguese enslaved the Indians and forced them to “paddle canoes filled with Portuguese along the rivers; guide them through the interior; plant, tend and harvest their sugar, tobacco, and cotton; and wait upon them in their homes” (D).  However, the papal grant that allowed the Portuguese territorial claims had made it clear that the monarch must Christianize, civilize, and protect the Indians (D).  The King then sent missionaries to convert the Indians and persuade them to live in villages under “the guidance and protection of Church and Crown” (D).  However, the Indians were still not being treated equal to the Portuguese.  As a result, the Jesuits became enraged by the colonists’ treatment of the Indians and took their complaints to the King.  Through a number of different Portuguese kings, who “declared that all Indians were by nature free” and that “no one was to harm his Indian subjects and called for tolerance, understanding, and forgiveness,” the Portuguese kings attempted to strengthen Portuguese-Indian relations (D).  However, soon the planters became irate because they no longer had a labor force to fuel their crops and as a result, they forced King Philip III, who was king at the time, “to modify his position in order to permit once again the enslavement of war prisoners” (D). 

However, it was not the planters who had the final word on European-Indian relations, but Sebastião de Carvalho.  Carvalho started by expelling the Jesuits because he believed they were the true barrier between an Indian-European society.  He then made the Indians equal with all the king’s other subjects and “a new law guaranteed the personal freedom of each Indian who thereafter received a Portuguese surname and was required to speak Portuguese” (D).  Carvalho also made it so each village had to have a Portuguese school and any Portuguese who married an Indian would improve his chances of preferment and promotion.  Finally, he “forbade the use of any pejorative adjectives or nouns to describe a person’s mixed Indo-Portuguese background” in hopes of making the Indian an integral and active participant in Brazilian life (D).

Because many countries came into Brazil bringing their languages with them, Brazilian people speak dozens of discrete languages with adapted forms of other languages such as Portuguese, French, and Italian (C).  Also as result, Brazilian colonial society developed a multi-racial social system based on more than two racial categories (B).  When the independent Brazilians adopted their first constitution it guaranteed full citizenship to all former slaves—persons of color were not branded as less than human, unlike the U.S.’ constitution in which it stated a slave was worth 3/5’s of a white man (B).