Indigenous knowledge: making captivity, slavery and freedom intelligible in Portuguese Amazonia (17th–18th centuries)

Research Project

This project examines how Indigenous peoples in Portuguese Amazonia contributed to the historical construction of normative regimes during the 17th and 18th centuries. It explores how legal categories such as captivity, slavery and freedom were not simply imposed upon Indigenous subjects, but reinterpreted and rendered intelligible through Native’s legal knowledge and socially embedded practices. Far from being passive recipients of imperial law, Indigenous individuals and their kin engaged in dynamic processes of legal translation and negotiation, particularly in courts such as the Juntas das Missões. Memory, kinship, and customary practices operated in these settings as powerful tools of legal argumentation.

The project conceptualises Indigenous memory as a normative element – a source of legal reasoning and belonging that shaped how Indigenous actors inhabited, contested, and reshaped colonial legal frameworks. Oral tradition, far from being peripheral, played a central role in the transmission and enactment of normative knowledge, especially in contexts where law was constituted through custom, kinship, and embodied practice. Memory, sustained through oral narratives, relational structures and ritual procedures, functioned as a key mode of legal intelligibility – anchoring claims to liberty, identity and protection.

Grounded in this memory-informed perspective, the research unfolds three interconnected lines of investigation: first, Indigenous trafficking and forced mobility across transimperial circuits; second, the production and performativity of colonial legal categories – particularly ‘índio’ – as shaped by Indigenous agency, natural law traditions and Enlightenment reformism; and third, the legal construction of mestiçagem and classificatory regimes in frontier zones, where racial, social and juridical boundaries remained fluid and contested.

Methodologically, the project approaches law as a culturally embedded regime of normativity, shaped by processes of multinormativity and sustained through ongoing translations across epistemic and legal boundaries. Drawing on freedom suits, missionary correspondence and normative texts, the research reconstructs how Indigenous actors produced legal intelligibility from within the structures of colonial governance.

By foregrounding native autonomy in the production and translation of normative knowledge, the project offers a critical intervention into global legal history and the epistemologies of colonialism. It sheds light not only on how law functioned within the Iberian empires, but also on how its meanings were contested, inhabited, and transformed by those it sought to govern – illuminating the historical depth of contemporary Indigenous struggles for territory, rights and justice.