Indigenous peoples in Brazil
descendants of the population that lived in the territory of modern Brazil before the Portuguese colonization
Indigenous peoples in Brazil or Native Brazilians (Portuguese: Brasileiros nativos) are the peoples whose ancestors lived in Brazil before European contact around 1500 and those pre-Columbian forebears. Indigenous peoples once comprised an estimated 2,000 distinct tribes and nations inhabiting what is now Brazil. The 2010 Brazil census recorded 305 Indigenous ethnic groups.
Historically, many Indigenous peoples of Brazil were semi-nomadic and combined hunting, fishing, and gathering with migratory agriculture. Many tribes were massacred by European settlers, and others assimilated into the growing Brazilian population.
The Indigenous population was decimated by European diseases, declining from a pre-Columbian high of 2 million to 3 million to approximately 300,000 by 1997, distributed among 200 tribes. According to the 2022 IBGE census, 1,694,836 Brazilians classified themselves as Indigenous, divided into 391 ethnic groups and the census recorded 295 Indigenous languages. Almost 77% of Indigenous Brazilians speak Portuguese.
On 18 January 2007, Fundação Nacional do Índio reported 67 remaining uncontacted tribes in Brazil, up from 40 known in 2005. With this increase, Brazil surpassed New Guinea, becoming the country with the largest number of uncontacted peoples in the world.
“Indigenous peoples in Brazil” enters the record as descendants of the population that lived in the territory of modern Brazil before the Portuguese colonization. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Indigenous, peoples and Brazil can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1363781. The Library of Congress control number is sh85065597. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1500, 2010, 1997 and 2022.
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This entry incorporates text from “Indigenous peoples in Brazil” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.