Mura people
ethnic group
The Muras are an Indigenous people who live in the central and eastern parts of Amazonas, Brazil, along the Amazon river from the Madeira to the Purus. They played an important part in Brazilian history during colonial times and were known for their quiet determination and subsequent resistance to the encroaching Portuguese culture. Formerly a powerful people, they were defeated by their neighbors, the Munduruku, in 1788.
Of the original diversity of Muran languages, only Pirahã survives today.
History
The Mura are first attested by the Portuguese in 1714 in a letter from a priest named Bartholomeu Rodrigues. They are identified as living on the right bank of the Madeira River. They were hostile to the encroaching Portuguese and the Jesuit Missionaries because a Portuguese trader had taken some Mura as slaves.
Starting in the early 18th century the Mura began a 100 year long era of conflict with the Portuguese. Early in the war the Mura engaged in open battle but after a defeat in the early 18th century they engaged in other forms of warfare as much as possible. The Mura during this war began to gradually expand as other tribes had been devastated by the Portuguese and had neither the will nor the power to stop the Mura, and the Portuguese military presence in the region was too limited to stop them.
The public source identifies “Mura people” as ethnic group. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Mura, people and ethnic.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1195416. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1788 and 1714.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mura people” 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.