Zo'é

This article deals with the Indian tribe; for the first name, see Zoe .

Zo'é woman with lip stake and children with Catalan filmmaker and journalist Albert Abril, 2007

Zo'é is an indigenous people of Brazil with around 250 members. It is attributed to the Tupí ethnic group. The Zo'é are considered indios isolados ( isolated indigenous people).

They are also known as the lip stake Indians because anyone who is to be recognized as a tribal member must wear a white wooden lower lip stake . At around seven years of age, the children's lower lip is perforated and a six to seven centimeter lip plug is inserted.

geography

The Zo'é live in the headwaters of the Rio Cuminapanema , Municipio Oriximiná in the north of the state of Pará in Brazil.

First contact

Two Zo'é women

The Zo'é were first contacted in 1987 by an American mission company. A quarter of the population died within two years from contact and the transmission of diseases against which the Zo'é had no defenses. After the missionaries had been banned from contact with the isolated peoples by the National Foundation for the Protection of Indigenous Peoples (FUNAI), they left the area in 1991.

The Zo'é population has since recovered. They are also beginning to get more involved in programs to protect themselves and their land. In February 2011, a group of Zo'é traveled to the Brazilian capital for the first time to express their demand for land rights, participation and health care.

Surname

The term Zo'é is used to distinguish between "one of us" and the "whites" or "enemies" which are the only two ethnic categories the Zo'é use. Apart from these two expressions, they do not use any term to distinguish themselves from neighboring indigenous groups, for example.

At first, FUNAI referred to the Zo'é by the name poturu , as that was the word the Zo'é replied with when you pointed to them and asked for their name. The word poturu refers to the wood from which the lip pegs are made.

language

The Zo'é language belongs to subgroup VIII of the Tupí-Guaraní languages and is similar to the Wayampi language . The ISO 639-3 code is pto . Other names for the language are: Buré, Poturu, Poturujara, Tupí of Cuminapanema.

literature

• Klaus Peter Kästner: Zoé. Material culture, customs and cultural-historical position of a Tupí tribe in northern Brazil. Publishing house for science and education, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-86135-781-0 .
• Roland Garve , Jesco von Puttkamer: Indians on the Amazon . Tanner-Verlag, Adliswil 1995, ISBN 978-3-90852-902-6 .
• Roland Garve: Among Amazon Indians . Herbig Verlag, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-7766-2303-9 .
• Sebastiao Salgado : My country, our earth. Autobiography. Nagel & Kimche, Munich 2019, ISBN 978-3-312-01152-0 , pp. 143-147.

media

• Andreas Kuno Richter: Hidden in the rainforest. The Zoé Indians , documentary film (1996), NDR, author's filmography

Web links

Commons : Zo'é  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Information about the life and history of the Zo'é including film and photos (in German)
• Instituto Socioambiental (ISA): Povos Indígenas no Brasil - Matis ( English , Portuguese )
• Jean-Pierre Dutilleux: The Zoe (People of the moon)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The first contact with the Zo'é
2. ↑ Romina Luz Hermoza Cacsire de Schaller: Kästner, Klaus-Peter: Zoé - Material culture, customs and cultural-historical position of a Tupí tribe in northern Brazil. In: Quetzal. August 2010, accessed August 13, 2010 . 
3. ↑ Zo'é. In: Ethnologue. 2009, accessed on August 14, 2010 .