Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil

"This fine historical study illuminates a host of crucial questions about Brazilian state formation, racial discourses, and national identity. Its pathbreaking reconstruction of the complicated interaction between the Xavante communities and the Brazilian state provides us with vivid examples of the way in which the policies of a modernizing state serve to reduce the complexities of indigenous culture but at the same time create possibilities for entirely new strategies of resistance and negotiation."--Barbara Weinstein, author of "For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in Sao Paolo, 1920-1964 "