Camarão Indians' letters
[4][5][6][7][8] Although the correspondence had been known since 1885 and there have been previous attempts at translation, the complete decipherment of its contents was only published for the first time in October 2022 by philologist Eduardo de Almeida Navarro, who also transcribed and commented on it.
He had managed to balance the complicated relations between the West India Company and the indebted sugar plantation owners, and to enforce religious freedom.
Also after the departure of Maurice of Nassau, religious conflicts ensued: In July 1645, Catholic faithful were massacred by the Dutch in Cunhaú, in the town of Canguaretama, and, in October, another slaughter was recorded, this time in Uruaçu.
[10][13] That same year, the Pernambuco Insurrection began, a movement opposed to Dutch rule and commanded by André Vidal de Negreiros, Henrique Dias, and Antônio Filipe Camarão.
Meanwhile, the philologist Eduardo de Almeida Navarro had his first contact with the letters and related their indecipherability to the nonexistence of Tupi dictionaries.
[20][21] The transcription and annotated full translation of the Camarão Indians' letters were published in the periodical Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi in October 2022.
[7] Furthermore, the authors of the letters - Diogo da Costa, Diogo Pinheiro Camarão, Filipe Camarão and Simão Soares - were probably literate in Portuguese, not Tupi, and, because of this, when writing, they registered their native language "by ear" (like a Lusophone writing "taquesse" instead of "táxi", for example), failing to register some phonemes and making little use of punctuation marks and accentuation.
[22] Roughly speaking, the pro-Portuguese natives asked those who were allied with the Dutch to return to the Lusitanian side, calling the Protestants heretics.
[28][e]In general, the letters reveal dissatisfaction over the Indians' contemporary situation,[22] since they wished their relatives to unite, to stop fighting each other, and to go back to living according to their old traditions.
[6] The letters reveal history from the perspective of those who have always been oppressed, that is, the indigenous people,[31] showing their dissatisfaction on the occasion of conflicts between Europeans and the will to rescue past traditions.
[7] The missives also bring to light previously unknown information, such as place names and other indigenous combatants, as well as revealing details about battles.
[33] The letters also reveal the predominance of a subject-verb-object syntax (aîmondó ã xe "soldados" ebapó — "eis que enviei meus soldados para aí" [I have sent my soldiers there]), although there were still examples of subject-object-verb syntax (emokûeî bé mokõî kunhã aîmondó — "para aí também duas mulheres enviei" [there also two women I sent]), primitive Tupi tendency, as recorded in quinhentist [pt] texts.
[34] In March 2022, Natal mayor Álvaro Costa Dias met with Eduardo Navarro and agreed that the city would distribute didactic material about the letters to public school students and tourists.
