He received the surname "Nimuendajú" from the Apapocuva subgroup of the Guaraní people, meaning "the one who made himself a home",[1] one year after living among them.

His publications laid, in the words of one recent writer:'the indispensable groundwork from which dozens of doctoral dissertations and books have been elaborated by Brazilian and American anthropologists.

'[5]One of the effects of his work was to shift interest from the tribes living along the coast or in large towns, to the tribes hidden in the interior, and to arouse the interests of anthropologists like the young Claude Lévi-Strauss, in communities that, though living in poverty, had managed to develop societies of considerable complexity, and religious cosmologies of great complexity.

Between 1929 and 1936 he spent 14 months with the Canela Indians, a Gê-speaking people on the northeastern edge of the central plateau of Brazil, and his monograph on them, translated and annotated by Robert Lowie, was published posthumously in 1946.

His work on the Apinaye drew attention because it had many features that made it anomalous to the genre structure of the Gê societies to which it belonged in classification.

[8] Despite failing health and warnings from his doctors, he set forth on what was to prove to be his last ethnographic survey in 1945 and was killed on 10 December, among the Tukúna people, by the Solimões river, near São Paulo de Olivença, Amazonas state.