“To Be at Peace”: Indigenous Women, Interethnic Marriages, and Cunhamenas in Northwestern Amazonia, 1730–1755

Exogamous marriage among Northwest Amazonian peoples structured exchange networks, interethnic relations, and settlement patterns during eighteenth-century European imperial expansion. Exchange and reciprocity offered a path to social stability within a highly conflictive environment characterized by warfare and slaving. Arawakan, Cariban, and Tukanoan leaders and outsiders, among them men from Belém, the Portuguese capital of the State of Maranhão and Grão-Pará, exchanged gifts and people. The leaders presented their female relatives to make alliances and extend their social networks. Those who accepted the women and became integrated into Indigenous communities were known as cunhamenas, or in-laws. New evidence from Inquisition files in Lisbon details these exchanges and the relationships that developed between individuals and groups. This long-held Indigenous social practice also shaped residential patterns in the downriver missions and contributed to the formation and consolidation of a highly diverse population. After the mid-eighteenth century, however, Portuguese authorities imposed Catholic norms to break up multiple marriages, which diminished Indigenous leaders’ social prestige, separated women from their co-wives, and disrupted alliances. Instead, the Crown encouraged monogamous marriages between Indigenous women and Portuguese soldiers. Rebellion erupted in the Rio Negro missions. This article presents an overview of regional interethnic alliances through marriage and contends that Indigenous exogamous practices were key to historical interaction, exchange, and social development in the Brazilian North.