Language Contact and Documentation: Contacto Linguistico y Documentacion

144 Mutua Mehinaku & Bruna Franchetto
of the same language (Franchetto 2001). Bakairi (Kurâ), on the other hand,
shares some characteristics of the Ikpeng/Arara/Jaguma grouping (perhaps
more like the northern Carib languages) and others closer to the Upper Xingu
Carib. Here it should be recalled that the Bakairi lived for a long time, more
than a century at least, in close interaction with the Upper Xingu peoples along
the region’s headwater rivers (the Curisevo and Batovi).
Narratives confirm that the Yaruma (we say Jaguma) inhabited the region
to the east and southeast of the Culuene, between the Xingu and Araguaia
rivers, establishing the affiliation of the Yarumá with the Carib family and the
Arawine with the Tupi-Guarani family. Krause (1936) provided information that
gives us a glimpse of how the region east of the Upper Xingu basin was occupied
by the Carib groups. The Kuikuro really did not understand what the Yaruma
said: for them, it was another language. The Yaruma were warriors: they
warred with other neighbouring ethnic groups, as explained by the authors
who have written about the akinhá (narratives) of these peoples. It is told that
the Yaruma chief managed to kill a great warrior of the Jukahamaĩ (Txukarramae,
Kayapó). Krause based his account on a list of Apiaká works collected by
Ehrenreich (1895) and on the Yaruma data collected by Hermann Meyer during
his voyages to the Xingu region in 1896 and 1899. In his 1936 publication,
Krause also presented a comparison of probable ‘Apiaká’ cognates with the
various Nahukwá dialects recorded by Steinen and Meyer himself, and with
Bakairi, as documented by Steinen. Krause concluded that there was a “close
linguistic kinship between the Yarumá and the Carib tribe of the Apiaká on the
Lower Tocantins.” Meyer observed a greater distance from the set of ‘Nahuquá’
dialects (Franchetto 2001) and that the linguistic kinship with the ‘Karaiba’ of
the Xingu was much less than with the Apiaká. Furthermore the Yarumá did
not belong to the cultural province of the Xingu headwater region. At the start
of the twentieth century there were no more reports of the Jaguma otomo.
Analyzing narratives and ethnographic and archaeological data, the hypothesis
already mentioned is that the Carib Upper Xingu peoples had migrated
from the region to the east of the Culuene river. Today archaeological studies
reinforce the idea ventured by linguists that these Carib-speaking peoples
had separated around 1700. According to Franchetto and Heckenberger, the
proto-Kuikuro and proto-Matipu living at the site or village of Oti 13 separated
around 1850 (Franchetto 2001). The ancestors of the Kalapalo entered the re-
13 There are no ‘names’ of peoples in the Upper Xingu: the ethnonyms used by the kagaiha
(whites) are derived from place names: toponyms and the names of ‘villages’ merge. A people
is always X ótomo, ‘the owners of X,’ where X is a toponym (Franchetto 1986).