Abstract
Until recently, eleven scarlet feathered mantles – made by the Tupinambá in the Atlantic Forest and taken from their territory in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – were maintained in European museums. Since 2000, after one of these adornments was exhibited in Brazil for the first time, the Tupinambá in southern Bahia, in the Northeast of the country, have opened a conversation on cultural rights and repatriation. At the same time, they began mobilizing to retake their land through direct actions known as retomadas de terras, while pressuring the State to officially recognize the Tupinambá de Olivença Indigenous Territory. Recently, Glicéria Tupinambá (Glicéria Jesus da Silva), from the village of Serra do Padeiro, has become widely known for creating new feather mantles and proposing novel ways of interpreting the colonial cloaks. In July 2024, responding to requests by the Tupinambá people, the National Museum of Denmark returned one of the Tupinambá mantles, which now forms part of the ethnological collection of the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro. This research was supported by the National Association for Indigenous Affairs (ANAÍ).
“A striking feature of the Indian cultures of South America is the extensive use of feathers for body ornaments and for decorations on weapons and other artifacts. Nowhere have feathers been worked more lavishly or with greater skill than there,” wrote the anthropologist Alfred Métraux, enthusiastically. “Among the first treasures wrested from Brazil were the brilliant feather cloaks worn by Tupinambá chiefs.”1 In Old Tupi, feathered mantles were designated by the terms assojaba and guaraabucu.2 Inhabiting a vast stretch of the Atlantic Forest, the Tupinambá were among the first Indigenous groups to be in contact with the invaders.3 Today, the National Museum of Denmark, in Copenhagen, holds the largest known collection of Tupinambá featherwork in the world, thousands of miles from southern Bahia, in Northeastern Brazil, where the Tupinambá of Serra do Padeiro have mobilized for the past twenty years to retake their territory and cultural heritage. The most celebrated pieces of the collection were five mantles that were taken to Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Predominantly composed of Scarlet Ibis (Eudocimus ruber) feathers bound to fiber matrixes using intricate techniques, the mantles had been used by the Tupinambá in diverse ritual contexts and, in the wake of the invasion of the Americas, became highly coveted by Europeans. Until recently, all of the remaining mantles from the colonial period were held in European museums: besides the five in Denmark, three in Italy (two at the Museum of Natural History at the University of Florence and one at the Ambrosian Library, in Milan), one in Belgium (at the Royal Museums of Art and History, in Brussels), one in France (at the Quai Branly Museum, in Paris) and one in Switzerland (at the Museum of Cultures, in Basel).4 In July 2024, however, responding to requests by the Tupinambá people, the National Museum of Denmark returned one of the mantles, which now forms part of the ethnological collection of the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro.
Since 2000, after one of these adornments was exhibited in Brazil for the first time in centuries, the Tupinambá in Bahia have opened a conversation on cultural rights and repatriation. In May of that year, Amotara (Nivalda Amaral de Jesus, 1932-2018), an elder who was instrumental in the group’s mobilization, visited the “Rediscovery Exhibit”5 in São Paulo, accompanied by another Indigenous leader, Aloísio Cunha Silva. Their encounter with the feathered mantle brought from Copenhagen was chronicled in one of the most important newspapers in Brazil, under the headline “We Are Tupinambá, We Want the Mantle Back”.6 It was also in 2000 that the Tupinambá wrote an open letter to Brazilian society demanding their rights, especially the official demarcation of their territory, which would begin in 2004 and is ongoing.7 From its onset, the land struggle has intertwined with efforts to dismantle narratives put forth by official memory and hegemonic historiography erasing the Tupinambá presence historically and in the present.
In 2004, the Tupinambá of Serra do Padeiro began carrying out direct actions, called retomadas de terras, to recover their territory, turned into cocoa farms and resorts by non-Indigenous settlers since the end of the nineteenth century onward. By doing so, they have advanced a reversal of the diaspora triggered by the loss of their lands. In 2006, in the framework of the territorial recovery process in Serra do Padeiro, Glicéria Tupinambá (Glicéria Jesus da Silva), one of the authors of this narrative, created a contemporary feather mantle, based on a photographic reproduction of one of the colonial cloaks. Subsequently, the Tupinambá of Serra do Padeiro donated the mantle to the National Museum of Brazil where it was incorporated into their ethnological collections. For Glicéria, it was a landmark, increasing the visibility of Tupinambá mobilization.
The mantle traveled around the country as one of the highlights of the exhibit “The First Peoples of Brazil” (Os Primeiros Brasileiros), curated by João Pacheco de Oliveira, curator of the Ethnological Collections of the National Museum.8 In 2018, when a massive fire ravaged the National Museum, the mantle was being exhibited in Brasília and thus was spared. The creation of this first contemporary mantle was the point of departure for Glicéria’s reflections on cultural rights, which would eventually advance a broader notion of repatriation. Since 2020, she has deepened her investigations and produced new and more complex cloaks. Today, Glicéria is widely known not only for creating new mantles, but also for proposing novel ways of interpreting the colonial pieces.
In November of 2018, Glicéria had access to the Quai Branly Museum and visited the mantle maintained in its collections.9 She explains that the mantle talked to her and revealed some of the secrets kept in its weave. Glicéria took the opportunity to carefully observe the material aspects of the cloak, how its matrix had been woven and how the feathers had been bound to it. Reading the mantle in person, she gathered important information that she would arrange, like a puzzle, to capture this complexity in the production of new pieces. She started creating a new cloak in February of 2020, informed by her findings at the Quai Branly, as well as revelations in dreams. The Tupinambá emphasize that the contemporary mantles are not replicas. While highlighting the connections between the colonial and the contemporary mantles, Glicéria affirms that the latter are no less valuable or authentic than the former, counteracting conservative perspectives on Indigenous heritage.

Glicéria at the National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen. Photo: Renata Valente (2022).
Invited by the National Museum of Denmark, Glicéria joined a week-long workshop put together as part of the project “Taking Care – Ethnographic and World Cultures Museums as Spaces of Care” in September of 2022. During the occasion, she had the opportunity to closely examine the sixteen pieces of Tupinambá featherwork housed at the museum. The visit would also pave the way for the agreement between the National Museums of Denmark and Brazil, allowing for the return of one of the mantles. After her stay in Copenhagen, she traveled to Brussels to visit the cloak kept at the Royal Museums of Art and History of Belgium. Her journey visiting all the mantles kept in Europe was finally completed in April of 2024 in Milan.
The production of contemporary mantles and the territorial recovery process are deeply entangled. To begin, land tenure is a basic precondition for the pieces’ existence. On a tangible level, the Tupinambá must be in possession of their territory to collect the materials used in the cloaks. From the birds that inhabit various niches to the wild bees, not to mention the vegetation, species have thrived anew since the Tupinambá began restoring forests through the retomada process. On a cosmological level, in Serra do Padeiro, there is a strong belief that the land ultimately belongs to non-human entities known as encantados (frequently referred to as donos da terra, or the owners of the land), while the Tupinambá are its main caretakers. Tending to the land is understood as a cosmological duty, central to the Tupinambá philosophy of history and political ethics.10 The returning of mantles, understood as both a demand and a gift to and from these entities, is an expression of renewed vitality. Finally, the territory is also the material basis for social organization; the knowledge that animates the mantle is embedded within it, dependent on the vitality of a kinship network and neighborly relationships.
Among the first Indigenous peoples in Brazil to be directly affected by the conquest, as we have observed, the Tupinambá have been subjected to massacres, conversions, and enslavement. “The Tupinambá were represented as ‘pacified’ (meaning militarily defeated) and then deemed extinct. In parallel, throughout history, the lethal colonizer wave has spread, reaching and destroying or conquering other Indigenous peoples in the entire country,” as highlighted by Pacheco de Oliveira.11 Centuries later, they are finally recovering their lands, while revitalizing their cultural heritage, as Glicéria summarizes: “I have always believed that our culture is a bowl that was thrown against a rock and shattered to pieces that flew everywhere. We must work to create a mosaic, collecting and gluing the pieces together. It will be the same bowl, even if it is cracked – that does not matter. It will be the same bowl, and we will bring it back.”12
References
Alarcon, Daniela F. “Mata Queimada Cresce; Museu, Não: Cientistas Indígenas Avaliam Perdas.” UOL. September 11, 2018. https://www.uol.com.br/tilt/ultimas-noticias/redacao/2018/09/11/mata-queimada-cresce-museu-nao-indigenas-avaliam-perdas-no-museunacional.htm
Alarcon, Daniela F. O Retorno da Terra: As Retomadas na Aldeia Tupinambá da Serra do Padeiro, Sul da Bahia. São Paulo: Editora Elefante, 2019.
Alarcon, Daniela F. 2022. O Retorno dos Parentes: Mobilização e Recuperação Territorial entre os Tupinambá da Serra do Padeiro, Sul da Bahia. Rio de Janeiro: E-PapersLACED
Antenore, Armando. “Somos Tupinambás, Queremos o Manto de Volta.” Folha de S.Paulo. June 1, 2000. https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/fsp/ilustrad/fq0106200006.htm
Buono, Amy J. “Feathered Identities and Plumed Performances: Tupinambá Interculture in Early Modern Brazil and Europe.” Ph.D. diss., University of California Santa Barbara, 2007.
Due, Berete. “Artefatos Brasileiros no Kunstkammer Real/ Brazilian Artefacts in the Royal Kunstkammer.” In Albert Eckhout Volta ao Brasil: 1644-2002/ Albert Eckhout Returns to Brazil: 1644-2002, edited by Barbara Berlowicz, Berete Due, Peter Pentz, and Espen Waehle, 187–195. Copenhagen: National Museum of Denmark, 2002.
Fausto, Carlos. “Fragmentos de História e Cultura Tupinambá: Da Etnologia como Instrumento Crítico de Conhecimento Etno-Histórico.” In História dos Índios no Brasil, edited by Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, 381–396. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras/ Secretaria Municipal de Cultura, 1992.
Françozo, Mariana. “‘Dressed like an Amazon’: The Transatlantic Trajectory of a Red Feather Coat.” In Museums and Biographies: Stories, Objects, Identities, edited by Kate Hill, 187–199. Woodbrige: The Boydell Press, 2012.
Métraux, Alfred. “‘Tapirage,’ A Biological Discovery of South American Indians.” Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences 34, no. 8 (1944), 252.
Monteiro, John M. “The Crises and Transformations of Invaded Societies: Coastal Brazil in the Sixteenth Century.” In The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, v. 3 – South America, edited by Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz, 973–1023. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Pacheco de Oliveira, João. “Uma Experiência Exemplar em Antropologia.” In O Retorno dos Parentes: Mobilização e Recuperação Territorial entre os Tupinambá da Serra do Padeiro, Sul da Bahia, by Daniela F. Alarcon, 15–23. Rio de Janeiro: E-Papers, Laboratório de Pesquisas em Etnicidade, Cultura e Desenvolvimento do Museu Nacional da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, 2022.
Pavelic, Nathalie L. B. “Aprender e Ensinar com os Outros: A Educação como Meio de Abertura e de Defesa na Aldeia Tupinambá de Serra do Padeiro (Bahia, Brasil).” Ph.D. diss., Universidade Federal da Bahia, 2019.
Tugny, Augustin de. “A Volta Histórica dos Mantos Tupinambá/ Iwiei Mbẽnẽuçawawara Assojaba Tupinãbá.” In Kwá Yepé Turusú Yuriri Assojaba Tupinambá | Essa é a Grande Volta do Manto Tupinambá, edited by Augustin de Tugny, Glicéria Tupinambá, Juliana Caffé, and Juliana Gontijo, 30–43. São Paulo: Conversas em Gondwana, 2021.
https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/65935132/catalogo-kwa-yepe-turusu-yuiri-assojaba-tupinamba
Tupinambá, Glicéria. “O Manto é Feminino/ Assojaba Ikunhãwara.” In Kwá Yepé Turusú Yuriri Assojaba Tupinambá | Essa é a Grande Volta do Manto Tupinambá, edited by Augustin de Tugny, Glicéria Tupinambá, Juliana Caffé, and Juliana Gontijo, 18–24. São Paulo: Conversas em Gondwana, 2021. https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/65935132/catalogo-kwa-yepe-turusu-yuiri-assojaba-tupinamba
Alfred Métraux, “‘Tapirage,’ A Biological Discovery of South American Indians,” Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences 34, no. 8 (1944): 252–254. ↩︎
Tibiriçá, Luiz C., ed. Dicionário Tupi-Português: Com Esboço de Gramática de Tupi Antigo. (São Paulo: Traço Editora, 1984), pp. 69, 103, as cited by Amy J. Buono, “Feathered Identities and Plumed Performances: Tupinambá Interculture in Early Modern Brazil and Europe” (PhD diss., University of California Santa Barbara, 2007), p. 83. ↩︎
“The many groups inhabiting the coast between the future captaincy of São Vicente [current São Paulo state, in the Southeast] and the mouth of the Amazon [in the North] came to be known collectively as the Tupinambá, though early sources attribute a much greater variety of ethnic designations in reference to the coastal Tupi.” John M. Monteiro, “The Crises and Transformations of Invaded Societies: Coastal Brazil in the Sixteenth Century,” in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 3, South America, ed. Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 977. Monteiro is an excellent source of information in English about the Tupinambá during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. On the complexities of dealing with colonial ethnonyms regarding Tupi groups, see also Carlos Fausto, “Fragmentos de História e Cultura Tupinambá: Da Etnologia como Instrumento Crítico de Conhecimento Etno-Histórico,” in História dos Índios no Brasil, ed. Manuela Carneiro da Cunha (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras/Secretaria Municipal de Cultura, 1992), pp. 383–385. ↩︎
Buono offers detailed information about the eleven mantles. See “Feathered Identities and Plumed Performances,” as well as Augustin de Tugny, “A Volta Histórica dos Mantos Tupinambá/Iwiei Mbẽnẽuçawawara Assojaba Tupinãbá,” in Kwá Yepé Turusú Yuriri Assojaba Tupinambá | Essa é a Grande Volta do Manto Tupinambá, ed. Augustin de Tugny, Glicéria Tupinambá, Juliana Caffé, and Juliana Gontijo (São Paulo: Conversas em Gondwana, 2021), pp. 30–43 and, on the Danish pieces, Berete Due, “Artefatos Brasileiros no Kunstkammer Real/Brazilian Artefacts in the Royal Kunstkammer,” in Albert Eckhout Volta ao Brasil: 1644-2002/Albert Eckhout Returns to Brazil: 1644-2002, ed. Barbara Berlowicz, Berete Due, Peter Pentz, and Espen Waehle (Copenhagen: National Museum of Denmark, 2002), pp. 187–195. ↩︎
The exhibit, Mostra do Redescobrimento in Portuguese, took place at the Oca (Lucas Nogueira Garcez Pavilion). ↩︎
Armando Antenore, “Somos Tupinambás, queremos o manto de volta”, Folha de S.Paulo, June 1, 2000. The episode is addressed by Mariana Françozo, who explains that “Ultimately, the cloak’s appearance in the Brazilian Rediscovery Exhibit added yet another layer of significance to the biography of this much-coveted object, insofar as it allowed present-day Tupinambá Indians to draw attention to their continuing struggle for the recognition of their heritage and their rights.” See “‘Dressed like an Amazon’: The Transatlantic Trajectory of a Red Feather Coat.” in Museums and Biographies: Stories, Objects, Identities, edit.Kate Hill, 187–199. (Woodbrige: The Boydell Press, 2012), p. 196. ↩︎
Encompassing approximately 47,000 hectares, the Tupinambá de Olivença Indigenous Territory (overlaid by portions of the cities of Buerarema, Ilhéus, São José da Vitória and Una) is composed of more than twenty villages, including Serra do Padeiro, which is located in a hilly region on the western border. The most recent estimates indicate that the population of the Indigenous territory fluctuates at around five thousand people, not including the non-Indigenous settlers still living in the area. For detailed information on the demarcation process, see Alarcon Daniela F. Alarcon, O Retorno da Terra: As Retomadas na Aldeia Tupinambá da Serra do Padeiro, Sul da Bahia (São Paulo: Editora Elefante, 2019) and Daniela F. Alarcon, O Retorno dos Parentes: Mobilização e Recuperação Territorial entre os Tupinambá da Serra do Padeiro, Sul da Bahia (Rio de Janeiro: E-Papers/LACED, 2022). ↩︎
In 2021, the project “The First Peoples of Brazil” released an online permanent exhibition: https://osprimeirosbrasileiros.mn.ufrj.br/en/. ↩︎
During the visit to the Quai Branly, Glicéria was accompanied by her niece Jéssica S. de Quadros and the anthropologist Nathalie L. B. Pavelic. She was in Paris to deliver a guest lecture at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS). For descriptions of the visit, see Glicéria Tupinambá, “O Manto é Feminino/ Assojaba Ikunhãwara.” in Kwá Yepé Turusú Yuriri Assojaba Tupinambá | Essa é a Grande Volta do Manto Tupinambá, ed. Augustin de Tugny, Glicéria Tupinambá, Juliana Caffé, and Juliana Gontijo (São Paulo: Conversas em Gondwana, 2021), pp. 18–24 and Nathalie L. B. Pavelic, “Aprender e Ensinar com os Outros: A Educação como Meio de Abertura e de Defesa na Aldeia Tupinambá de Serra do Padeiro (Bahia, Brasil)” (Ph.D. diss., Universidade Federal da Bahia, 2019). ↩︎
For detailed considerations on this topic, see Daniela F. Alarcon, O Retorno da Terra: As Retomadas na Aldeia Tupinambá da Serra do Padeiro, Sul da Bahia (São Paulo: Editora Elefante, 2019). ↩︎
João Pacheco de Oliveira, “Uma Experiência Exemplar em Antropologia,” in O Retorno dos Parentes: Mobilização e Recuperação Territorial entre os Tupinambá da Serra do Padeiro, Sul da Bahia, by Daniela F. Alarcon (Rio de Janeiro: E-Papers/LACED, 2022), p. 17. Translated by the authors. ↩︎
Glicéria Tupinambá, “O Manto é Feminino/ Assojaba Ikunhãwara.” in Kwá Yepé Turusú Yuriri Assojaba Tupinambá | Essa é a Grande Volta do Manto Tupinambá, ed. Augustin de Tugny, Glicéria Tupinambá, Juliana Caffé, and Juliana Gontijo (São Paulo: Conversas em Gondwana, 2021), p. 19. Translated by the authors. ↩︎