Mythologies of the Panará/Kreen-Akrore Tribe

The Panara are an indigenous tribe from the Brazilian Amazon who thrived in their isolated way of life until their sudden exile almost decimated their entire population. In less than a year they lost two-thirds of their people and were well on their way to extinction. The Panará are the last descendants of the Southern Kayapó, a large ethnic group which inhabited a large area in Central Brazil during the 18th century. They were formerly called the Kreen-Akrore. Other names for the Panará include: Kreen Akarore, Kren Akarore, Krenhakarore, Krenhakore, Krenakore, Krenakarore or Krenacarore, and "Índios Gigantes" ("Giant Indians"). All of the names are variants of the Mẽbêngôkre name Krã jàkàràre [ˈkɾʌ̃ jʌˈkʌɾʌɾɛ], meaning "round-cut head", a reference to their traditional hair style which identifies them. The Panará are farmers, fishermen, and hunters. They grow corn, potatoes, yam, several banana species, cassava, squash and peanuts. The Panará use a variety of different techniques to ensure that they have a steady supply of food all year round. Fishing techniques vary according to the water level: timbó (a toxic weed) is used in low-water season and bow and arrows are used during the flood.

When they returned to their region of origin, in the Peixoto de Azevedo river basin, 25 years ago, the Panarás put an end to a tragedy that had lasted another 25 years: even before they found the contact front led by the Villas-Bôas brothers, in February 1973, "everybody" was already dying, as the chief Akë (pronounced Akã) tells us. In the beginning, they were called "krenhakarore", always associated with the description "giant Indians". The fame of their supposedly beyond-average height, faded a little after contact, traveled the world between the late 1960s and early 1970s, provoking a global interest like few things in Brazil, apart from football, could reach at that time. Panarás, 'giant Indians', grow again after almost disappearing. The Panará indigenous people managed to return to their homeland after decades of forced exile. Today they have reached a larger population than the one they had before being almost decimated by the diseases and mistreatment resulting from the contact determined by the military dictatorship, to tear up a road in the territory they occupied in the early 1970s. Exactly 50 years after the meeting with Brazilian State officials, they are now going through a happy phase, of food comfort and population growth. Even so, they are scared and have to permanently protect themselves against the risk of invasions, arson and the influence of agribusiness on their territory —in the form of a drying environment, water pollution and contamination of animals by pesticides. Despite the trauma of contact with Brazilian society in 1973, the white men’s diseases that almost decimated them, and twenty years of forced dislocation from their traditional lands of Peixoto de Azevedo River to the Parque Indígena do Xingu, the Panará have been able to recover their joy and desire to fight. They are once again growing in numbers and proud of their way of life. They were also able to take back part of their ancient traditional territory along the Iriri River (495,000 hectares of dense forest and headwaters, unspoiled by the white man) located on the border of Mato Grosso and Pará states. Nowadays, they want to be known by their real name: Panará.

His body was painted from the neck down in the black dye of the genipap (a fruit used by indigenous people for body painting), which takes days to come off. He wore nothing but green nylon shorts that went down to his knees, a necklace made of jaguar teeth, and mirrored sunglasses that looked like those of a surfer. He has the posture of an old warrior who still has the strength to fight if necessary, but as soon as the Panará’s elder statesman starts telling the story of his people’s survival, a smile comes across his face. 2017 marked 20 years since the Panará concluded their return to part of their ancestral lands on the Iriri River, on the border between the states of Mato Grosso and Pará, in Brazil’s Amazon region. They left the Xingu Indigenous Park after a period of forced exile that they could not have imagined would last so long. The Panará, also known as the giant Indians – there is a myth that they are very tall, although their average height is only 5′ 6″ – used to live in the basin of the Peixoto de Azevedo River, a region that spanned from the town of Colider, in Mato Grosso, to the Iriri River in Pará. Their plight was an example of what the so-called “Brazilian miracle” — the economy during the dictatorship era — wrought on its indigenous people. The the BR-163 highway, constructed in the 1970s, cut across the forests of Mato Grosso and Pará in order to connect the cities of Cuiabá and Santarém, piercing through the region where the Panará lived, bringing disease and death along with it. After contact with the white man during the construction of the highway, the Panará’s population dwindled to fewer than 80. “Cláudio [Villas-Boas, one of the activists responsible for establishing the Xingu as protected land] asked us to go to the Xingu park, otherwise we would all die, so we went,” recalls Akã during an interview behind his house in the village of Nãsepotiti, where he now lives. “We started farming in Xingu, but neither the land or the forest were good. Nothing would grow. Corn, manioc, banana, none of them grew. The forest was also poor for hunting and the area didn’t have the fruits we were used to eating.” The natural resources at the Xingu park are different from the Peixoto de Azevedo region, which made basic subsistence, from farming to building houses, much more difficult. They moved their village around the approximately 10,000 square miles of Xingu Indigenous Park seven times, in search of conditions similar to those they had enjoyed on their ancestral land, but none of the places could yield the abundance of their previous life. One indicator of their difficulty in adapting to Xingu was their low birth rate. Akã recalls asking a cousin, “Do you think there’s anything left of our traditional land? Because this place is not working.” So began the “giant Indians’” struggle to find out whether the whites had left any of the forest standing, or if they had already “devoured everything” with their tractors and machines.

Two groups of men descend the unpaved road at a rapid, rocking gait. Under the intense midday sun, each carries the three-meters-long trunk of a buriti palm tree, weighing at least a hundred kilos. One man carries the trunk for some meters before another takes his place. They spell each other without stopping because they are competing in a tora race, a tradition among the Paraná warriors. As the two teams get closer to the village, their speed increases, until one of the groups breaks away from the other, rushing toward the Men’s House, a wood and straw construction in the middle of the village, which is the finish line. Afterward, with both toras resting on the ground, everyone gets together to dance and sing. The women, their bodies painted, feathered ornaments on their arms, rattles of pequi seeds tied to their legs and skirts of glass beads, form a line and join the men in a circular dance. The commemoration of 25 years since the Panará tribe repossessed their traditional territory was promoted by the Iakiô Panará Association, which represents them. It took place October 15-17, with traditional songs and dances, the tora race, bow and arrow contest, the moitará (an exchange of objects between event participants), a women’s meeting and important speeches by the Panará and their guests. During the years of the military dictatorship (1964-1985), impacted by the construction of the BR-163 highway, the Paraná were transferred to the Xingu Indigenous Park despite their protests, where they lived in exile in their own country. Twenty-five years ago, they returned to their ancestral territory, bringing a cycle of loss and tremendous pain to a close. The Panará are warriors and have many conquests to commemorate. Readers can watch the video made by Arewana Yudja and Kujãesage Kaiabi, from the Xingu+ Communicators Network. “I was courageous. I was strong.” Akâ Panará speaks at the opening ceremony. “As a warrior, I was able to claim this piece of earth. If it was not for me, we would not be here. This is why I fought. I was not afraid of the white men. I was brave. I am happy to be hearing and celebrating our history.” Akâ is an elder of his people and experienced his initial contact with white men in the 1970s. He is one of the few Paraná survivors from that era. During the opening ceremonies, he was joined by Steve Schwartzman, an anthropologist who acted together with the Panará and is the current coordinator of the EDF Renewables organization, André Villas-Boas, a founding member of the ISA, Sofia Mendonça, coordinator of the Unifesp Xingu Project, Douglas Rodrigues, a Unifesp physician who has been on the side of the Panará since the time they lived in the Xingu, Kanse Panará, Pasyma Panará and other partners, like Marisa, a nurse who has been active for years in the territory.

The Panará are an indigenous ethnic group inhabiting the northern Mato Grosso region of Brazil along the Iriri River bordering Pará state, numbering 704 individuals as of 2022 and speaking the Panará language, which belongs to the Northern Jê linguistic family. Traditionally organized into four clans within large circular villages, they sustain themselves through slash-and-burn agriculture of crops like maize and cassava, supplemented by hunting, fishing, and gathering. Their population plummeted from several hundred to 174 survivors by 1996 following first sustained contact on February 4, 1973, amid construction of the Cuiabá-Santarém highway, which exposed them to epidemic diseases such as flu and diarrhea transmitted by non-indigenous workers, necessitating relocation to the Xingu Indigenous Park until demarcation of their 495,000-hectare reserve enabled return that year. Since repatriation, the Panará have experienced demographic recovery and cultural revitalization, including ceremonial practices like log racing, though their lands remain vulnerable to external pressures from infrastructure projects and resource extraction. The Panará people, speakers of a Northern Jê language isolate within the Macro-Jê family, historically received exonyms from neighboring groups and outsiders that reflected physical or cultural traits rather than self-identification. Prior to sustained contact in the 1970s, they were known among the Kayapó as kran iakarare, rendered in Portuguese orthography as Kreen-Akrore or variants such as Krenhakore and Krenacarore, denoting "round-cut head" in reference to their traditional cropped hairstyle featuring two parallel lines shaved across the forehead. This Kayapó-derived term, disseminated through inter-tribal lore and early explorer accounts, persisted into the 20th century despite the Panará's avoidance of outsiders, underscoring a linguistic borrowing pattern common in Jê-speaking networks where enemy or unknown groups are labeled via descriptive morphology. Early European and Brazilian settler narratives further amplified the "Índios Gigantes" (Giant Indians) designation, attributing it to the Panará's large war clubs and bows—up to 3 meters in length—as well as exceptional individual statures, such as that of Mengrire at approximately 2.03 meters, though average heights were around 1.67 meters for men. This hyperbolic naming, echoed in 1960s FUNAI reports and films like Adrian Cowell's The Tribe That Hides From Man (1970), stemmed from unverified Kayapó enmity and frontier exaggeration rather than empirical measurement, with post-contact assessments by the Villas Bôas brothers in 1973 debunking the giant myth while confirming the hairstyle-derived exonym. Historically, the Panará were also conflated with the Southern Cayapó (Caiapó do Sul), a larger Jê group deemed extinct by the early 1900s after colonial incursions, positioning the Panará as their linguistic and cultural remnants in the upper Xingu and Iriri River basins.

Journalists followed the monitoring work (air and land) carried out by the Panará people to verify and combat threats of invasion of their land. The report coincides with the 25th anniversary of the return to their land in 1997. Formerly called Krenhakarore or 'Giant Indigenous people,' the Panará were contacted by a Funai mission led by brothers Claudio and Orlando Villas Boas in 1973. The military dictatorship wanted to pass the BR-163 highway (Cuiabá-Santarém) where they lived. The contact resulted in tragedy: They fell victim to disease, their population declined, and they were eventually taken to live in the Xingu Indigenous Park. Their land in the Peixoto de Azevedo region was then taken over by miners and largely destroyed: Today it is a barren sand dune and the river is polluted with mercury. The Panará never adapted: Indigenous Amazonian forest people, they lived in transition to the Cerrado, another biome, other food. In the mid-1990s, on missions organised by Stephan Schwartzan and André Villas Boas, they detected an area of their homeland with preserved forest, in an army zone in the Serra do Cachimbo. The NDI (Núcleo de Direitos Indígenas - Indigenous Rights Nucleus) won a lawsuit against the Union and got the lands back in 1997. Their forest is preserved, their population has grown, and they monitor the land. The success story after the tragedy, however, requires permanent control of the territory, surrounded by cattle and agricultural commodity farms in a region also threatened by illegal mining and logging.