Payaguá Indians

The Payaguá, a people of the Guaicuruan language family that lived along the Río Paraguay between the modern Corrientes region and the Mato Grosso. Organized in bands that traveled in canoes, the Payaguás, who numbered 6,000 in the early 1500s, are known chiefly from the accounts of enemies and rivals. Although they called themselves Evueví, meaning "people of the water," they were named Payaguá by the Guarani, whom they kept from the river. This designation contributed to the naming of the Paraguay river, province, and nation.

Prior to the arrival of the Spanish in the 1520s, the Payaguá lived by gleaning wild fruits and vegetables along the river, by fishing, and by raiding their Guarani neighbors for crops and captives. After Guaranis allied with Spanish invaders in the 1530s, Spaniards and Spanish goods were often the focus of Payaguá raids. War profits reinforced their aboriginal position as regional brokers who disseminated booty to other Chaco peoples. Southern Payaguá canoe-born bands harassed Spanish river commerce from the 1540s until after 1750. In the 1720s and 1730s, Payaguá attacks cut Brazilian communication between the coast and the settlements of Mato Grosso.

Spanish expeditions against the Payaguás were frequent, but the European strategy of annihilation was never a great success. A relaxation of tension usually followed hostile encounters, and trade with Spaniards allowed Payaguás to adopt Spanish iron for the hooks, needles, and projectile points that made their economy more productive. By the 1740s, groups of southern Payaguás began settling on the outskirts of Asunción. They caught and sold fish to Paraguayans and performed manual labor, but they rejected Christianity. Other Payaguá men worked for the colonial government for wages as couriers or scouts on the river and in military capacities, and Payaguás fought for Paraguay in the War of the Triple Alliance in the 1860s. From 1750 to 1850, Payaguás slowly declined in numbers as they merged into the Guarani-speaking population. The Payaguás had disappeared by the 1940s.

See alsoIndigenous Peoples .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alfred Métraux, "Ethnography of the Chaco," in Handbook of South American Indians, vol. 1, edited by Julian H. Steward, (1946): 197-370.

Branislava Susnik, El indio colonial del Paraguay, vol. 3, El Chaqueno (1971).

Barbara Ganson, "The Evueví of Paraguay: Adaptive Strategies and Responses to Colonialism, 1528–1811," in The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Inter-American Cultural History 45, no. 4 (1989): 461-488.

                              James Schofield Saeger