Terra Brasilis

Credited to the Portuguese cartographer Lopo Homem, this sixteenth century image depicts the then called “Terra Brasilis” as a land abundant in natural resources, highlighting the extraction of pau-brasil via the exploitation of the Tupinambá people. From an Indigenous perspective, this image reveals the beginning of colonial violence: the forest, a sacred space of life, memory, and spirituality was transformed into a commodity, used to enrich the colonizers.

Among the first to establish contact with the invaders, the Tupinambá people were enslaved and suffered attempts to expel them from their lands and erase their culture.

For the Tupinambá people, pau-brasil does not represent merely an economic resource, but it is part of a living land inhabited by human beings, animals, spirits, and encantados.  In this map, the Tupinambá are shown cutting and transporting the wood, demonstrating how the colonizers took advantage of their knowledge and labor to extract resources from the territory.

The image does not address the consequences of this contact: the invasion of ancestral lands, environmental destruction, the imposition of exploitative relationships, epidemics, and conflicts that defined the history of Indigenous peoples.

Thus, the scene, often presented as a record of the “discovery”, showcasing the wealth of the new colony, can be reinterpreted as a visual account of the first moments of the exploitation and the violence that marked the dispossession of Indigenous lands and the predatory deforestation of the Atlantic Forest.