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Charrúa

1527 – 1831
Native nationSouth America

Mounted lancers of the Banda Oriental whom Spanish chroniclers credited with killing the explorer Solís in 1516, and who later took to the horse with ferocity, making the grasslands west of the Uruguay a frontier no colonist crossed lightly.

Not an ending in the sense of erasing the people, but the Salsipuedes massacre is, per historian Lincoln Maiztegui Casas as quoted on Wikipedia, the event that 'marcó el fin de las naciones indígenas... asociada a un territorio' in Uruguay -- i.e. the end of a territorially-bound Charrúa nation there. Descendant organizations persist without a recognized land base: in Argentina's Entre Ríos province (Comunidad Cepe and Comunidad Abayubá in Concordia, coordinated via Codecha, with an INAI Consejo de Participación Indígena seat since 2008) and in Brazil (roughly 400 self-identified descendants around Porto Alegre/Santo Ângelo, given largely symbolic recognition by FUNAI in 2007 despite being officially considered extinct). Uruguay itself recognizes no indigenous land at all -- its only official gesture is a 2009 law (Ley 18.589) declaring 11 April the 'Día de la Nación Charrúa y de la Identidad Indígena', and a 2021 declaration of the Salsipuedes site as a memory site, neither of which is a land grant.

Borders in 1831 · drawn from 3 sourced border frames
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Borders over time

The atlas holds 3 border frames for Charrúa — the shape you scrub through changes in 1527 · 1700 · 1831.

Moments from the Chronicle

Further reading

Sources