The "people of the water's source," body-painted Jê warriors whose ring-shaped villages and men's houses command a forest territory along the Xingu nearly the size of Austria.
Splintered into fiercely independent bands (Xikrin, Gorotire, Mekrãgnoti, Metyktire) that fought ranchers and gold-miners; galvanized by the 1989 Altamira gathering, they secured vast demarcated reserves and number over 8,000.
Terence Turner's lifework on the Kayapó (Mebêngôkre), their cosmology and politics.
An accessible survey of the pre- and post-contact Americas that conveys the pre-conquest complexity and colonial devastation of Amazonian and Brazilian indigenous peoples.