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Tukano (Vaupés River Peoples)

1450 – present
Native nationSouth America

River chiefs of the black-water Vaupés whose famous law of linguistic exogamy forced a man to marry a woman of a different language, knitting some twenty named peoples into one multilingual society.

Battered by 18th-century Portuguese slave-raids and forced descents, then the rubber boom and the Salesian mission era, the Tukanoan peoples survived in the Alto Rio Negro and today number tens of thousands across the Colombia-Brazil reserves, still speaking Tukano on the river.

Borders in 2026 · drawn from 4 sourced border frames
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Borders over time

The atlas holds 4 border frames for Tukano (Vaupés River Peoples) — the shape you scrub through changes in 1450 · 1650 · 1751 · 1901.

Further reading

Sources