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The 'Tupi people' are one of the main ethnic groups of Brazilian indigenous people, together with the related Guaraní. They first inhabited the Amazon rainforest, then spread southward and gradually occupied the Atlantic coast. From the sixteenth century onward the Tupis, like other natives from the region, were assimilated, enslaved or simply exterminated by Portuguese and Spanish settlers, nearly leading to their complete annihilation of its tribes, with the exception of a few isolated communities. The remnants of these tribes are today confined to indigenous reservations or acculturated to some degree into the dominant society. In southeastern Brazil they are an important presence in the , while constituting a considerable portion of the lower classes in the North, Northeast, and Center-West.
The Tupi people is a nation that inhabited almost all of Brazil's coast and the Amazon rainforest when the Portuguese first arrived there. Although being a single ethnic group spread across thousands of kilometers of coast and spoke the same language, the Tupi were divided in several tribes that usually engaged into war with one another. In these wars the Tupi normally tried to capture their enemies to later kill them in anthropophagic rituals, instead of just killing them in battle. Examples of tribes are: ''Tupiniquim, Tupinambá, Potiguara, Tabajara, Caetés, Temiminó, Tamoios'' and another one called the name ''Tupi'' itself, which shows that "Tupi" is a generic and specific term.
Tupi culture and language have a massive presence in today Brazilian Culture and in the Brazilian Portuguese language. Some examples of Portuguese words that come from Tupi are: ''mingau, mirim, soco, cutucar, tiquinho, perereca, tatu'' and other several local fauna and flora names, besides a huge number of places and cities in modern Brazil are named in Tupi.
The ''tupinambá'' tribe is fictitiously portrayed in Nelson Pereira dos Santos' satirical 1971 film, ''Como Era Gostoso o Meu Francêsin'' (Oh, How My Lil' Frenchman Was Tasty).
The Guarani is a different nation inhabitant of southern Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay and northern Argentina that speaks Guarani, another language, but it is usually thought to be the same group as Tupi.

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See also

★ De Gestis Meni de Saa

★ Guarani War

★ José de Anchieta

★ Língua Geral

★ Manuel da Nóbrega

★ Nhengatu

★ Old Tupi

★ Tupian languages

★ Tupiniquim

External links

★ Portugal in America