What is it about?
This article explores the legal strategies employed by Indigenous women in their petitions for freedom before the Tribunal of the Junta das Missões in the Portuguese Amazon. It focuses on the everyday tactics these women used to secure not only their own freedom but also that of their children.
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Why is it important?
This article highlights the legal and social protagonism of Indigenous women in the Portuguese Amazon by examining their actions before the Tribunal of the Junta das Missões. Far from being passive subjects of colonial rule, these women mobilised existing legislation, family memory, and local alliances to claim freedom for themselves and their children. The research reveals how they mastered complex legal strategies and challenged the systems of captivity imposed by missionary governance. By focusing on their everyday practices, the study expands our understanding of Indigenous agency and gender in colonial contexts of slavery and justice.
Perspectives
By focusing on the legal agency of Indigenous women in the Portuguese Amazon, this article contributes to global debates on slavery, gender, and colonial justice. It challenges Eurocentric narratives by centring subaltern voices and revealing how Indigenous women strategically navigated legal systems to resist bondage and assert kinship-based claims to freedom. The study engages with transimperial histories and comparative slavery scholarship, offering a nuanced perspective on how multinormativities, missionary governance, and Indigenous knowledge intersected in early modern empires. It thus positions Amazonian experiences within broader frameworks of global history, Indigenous studies, and the legal history of human bondage.
Dr André Luís Bezerra Ferreira
Max-Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: “Mães das Liberdades”:, Fronteiras Revista Catarinense de História, October 2018, Universidade Federal da Fronteira Sul,
DOI: 10.36661/2238-9717.2018n31.10562.
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