ABSTRACT
Brazil was a Portuguese colony from 1500 to 1822. When the Portuguese began their journeys of conquest to the Brazilian territories, they encountered between three and five million indigenous people organized into approximately one thousand different nations. Portuguese society was rigidly structured, ‘centred in hierarchy, founded in religion; service to God and service to the king were the parameters of social activity’ (Paiva 2000:44). The Portuguese Empire had the support of the Catholic religious orders in the colonization process, especially the Jesuits who used formal education of indigenous children as one of their strategies. The Portuguese began to enslave the indigenous people in 1536. The Jesuit priest Manuel de Nóbrega, who founded the Jesuit mission in Brazil, wrote the following to Dom João III, king of Portugal, in 1551:
When the priests realized that the grown people were so rooted in their sins, so obstinate in their evil ways, gratifying themselves by eating human flesh, and that they called it the true ambrosia and seeing how little can be done with them because they are so full of women, so fiercely engaged in war and given over to their vices, and that is one of the things which most disturbs reason and takes away all meaning, the priests decided to teach the children the ways of salvation so that later, they can teach their parents. Thus going out to the villages, they gathered them together to teach them Christian doctrine.
