The Gavião, also known as the Ikoro or Digút, are an

indigenous people Indigenous peoples are culturally distinct ethnic groups whose members are directly descended from the earliest known inhabitants of a particular geographic region and, to some extent, maintain the language and culture of those original people ...

native to Rondônia,

Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...

. Their population was around 220 in the 1990s. Their language, Gavião of Jiparaná, is a

Tupian language The Tupi or Tupian language family comprises some 70 languages spoken in South America, of which the best known are Tupi proper and Guarani. Homeland and ''urheimat'' Rodrigues (2007) considers the Proto-Tupian urheimat to be somewhere between ...

in the

Monde A ''monde'', meaning 'world' in French, is an orb located near the top of a crown. It represents, as the name suggests, the world that the monarch rules. It is the point at which a crown's half arches meet. It is usually topped off either w ...

branch. Like the closely related Arara and Zoró, the Gavião traditionally lived on agriculture and hunting, but their traditional lifestyle was disrupted by rubber booms in Rondônia during the 20th century. They declined dramatically through epidemics and violence in the 1940s, and their population dropped below 100 people. In the 1966, the

New Tribes Mission Ethnos360, formerly known as New Tribes Mission (NTM), is an international, theologically evangelical Christian mission organization based in Sanford, Florida, United States. Ethnos360 has approximately 2,300 missionaries in more than 20 nation ...

introduced medical care, and the population increased to over 200 in the 1980s. The Brazilian government established boundaries around their traditional land in 1977, although growth and development in Rondônia continues to threaten them.

References

{{authority control Ethnic groups in Brazil Indigenous peoples in Brazil Rondônia