Indigenous Legal Strategies in the Shadow of Empire
André Luís Bezerra Ferreira shows that Indigenous peoples in Portuguese Amazonia were not just subjects of colonial rule. They were active participants who shaped legal meaning between the 17th and 18th centuries. Drawing from rarely studied archives like the Livro de Assentos e Despachos do Tribunal da Junta das Missões do Maranhão (1738-1777), Ferreira uncovers how Native communities used their own knowledge systems to negotiate, contest, and reshape imperial law.
Rather than simply following laws imposed from Lisbon or Madrid, Indigenous individuals turned memory, kinship ties, and oral tradition into legal arguments. Courts like the Junta das Missões became spaces of constant renegotiation, where categories like "captive," "slave," and "free" were debated from Indigenous perspectives.
Ferreira argues that memory was not just a cultural practice, but a legal force. Oral narratives, rituals, and social ties anchored claims to liberty, identity, and protection. Especially in frontier regions where colonial definitions of race and status were unstable.
At the heart of this study is a view of law as a culturally mixed system, shaped by constant translation between Indigenous and imperial ideas. By analyzing freedom suits, missionary letters, and legal records, Ferreira reconstructs how Native actors worked to make colonial law understandable and usable on their own terms.
Still, the work raises important questions. Colonial records were often written through the lens of European officials. How fully can they capture Indigenous strategies and meanings? Ferreira’s approach acknowledges these gaps but also risks reading too much agency into a heavily mediated archive.
Even so, this research reframes global legal history. It shows that Indigenous peoples were not passive victims of colonial law, but creative legal thinkers. It also connects past struggles for freedom to today’s Indigenous fights for territory, rights, and justice.