The Brazilian city of Manaus is often thought of as simply a jumping-off point for jungle adventures. But a new wave of Indigenous entrepreneurs, long sidelined by the city’s colonial rule, are inviting visitors to stay a while and explore the native cultures of the Amazon.
“Waku kahato ewetõ’e Biatüwi Kape.”
I don’t need to understand chef Clarinda Ramos’ words in her native Sateré-Mawé language: Her beaming smile, open arms and the long table laid with bowls of steaming food say it all. Clarinda is welcoming me and a group of fellow journalists to her recently opened restaurant Biatüwi, in Manaus, to try traditional Indigenous foods that are pretty much unknown to most Brazilians, let alone foreigners.
We’ve traveled to Manaus to listen to Clarinda and other chefs from across the Amazon speak at FIGA (International Amazonian Gastronomy Fair), the fourth edition of a government-supported food fair in which indigenous people are gaining more and more recognition as the legitimate ambassadors of the Amazon.
Biatüwi is a fascinating and fiery introduction to Clarinda’s food culture. Steaming bowls of quinhapira (meaty tambaqui fish in a black tucupi broth) are followed by puquecado (grilled fish wrapped in cacao leaves). We try crunchy sahai ants and aluá—a fermented pineapple drink—served in decorative black bowls fashioned from gourds.
Like many facets of Indigenous culture in Manaus, Indigenous food has been all but invisible until recently; it’s there but not really acknowledged. And definitely not promoted to tourists.
Every mouthful packs a punch. Chillies, ants, manioc flours and fruits are sourced from friends and family far and wide across the Amazon—a network of ethnic and family ties that connects the urban Indigenous population to the forest communities. A hand-painted cosmology chart on the wall maps out the seasonal cycles of every ingredient on the menu.
Switching to Portuguese, Clarinda, standing in impeccable chefs’ whites, explains that serving her traditional food is as much a political statement as it is a meal.
Like many facets of Indigenous culture in Manaus, Indigenous food has been all but invisible until recently; it’s there but not really acknowledged. And definitely not promoted to tourists.
“The Amazon lived a clash of cultures over the last few centuries,” explains Tenório Telles from the municipal department for tourism and culture (Manauscult). “Different perspectives about the future of the region were dominated by the interests of the Portuguese, Spanish and the Brazilian empire, in detriment to Indigenous cultures, which were silenced. In recent decades, we’ve seen a cultural resurgence of Indigenous peoples, thanks to leaders who have helped gain more visibility and recognition. Their social protagonism is changing the country.”
This protagonism is happening at the highest levels of government as well as at a grassroots one. When Biatüwi opened in 2020, some people even dubbed it Brazil’s ‘first Indigenous restaurant’. It actually seems remarkable, given that Indigenous people are the original cultures of Brazil, that this is the first restaurant run by Indigenous people serving authentic Indigenous food. The seed of the idea started in 2019 as a food stall at Feira Terra-Floresta Viva, one of a handful of food and craft markets that have flourished, despite the setback of the pandemic, inspiring ventures like Biatüwi to put down permanent roots.
It hasn’t been an easy undertaking. Lack of access to financing, lack of experience and prejudice are just some of the challenges that Indigenous entrepreneurs in Brazil face.
Manaus is a modern metropolis in the heart of a vast forest; a meeting point of waters and worlds. In the last Census (2010), there were just over 4,000 self-declared Indigenous people in the city, representing 92 ethnic groups and 36 languages.
The actual number of Indigenous people, however, is likely around 10 times as many, says João Paulo Lima Barreto. João (or Yupuri to his relatives) is one of the founders of Biatüwi and an anthropologist from the Tukano, the Upper Negro River region. “Manaus is a big Indigenous village because every neighborhood has an Indigenous presence,” he tells me.
After a fascinating lunch listening to Clarinda and João tell their stories, I wander down the cobbled street from Biatüwi, past brightly painted buildings dating back to the years of Portuguese colonial rule, to the leafy Praça Dom Pedro II. If it wasn’t for my conversation with João, I might have sat in the square in the afternoon sun and admired the ornate fountain or the iron bandstand that was shipped from England. But I now know that buried beneath my feet lies an Indigenous cemetery.
“Enough of enriching others and us not being in a good situation. We’ve woken up that Manaus is an Indigenous land and everyone has space except for us.”
- Regina, artisan at Yande Muraki
Discovered in the late 19th century, and registered as an archaeological site in the 1960s, the cemetery was only given formal recognition as a sacred place in 2021, and hundreds of burial urns still lie beneath. The local government paid homage to this history with an event in 2021, and there is talk of a memorial being built, but all that remains for now is an inconspicuous sign.
“When the Portuguese began to occupy and build the city 352 years ago, the cemetery was submerged under the buildings,” says Tenório Telles. “There was a total indifference to this memory. Manaus is an Indigenous city; it has a past connected to this ancestry. The memorial is a gesture and a recognition of an end to the silence.”
The memorial—for now at least—is no more than a plan to tell the city’s history from an Indigenous perspective. For the city’s Indigenous community, however, Praça Dom Pedro II has become a focal point for cultural celebration.
I stopped at an art exhibition overlooking the square, with artworks by dozens of artists from different ethnic groups, from paintings to more traditional wooden animal sculptures and buriti fiber baskets. “We want to occupy this square with markets, music festivals and Indigenous cuisines, all of our cultural practices,” João tells me.
Nearby, I treat myself to some handmade jewelry at Yande Muraki, a recently opened center for Indigenous entrepreneurs that has yet to gain much traction, not helped by its location off the regular tourist route.
Sculptures, feathered headdresses and artworks are all for sale. A group of artisans, mainly Sateré-Mawé women, sit around a table chatting while threading seeds together for necklaces, with piles of palm fibers and dried fruits nearby waiting to be transformed. Besides itinerant markets, this is one of the few places in the city to buy crafts directly from Indigenous people.
I talk to one of the artisans, Regina, while she threads beads. “Enough of enriching others and us not being in a good situation,” she says. “We’ve woken up that Manaus is an Indigenous land and everyone has space except for us.”
My final stop, as the sun heads down, is the famous Amazonas Theater, an opera house that stands as a symbol of opulent excess from the city’s rubber boom. Imposing and ostentatious, it was built with Italian marble, English bricks and French crystal chandeliers in the 19th century, as the city competed to be a tropical Paris. Back then, the Brazilian Amazon supplied nearly all of the world’s rubber.
The rubber barons grew rich on the labor and sweat of seringueiros (rubber tappers), mainly migrants from northeastern Brazil. The Museu do Seringal, a short boat ride away, delves further into this history. But the story of the enslaving of Indigenous people to fuel the rubber trade isn’t told, not so far as I can hear, at least. A 2020 Brazilian documentary describes a British diplomat’s account of the violence he witnessed against Indigenous communities during the rubber boom, most notably how 30,000 Indigenous people were killed to produce 4,000 tonnes of rubber.
By the 1920s, the boom turned to bust when Asian rubber broke the Brazilian monopoly and Manaus fell into decline. It has since restyled itself as a manufacturing hub with a free-trade zone and another boom cycle began. But all the while, Indigenous culture remained buried, invisible or silent to many who visited. If the people I’ve met have anything to do with it, that won’t be the case for too much longer.
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The writer traveled to Manaus courtesy of FIGA, the International Amazonian Gastronomy Fair, FIGA.
Catherine Balston is a British journalist based in Brazil, a country that never ceases to surprise her, even after more than a decade living there. She writes about interesting places and little-known ingredients, among other topics, for a variety of publications such as BBC Travel, Lonely Planet and the Telegraph.
