Camarão Indians' letters

Camarao Indians' letters are six letters written in 1645 by pro-Portuguese Indigenous Potiguara leaders, including Antonio Filipe Camarao and Diogo Pinheiro Camarao, urging Dutch-allied Indigenous leaders Pedro Poti and Antonio Paraupaba to switch their allegiance during the Pernambuco Insurrection amid the Dutch-Portuguese conflict in colonial Brazil. Written in Old Tupi, a language normally used only orally, the letters are considered the only known texts written by Brazilian Indigenous people before the independence of Brazil and the only surviving record of how Old Tupi was actually written by native speakers. Discovered in 1885, the letters were not fully transcribed and translated until the philologist Eduardo de Almeida Navarro published a complete annotated translation in October 2022; the originals have been held in the Royal Library of the Netherlands for nearly four centuries.