Indigenous Bororo and Mapuche peoples Photos in French Missionary and Brazil and Chile, c. 1900

Bororo Mapuche peoples

Photograph

Indigenous South American real photo postcards and photographs of Bororo and Mapuche people in Brazil and Chile, circa 1900 to 1910, preserving early twentieth century views of Indigenous family life, dress, childhood, settlement, travel, and labor across several distinct communities. Bororo subjects in Mato Grosso appear in close portrait format under the printed heading “Missions Salésiennes,” including a child holding a parrot, four seated children captioned “Petits Bororos chrétiens,” and an adult man posed before a thatched structure wearing crescent chest ornaments and armbands. Mapuche women and children appear in Chilean postcards titled “Mapuches, Niñas araucanas,” “Indias mapuches con niños,” and “Mapuches Mujeres y niños araucanos,” with braided hair, long dresses, shawls, bead adornment, and multi-generational family groupings. The Mapuche, an Indigenous people of south-central Chile and adjacent Argentina, had long resisted Spanish rule before Chilean military conquest and land seizure reshaped the conditions under which such portraits were made in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Photo archive of 11 photographs, including 8 real photo postcards and 3 silver gelatin photographs, ranging from postcard size to small snapshot format, Brazil, Chile, and northern South America, circa 1900 to 1910. The Bororo material centers on frontal portrait studies printed in French as “Brésil, Matto Grosso,” with figures placed outdoors or before vernacular architecture and presented with close attention to ornament, pose, and age. The Mapuche cards are more varied in grouping: one shows three young women standing together in dark garments with braided hair and jewelry; another gathers two elderly women, two younger mothers, a baby, and two children beneath the title “Indias mapuches con niños”; a related card of women and children bears a Chilean stamp and a French manuscript note on the front identifying the women as those of a cacique. The three photographs move beyond posed portraiture. One records Indigenous people seated on the ground in a dry landscape wearing broad sun hats beside baskets of food and goods, with a small dog in the background and the verso caption “Indians on the way to [illegible].” Another records three Indigenous men standing bare-chested before vernacular structures in Vichada, while a companion photograph isolates one man before the same settlement. A weaving scene captioned “Indian woman weaving” and a market or village scene with men, baskets, and goods outside an adobe building widen the group from ethnographic portrait types to scenes of movement, work, and exchange.

Children, mothers, elders, travelers, weavers, and men p osed within village settingsappear across the group. Dress, hair, jewelry, baskets, animals, thatched and adobe structures, and handwritten captions keep the photographs and postcards grounded in specific lived environments even where ethnographic titles or missionary framing shape the captions. Light to moderate edge wear, corner rubbing, scattered toning, manuscript and postal markings to versos, one Chilean stamp, and some surface wear consistent with age; overall good condition. The group preserves Indigenous family relations, material culture, travel, labor, and village life across several early twentieth century South American communities.

Item #23173

Price: $880.00