| Summary: | Our goal is to map a few reports made by travelers who devoted themselves to presenting and describing the native inhabitants of the Brazilian coast and their habits to the Europeans. Moreover, we expose the fact that the relationships established between the native and foreign people were also motivated by the interests, desires, and arguments presented by the indigenous Brazilians. Thus, we are led to reconsider the inclusion of these natives in the Brazilian colonial history no longer as listless and wishless victims, but now as the subject and creators of their own stories. The documents used as our reference were produced in the mid-16th century, specifically from the year 1549, when the Jesuits first set foot in the new Portuguese colony, to 1615, when the French project that aimed at establishing a colony in the coast of Maranhão, the Equinoctial France, was canceled.
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