“The Pombaline Directory”

legislation, and the indigenous freedom in the Captaincy of Siará Grande

Abstract

This paper aims to reflect about the indigenist policies settled in the Captaincy of Siará Grande during the 18thCentury. The main goal is to analyze how the indigenous populations gainedtheir freedom and autonomy, facing the implantation of the legislation of regulations and Pombaline Directory within the Portuguese colonizer process. Specifically, we analyze the indigenist policies installed in the Portuguese colonial context in the endof the 17thand 18thCenturies, we investigate how the indigenist legislation was installed in the settlements of the Siará Grande Captaincy by the Portuguese Empire since the beginning of Regulations up to the implantation of the Pombaline Policy starting in 1757. The article also approaches the Pombaline Directory, since the implantation up to when it was abolished in 1798 by Dona Maria I, after taking the Portuguese throne because of the death of D. José I in the year of 1777. The analysis is based on the historical revisionism from Almeida (2003) -Wood (1998), Silva (2003), Chaves Jr. (2016) and the work of Francisco José Pinheiro that addresses the Colonial History documentation, specifically the indigenous theme in the 18thCentury and the Manunscripts of AHU-CE. Therefore, the epistemological reference for this study, that verifies the relations between Society and History, is based on many nuances between Liberties and Justices, in the diverse concepts about the historicity of indigenous populations based on Sampaio (2006).