Museu do Índio / FUNAI (National Foundation for Indigenous Peoples)

O Museu do Índio (The Museum of the Indigenous Populations) is a cultural and scientific agency of the Fundação Nacional dos Povos Indígenas (National Foundation of Indigenous Populations) or FUNAI. It was created by Darcy Ribeiro, in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1953. As the only official institution in Brazil exclusively dedicated to indigenous cultures (the people known as povos indígenas in Portuguese), the museum has the objective of promoting an accurate and updated image for the indigenous cause, while avoiding common misconceptions and prejudice of these societies.

The rich collection of the museum, which includes most of the present-day indigenous societies, is composed of 14,000 ethnography parts. In the Marechal Rondon Library, 16,000 national and foreign publications specialized in ethnology and other related areas, plus 50,000 images in diverse environments, including 3,000 digital photographs on CD-ROM, about 200 films, videos, and sound recordings, as well as 500,000 documents of historical value relating to various indigenous groups and their political situation in Brazil from the end of 19th century to the present.

In the eleven rooms of the main building, the Museu do Índio organizes the temporary showing of samples of paintings and photos using the collection storied in its archives. In the gardens of the institution there are five different environments, including a Guarani fazenda, a Xingu kitchen and ritual house for the Xingu Quarup (also spelled “Kuarup”). (Wikipedia).

Image copyright – By MDOIB, CC BY-SA 3.0,