"Revisionist history of Brazilian indigenous policy at the beginning of the Velha República focuses on the creation of the Serviço de Proteção aos Indios (SPI) and its first director, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon. Demythologizes Rondon, and reevaluates SPI's project objectives and place within the apparatus of State power. This study, written by an anthropologist, provides an ethnographic history of the principal elements and processes that constitute a certain modality of State power, i.e., tutelary power, as exercised by the SPI over the indigenous population"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57.