| Abstract | As in various parts of the Western Hemisphere, the indigenous population of eastern Brazil has increased rapidly in recent decades. Based on over fifty in-depth interviews that I conducted with eastern Indians and the twelve months I spent living in their households and communities between 1994 and 1997, I discovered that much of this demographic phenomenon has been fueled by increasing numbers of individuals self-identifying as Indian who had not always identified as such or their parents had not identified as Indian. A number of lay people and scholars have argued that this shift in the direction of racial formation has been driven by state induced material incentives. Yet my ethnographic data, which I detail in great depth in this article, suggests that in terms of the material factors responsible for Indian resurgence that the state’s sticks have been a much more significant variable than the state’s racializing carrots. In other words, I found that the fundamental change in state practices in eastern Brazil has been in the drastic reduction of the costs of being Indian. Thus I posit and demonstrate how one of the primary variables behind this demographic shift has been the reduction of state led and sanctioned anti-Indian violence in eastern Brazil.
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