The colonial narratives addressing the presence of European dogs in encounters between natives and whites in the Americas often stress the instrumental role of those animals as terrible conquerors’ weapons. For those settlers, dogs were effective tools for the submission of the native peoples they met since the 15th century. But paying attention to some of the indigenous narratives about these first encounters with dogs may show distinct perspectives, which show dogs not only as instruments of conquest, but as agents acting to smooth out the contact between Native Americans and non-Natives. This article explores how narratives on the first dogs known to two native populations of Rondônia can demonstrate the canine agency in the interethnic encounters. The first contacts between Natives and non-Natives never include only two groups of human participants, since dogs’ actions have a crucial role in the development of human interactions: interethnic contacts can also be multispecific contacts.
Dogs; Agency; Contact; Native Americans; Narratives