During the Brazilian Empire, the quest for a national identity took over the local intelligentsia and the few scientific, literary and academic institutions created in Brazil, with personal and financial support from Emperor Pedro II, who expressed the need to 'organize the nationality' (Schwarcz, op. cit.). The intellectual elite chose the Indigenous inhabitant of the past to represent the national identity, based on a mythical view of the native as the sacrificial hero  
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[^0]:    8 For more information on the traffic of African slaves to Brazil, see: Alencastro (2000), Florentino (1997), and Mattoso (1986). On the enslavement of Indigenous people, see: Cunha (1992), Monteiro (1994), Karasch (1992), Paraiso, M. 1992. Os Botocudos e sua trajetória histórica. M. Cunha (ed), História dos indios no Brasil, São Paulo, Brazil, Companhia das Letras, pp. 413-430, Meliá (1988), and Gagliardi (1989).  
that resisted the conquest and gave his blood for the emergent nation. The literature, visual arts and monuments of the period between 1850 and 1900 are marked by this vision (Rocha, 2002).  
The adoption of the Indigenous inhabitant as the new nation's symbol was an optimistic move that also occurred in other Latin American nations, and was embraced even though about two thirds of the Brazilian population at the time was black. Elite optimism was spoiled by Arthur de Gobineau, a French philosopher dedicated to examining hierarchy among races, who visited Brazil between 1869 and 1870. De Gobineau wrote an essay in which he criticized Brazil's high proportion of mestizos, asserting that the nation had a physically degenerate population that would be extinct in less than three centuries. For him and his followers, miscegenation was equal to degeneration. From that point of view, there was no hope of Brazil becoming a respected and modern nation, as its population was condemned to extinction (Sousa, 2008).