In 1966 the state of São Paulo opened the Museu Histórico e Pedagógico Índia Vanuíre in Tupã, and it has since become one of the most important collections of Indigenous material culture in Brazil, holding roughly 38,000 objects from Kaingang, Krenak and many other peoples. What makes it unusual is who it answers to. The museum works directly with Kaingang and Krenak communities from the Vanuíre and Icatu Indigenous Lands, the two reserves where survivors of the frontier period were settled, and it presents their history as a living one rather than a closed case. The word pacification appears in the older literature about 1912. It is worth reading with a hard eye: what was being pacified was the resistance of people whose land was being taken, and the peace that followed cost them nearly everything. The museum does not pretend otherwise.

Tupã was founded on 12 October 1929 on land that was then tropical forest, and became a municipality by state law in 1938. It sits between the Aguapeí and the Rio do Peixe, on the ridge of high ground that gives the Alta Paulista region its name, some 520 kilometres west-northwest of the city of São Paulo. The municipality covers about 628 square kilometres at an elevation near 524 metres, and its climate is the mild tropical highland variety of the interior: an annual average around 24.5 degrees Celsius and roughly 1,365 millimetres of rain, most of it in summer. Around 65,000 people live here, making Tupã the second-largest city of the Alta Paulista. Beyond the seat, the municipality takes in three districts with three very different histories: Parnaso, Universo and Varpa.

In November 1922 a group of Latvian Baptists began settling the right bank of the Rio do Peixe, refugees from a Europe reordered by the Russian Revolution, where the new Bolshevik authorities were tightening the screws on religious practice. They called their colony Varpa, a Latvian word meaning ear of grain. More than 2,400 Latvians eventually arrived. They cleared forest, organised themselves as a cooperative, built houses in a plainly European idiom, and raised a Baptist church that was for a time the largest in South America, with room for over a thousand people seated. A century later the district still keeps the thread: Varpa celebrates Ligo, the Latvian midsummer festival, and the surnames on its gravestones are not the surnames of anywhere else in São Paulo.

Tupã is the leading peanut-producing municipality in Brazil, with something on the order of 20,000 hectares under the crop, alongside corn and cassava. That is the economy you would expect. The other one is stranger. The city has also claimed the title of national capital of photography, on the strength of roughly 130 businesses in the photographic trade concentrated in a town of 65,000 people, a cluster with no obvious geographic logic and a great deal of local pride behind it. Tupã is formally designated an Estância Turística, one of the state's tourism-priority municipalities, which brings state funding for the museum and the town's cultural calendar. Between the peanut harvest, the camera shops and the Kaingang collection, the place is considerably harder to summarise than its size suggests.

Tupã is reached from the capital by the SP-294, the Comandante João Ribeiro de Barros highway that runs the spine of the Alta Paulista. The city grew up on the Tronco Oeste railway line, and the old rail geometry still shows in the street plan. José Vicente Faria Lima State Airport (SDTP) sits at the edge of town and handles general aviation. The Catholic parishes belong to the Diocese of Marília, about 80 kilometres east, which is also the nearest city with a commercial airport. If you make only one stop, make it the Índia Vanuíre museum. It is the reason a town founded in 1929 has a memory that reaches much further back.