Moquém

A grill of sticks and the work done on it

Moquém is both the object and the work: a grill of wooden sticks, and the roasting, drying or smoking of meat or fish on it. The Museu da Língua Portuguesa traces the word to Tupinambá and defines it as a stick grill. The verb moquear and the participle moqueado, a food treated this way, come from the same root.

The Makuxi call it surarî'. A 2025 exhibition at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, curated by Jaider Esbell and bringing together 34 Indigenous artists, takes the word as its title. Its text describes the moquém as a rack used to dehydrate and smoke meat, and says the treatment preserves food and makes it easier to carry from hunting and fishing grounds to the villages. The text names meat as the food; it is a curatorial statement of a people's knowledge, not a technical manual.

Roasting, drying and smoking

The sources use roasting, drying and smoking for different things and this page keeps them apart where each source does. A stick grill puts the food above the fire on an open lattice, so heat, smoke and air all reach it; which of the three dominates depends on how close the grill is to the fire and how long the food stays, and the records give neither.

Records from different peoples

A catalogue of the Museu Nacional dos Povos Indígenas describes a black-and-white negative made by Harald Schultz in 1943, titled Local para assar alimento, a place for roasting food. It calls the pictured apparatus a stick grill named moquém, used to roast or dry fish or meat in a study context linked to the Umutina people. The image itself is not available in the catalogue, so there are no measurements or visual analysis.

A separate educational page of the Instituto Socioambiental attributes an account involving moquear fish to Tuyuka communities; that account rests on a 2004 book that was not inspected. These accounts stay with their named sources and peoples and are not merged into one moquém practice.

What is not settled

No source reviewed gives a rack design, a fuel, a duration, a temperature or a storage period for any moquém. A municipal notice from Jaru, in Rondônia, announced a 2025 workshop on an Indigenous smoking technique, but its body could not be read, so who took part and what was taught is unknown. Community terms and knowledge should be described only as the communities concerned agree, and a reader who wants to cook or preserve food this way should turn to them.