Desc: Os Índios Potiguara - Memória, Asilo e Poder: Directed by José Manuel Simões. The 14 months of field work and the consequent organization of a large oral and visual archive, understanding also that the information gathered from historical sources and oral anthropology was widing the invention of a constructed idea of past, I sought to clarify the distance between this past and the present of a community whose culture is invented and re-created as a sort of 'folkloric' representation progressively more open to the Catholic festivals, the school and the many tourists, the three social and institutional intermediaries constraining the idea of Potiguara culture to be updated. Crossing systematically historical documentation, chronicles, old maps and that huge archive build up from the interviews with chiefs, shamans, healers and several other candidates to the Potiguara political leadership, it was possible to understand the process of invention of their idea of land, social milieu, and mainly present-day cultural manifestations and practices that are preserved through a long term anthropological-historical process associating colonial legacy and its survival and political promotion in the present Potiguara cultural discourse.