People of Recent Contact in the Ecuadorian Amazon

Abstract

The Waorani are an ethnic group of recent contact who preserve traditional cultural practices of people who inhabit the tropical jungles and are characterized by being clanic families of hunters and gatherers, highly mobile and nomadic warrior groups that inhabit a wide expanse of Ecuadorian Amazon forests (about one million hectares) located in the Yasuní National Park (YNP), a unique humid forest ecosystem in the world, which they consider their territory. Their language is Wao Tiriro, the word wao meaning “human” and Waorani “human beings.” It is their form of self-identification with their ethnic neighbors, whom they call cuwuri or strangers.

1. Introduction

The images created around the Ecuadorian Amazon jungles and their inhabitants are the product of the confrontation between various logics of thought, different worldviews, ethos and symbols. This confrontation has been carried over to the present day, and in modern stages, it is much more valid since the appropriation of this space by different actors results in the systematic consolidation of different power groups that, when confronted with each other, generate conflicts of different kinds and violence in the region, becoming one of the references for the creation of the local identities.

If the confrontation of these logics results in the appearance of new actors, we have the Ecuadorian Amazon converted into a true laboratory of ethnic constructions and disintegrations. An ecology, where various groups, representing national and colonial states and even tribal movements, fight to consolidate this region as their space of power. The clash of these two logics: an extractive market economy (gold, spices, rubber, oil and coca) and the other of resources for survival (hunting, fishing, gathering and planting), have generated that the Amazon jungle is seen as a wide region of inexhaustible resources, of invisible inhabitants to be conquered, Christianized, civilized and transferred to modernity.

The passage from the wild subject to the modern subject is seen so clearly drawn in these areas, where the different regions and their inhabitants go from representing spaces of cultural reproduction to wasteland regions, without owners, without God, law or order. If 40 years ago, the ideal of development on a global level was to create a humid tropical forest, the source of food for the planet, and to civilize its inhabitants and incorporate them into the modern world. In the last decade, this ideal has been linked to maintaining tropical humid forests in a natural state, conserving them as the lungs of the world and their inhabitants as the last modern savages on earth, as the guardians of the tropical humid forest. Contradictory paradigms of the new modernity that use the inhabitants of the tropical forest to justify the continuous errors of development projects, executed from the civilized north to the underdeveloped periphery.

2. Waorani: savage and civilized

The term Wao (wao tededo) means human and Waorani means (true) human beings. This is how this cultural group identifies itself and creates its ethnic borders in relation to other groups, which it calls “cowode”/cowuri/or the non-Waorani, “the strangers, the outsiders, the others.” In specialized literature, you will find different ways of writing this term, like this: cowode, cogouri, cuwuri, cowuri, cohuori, etc., there are many reasons for this, but perhaps the most real is that the first ethnolinguistic studies were carried out by North Americans and the other phoneticizations depend on the mother languages of those who have worked with the Waorani. The literal translation of the term is strange, but it has other “charges” in the message such as savage, cannibal and murderer [1, 2, 3].

The Waorani language (Wao Tededo, Tiriro or Terero) has no affinity with any other language or parent linguistic group in the Ecuadorian Amazon and is considered an isolated language. In fact, the toponyms of this space, known since the time of the missions, do not correspond at all to the Wao Tededo language. According to the story of several old warriors (Pikeneni), there were different dialects among the different clans, the same ones that are divided between two large groups IROMENANI or those upstream and ENOMENANI or those downstream of the Napo River [4]. An interesting argument to relate this status of supposed marginality, in the ethnic context in which they developed, is linked to the fact that until the mid-twentieth century, the area was dominated by groups or tribes of Tukano linguistic affiliation, especially located toward the left bank of the Napo and by those of Sapara and Kichwa affiliation, starting from the right bank. The variety of names (anthroponyms-toponyms) of the different rivers and sites that have been preserved in early references by missionaries and travelers prove this hypothesis: Napo (Doroboro), Tiputini (Guiyero), Yasuní (Dicaro), Tivacuno (Peeneno), Curaray (Ewengono), Tiguino (Bataboro), Cuchiyacu (Menkaro), Cononaco (Baameno), Nashiño (Gabaro), etc., against which the Waorani have their own linguistic name.

Later oral and written references allow us to assume that, at least for a certain time, the surroundings of the mouth of the Tiputini were inhabited by some Omagua or Sapara tribes. At the time of the “rubber patterns” (1910–1930) apparently the populations located in the same environment, between the Tzapino, Villano and Curaray rivers, were not Waorani but Sapara [5]. Apparently, the Waorani warrior clans eliminated the Sapara families, to later occupy these sites and incorporate them into their territory. In fact, a route allowed rubber seekers to cross from Curaray to Napo, passing through Cononaco, Nashiño, Yasuní and Tiputini, which at this time appeared populated by clans of Sapara descent.

The rereading of the innumerable ethnographic data (writings of travelers, missionaries) before contact with the West indicates that this group was classified as extremely violent, highly mobile, fighting with any stranger who had entered their territories. This created the imagination of savagery, especially among the Kichwas, who called them “Aucas” (savage or uncivilized in the Kichwa language). “Auca” was the name that identified them for a long time, until the Summer Linguistic Institute (SLI) reinvented for the West as Waorani [6].

The Waorani are a group that, from the tradition of Amazonian studies, is considered a tropical jungle culture [1, 7], mainly because it maintains the following basic characteristics:

1. Generalized war fulfilled the function of social organizer; it was the most important socio-cultural and control institution.

2. Hunter-gatherers with high mobility and little horticulture. The use of forest resources depended on the seasons of fruit and animal reproduction in the forest.

3. Clan groups or extended families made up of a complicated kinship designation. Each group was dispersed and maintained little contact related to the lack of centralized power. The chief was named or constituted in a circumstantial way, the power was egalitarian and related to the levels of symbolic power and the best warrior was the clan chief.

4. Linguistic groups, oral cultures that recreated their entire worldview based on myths and legends that are transmitted from generation to generation.

5. Territory conceived as a large space of resources. Their houses were built in hilly areas of mainland forests, allowing them to see their enemies, attack and flee, away from the main rivers, avoiding any contact with strangers.

2.1 Contact and modernity

Before formal contact with the West (1956), in the oral memory or Wao tradition, two eras or times in which the different groups lived are remembered: (1) time of tranquility or peace (waemo eñere), and (2) times of war, escape or group diaspora (piinte eñere). These stages shaped the social history of the Wao group, its development and, above all, its survival strategies against the “other groups” called “cowuri” and other enemy family groups called “warani or non-nanikaiboiri.” In times of peace, they remember stability and stages of sedentary lifestyle, where the development of clan groups (nanikabos) was based on horticulture and hunting, family settlements remained from 1 to 3 years in the same place that was considered as its area of action or territory. On the contrary, the war stage was characterized by high mobility, search for safe places and family survival based on hunting and gathering seasonal fruits of the forest; horticulture was secondary and settlement sites did not last more than 2 years. Months due to the fight from the insistent intragroup war [1].

Nanikabo is the social and economic unit that brings together several extended families (Guiquitaris, Wepeiris, Piyemoiris, Nihuairis, Kempeiris, etc.), linked by kinship, whether blood or fictitious (alliances). Parental alliances were fundamental for the development of the group, since survival against their enemies depended on them. The Waorani maintain a complicated kinship relationship since they are polygamous groups in both ways: polyandry, woman with several men or polygyny, man with several women. Another cultural institution was war, the fundamental basis of social relations between the different Waorani clan groups. The same one that would become the main socio-cultural institution because, around this exercise of power, complex strategies of alliances and mythical constructions that fed the oral culture of the Waorani were developed and consolidated. In fact, during the war period, “death with spears” (tapaca wente) was the main social mechanism that regulated demography and symbolic relations between clan groups [4].

The first contacts between Western society and the different Waorani clans were violent and are described in several accounts of travelers who entered this territory and compiled several stories about the bloody war they waged against the rubber tappers, who, between the decade of 1910 and 1930 of the twentieth century they crossed the Curaray, Villano, Tiputuni, Shiripuno, Cononaco, Yasuní and Napo rivers, in search of raw materials and enslaved people for the haciendas of Peru and Brazil. The “hunt” to which the lower Cononaco-Baameno and Curaray groups were subjected, especially Baiwairis (people of Baiwa), is present in the memory of many warriors today, memories that trace back the cruelty with which many Waorani were enslaved and sold in distant haciendas., the majority never returned, so the image of the “cowuri” as a murderer who “eats or takes away” people begins to be conceptualized among their Wao culture since that time.

Subsequently, several confrontations are described when the oil company Dutch Shell Oil Company (1940) enters Waorani territory, especially the Arajuno River area, and establishes a camp to carry out seismic prospecting operations throughout the area. Moipa, Iteka and Guikita, are the warriors who defended this part of the territory, incessantly attacking the oil workers, resulting in several deaths between the two sides. Blonberg, in his book The Naked Auca [5], accurately recounts all these events that contributed to the creation of the image of the “ferocious Aucas,” groups reluctant to contact and civilization. As we pointed out, Aucas (naked savage in Kichwa) was the word that was used for a long time to designate or identify the Waorani clans that attacked and defended their territory until 1956, a date that marked a new relationship with the West, since specifies the contact mediated by the Summer Linguistic Institute-Wycliffe Books Translators SLI-WBT (Summer Linguistic Institute), an evangelical organization in the United States, the same one that had been contracted by the Ecuadorian State to “civilize,” “pacify” and “evangelize” the Aucas, who had caused so much trouble in the area of ​​the Ecuadorian Amazon provinces of Pastaza and Napo.

2.2 The Christian God

The SLI entered the Ecuadorian jungles in 1953, forming its first operation center in Shell, near Puyo. Until then and for many years, as has been explained, there had not been a peaceful relationship between the Waorani and the “cowuri.” For months, the missionaries prepared the meeting, dropping from the air (using devices from the Friendship Air Mission-Aircraft Fellowship Mission) steel materials (axes, machetes, knives, pots, etc.), intended as gifts for this operation. It was called “Operation Auca.” Contact was made after a small missionary plane landed on the “beaches” of the Curaray River and five of them (Nate Saint, Jim Elliot, Pete Fleming, Ed McCully and Roger Youderian) managed to establish the first camp, which they called “palm beach” or “playa de palma.” At this site, they wait for the arrival of the group of Auca, to whom they had dropped gifts from the air. After a few days, a small group appeared, with which they tried to make peaceful contact [8].

On January 8, 1956, the missionaries were speared to death. A fact recorded in documentaries, magazines and books, since when Ecuadorian army forces entered to rescue the bodies, they found film and photographs that the missionaries had taken of their alleged murderers. Later, Minkaye, one of the actors in the event, reported that there was a confrontation between the two groups, and that the missionaries had shot one of the Waorani, starting the confrontation and the subsequent massacre with spears [1].

In 1958, Raquel Saint (SLI) and Ellizabeth Elliot (Christian Mission in Many Lands), sister and wife, respectively, of two of those murdered, returned to the United States in order to raise money to continue with “Operation Auca.” Indeed, they did so, and they returned to Ecuador with much more financial support to finish their project. Later, Raquel Saint met a Waorani woman, on one of Carlos Sevilla’s properties (Hacienda Ila), called Dayuma, a young woman who had fled with other members of her family, when her father Kaento was killed by Moipa [3, 8].

The SLI quickly copied it and converted it. Raquel Saint takes Dayuma to the United States and there presents her as the first Christianized wao. Saint quickly learned the Waorani language (wao tededo) and together with Elizabeth Elliot returned to the Tiweno river, with the mission of looking for Dayuma’s family, telling them about “the goodness of the new God, telling them not to fight anymore, it was time to fight to change life he did so,” and his return meant the main anchorage for his group to move to the new area that the SLI missionaries had prepared, the protectorate. Dayuma became the emissary of the SLI and the evangelical God, trying to get all her relatives to gather in a single area and be pacified. From that moment on, the SLI becomes the protector of the Waorani and maintains intense control and zeal over their lives [3, 8].

Later, with other Waorani such as Zoila (Wiñame), Minkaye, Kimo and Dawa as interlocutors, a select group of anthropologists and linguists (James Yost, Catalina Peeke, Patricia Kelly, Raquel Saint) from the SLI mission entered, to learn the Waorani culture and language, translate the Bible into their language, evangelize and civilize them. From this moment begins the modern history of the Waorani; they would never again be like their warrior grandparents from the tropical jungle; it is the definitive step to a new world. However, it was from 1968 onwards that the true process of reduction of the Waorani by the SLI began. Almost 80% of the clan groups are convinced to abandon their traditional lands and move toward the so-called Tiweno, near the famous Palm Beach or Playa de Palma, currently Toñampare [1, 3, 4, 8].

Finally, in 1969, the Ecuadorian State handed over 1600 km² to the SLI, known as “the protectorate,” which is where they concentrated and began the pacification of the majority of the Waorani clans. By 1972, most of the clans had abandoned their traditional territory of residence, moving toward the so-called “protectorate,” which was located at the southwestern end of their territory. Many were transported by plane with their belongings, with the move of clan chiefs, thousands of kilometers were left empty and uninhabited [3, 8].

However, not everyone migrated to “the protectorate,” some groups stayed in the jungle, continuing with their traditional way of life. The groups of the so-called “lower Cononaco” that lived near the Yasuní and Nashiño rivers: Nampaweiris, Wepeiris, Waneiris, Baiwairis, Kempereiris, never moved to the SLI village, remaining in their territories for several more years without contact. This is how the historic settlement pattern of the Waorani (transhumance) was modified with the “evangelization” and the simultaneous process of “civilization” that they were subjected to by the “missionaries” of the SLI. Currently, the majority of Waorani population groups settle in the area known as the protectorate [4].

2.3 The last warriors of the Ecuadorian Amazon

Tageiri-Taromenane are the last groups of men and women in the Ecuadorian Amazon (and possibly the global Amazon) who do not remain in close contact with national society, either by their own decision in accordance with their cultural norms, or by flight from their enemies and the effects that Western civilization has on their lives and cultures. They have Wao Tiriro linguistic belonging and are characterized by high mobility and uxorilocal parenthood, a form of matrilocality that evidences the return of Waorani-Tagueiri women to the territory where their parents were born [9]. This cultural trait makes them one of the last cultural groups of tropical humid forests with traditional characteristics in Ecuador. However, relations with their cultural and linguistic relatives, the Waorani, go through complex dimensions of conflict over territory. To this relationship must be added symbolic components related to a form of intragroup violence and war in which a series of episodes of deaths and revenge have configured complex war geography between Waorani and Pueblos Indígenas en Aislamiento Voluntario (PIAV) [4].

The Tagueiri were members of the Waorani affiliation who separated more than 40 years ago and moved among a large jungle area that includes the Nashiño (Gabaro), Tivacuno (Peeneno), Shiripuno (Keweriono), Tiwino (Menkaro), Cononaco (Baameno) rivers) and Curaray, which forms a corridor of high seasonal mobility. It seems, according to testimonies collected in this investigation, that they were absorbed by another PIAV group known as “taromenane” [1, 4, 9].

These groups are described as hidden or uncontacted peoples who live in the areas of the Waorani territory and the Yasuní National Park and are defined as extended Waorani clans or families who have decided to live away voluntarily due to pressure from their ethnic enemies or due to the pressure that the expansion of the agricultural and oil extraction frontier exerts on their mobility territories: “They are groups that maintain high spatial mobility, which allows them to survive with a certain independence and isolation, compared to the way in which Waorani families lived before contact with the SIL, called by informants as ‘durani bai’” [4].

This article proposes that the Tagueiri-Taromenane clan families could not be classified as hidden peoples, much less “without contact,” since there is evidence of kinship relations, exchange and symbolic alliances with other Waorani clan groups, such as the Baiwairis. (the Baiwa people), Kempereiris (the Kemperi people) and Kairis (the Kay people), three of the Waorani families that control and inhabit part of the territories of the Yasuní National Park and, specifically, the areas of the Cononaco rivers (Baameno), Nashiño (Gabaro) and Yasuní (Kawymeno), where there is evidence of the presence of the PIAV [4].

The spaces of contact, peaceful coexistence or not, between PIAV and Waorani families, are interpreted on several levels. At the first level, it is related to (a) exchange of forest products, for example, hunting prey for cassava, banana for handicrafts or for city products such as machetes, axes, salt, pots, etc., (b) with phenomena symbolic, referring to exchanges at festivals for good hunting, potential alliances and marriages and (c) with the war with Niwairi and Babeiri enemies, especially those who maintain a warlike relationship with these groups and who have maintained a violent relationship over several years., with stages characterized by times of peace and times of war and revenge [4].

The second level of contact would be related to spaces of shared territoriality with Waorani families. This is the most conflictive space because it produces competition for resources that are scarce due to demographic pressure and also for territory. The Tagueiri-Taromenane are characterized by high mobility and the use of large forest spaces in order to obtain resources for their survival. They imagine that large space of jungle as their territory, a space that in geographical coordinates would limit between the banks of the Curaray and Napo rivers.

The situation of the Tagueiri-Taromenane is complex because they are pressured or surrounded on several fronts. The first refers to the expansion of the agricultural frontier and the shared and conflictive use of the same hunting and gathering territory by Waorani clans. The second corresponds to the oil extraction activities that have expanded in the area of ​​influence them and that have facilitated the construction of roads that at the same time allow permanent settlements of settler-peasant groups near YNP (Los Reyes, Armadillo, Hormigueros), contacted Waorani families (Miwaguno and Yawenpae) and Shuar-settler families (Tiwano), who increasingly put pressure on the territories through which these families move (especially those located between the Tivacuno-Armadillo-Cononaco Chico-Menkaro area) [4].

The future of these families is complex, especially after the massacre in April 2013, their mobility spaces are increasingly reduced and the relationship of vulnerability and conflict, resulting from an accelerated reduction of their living spaces (territory) and potential time for an encounter with enemies is getting shorter and shorter. A new confrontation with warriors from enemy Waorani families could eliminate them completely: their extinction is a real possibility. Finally, this article considers the option of a slow but sustained fission between the Tagueiri-Taromenane families and the Waorani families, for example, Kairis, Kemperiris and Baiwairis clans. Libidinal exchange has been one of the survival strategies of Amazonian cultures; perhaps that is what is happening in the vast jungle areas of Kewerioro, Baameno, Nashiño, Kawymeno and Curaray in the Yasuní National Park and the Waorani land.

2.4 Cultural change?

The control of demographics in the Waorani culture was closely related to war and the extensive deaths between clans that it caused. “Murder or death with spears” was one of the main drivers of population growth; this could be measured according to data that James Yost [10] has before contact:

• 44% of Waorani died from intra-clan murders by other Warani or enemy but families

• 12% illness or witchcraft

• 10% were murdered by cowuri (rubber farmers, oil workers and Kichwa indigenous)

• 12% were kidnapped by landowners

• 8% fled or hid in various places

• 6% snake bite

• 5% accident

• 2% old age

• 1% unknown

At the time of pacification and subsequent sedentaryization in the protectorate, the new way of life brought with it an accelerated process of population increase between 1958 and 1990. According to data from various sources [1, 10]:

• 1958 there were approximately 500 Waorani

• 1980 there were 658

• 1982 there were 715

• 1990 there were 1157

• 1993 there were 1282

• 1996 there were 1580

• 2001 there were 1898

• 2010 2000

• 2020 3050

Consequently, the growth rate in a period of just over 50 years was more than 300%. The population increase is related to the rapid social transformation of the Waorani; basically linked to [1, 4]:

• The suspension of intra- and extra-group violence and cycles of inter-clan revenge.

• The change in settlement patterns, greater sedentarization, little spatial mobility, construction of towns.

• Reduction in the practices of geronticide (death to the elderly) and infanticide (death to children).

• Abandonment of polygamy and traditional marriage alliances (Zororate-Levirate) due to the emergence of modern practices (Cowuri-style marriages).

Starting in the 1970s of the twentieth century, a rapid process of reconfiguration of the spaces of this group began. From nomadic groups, they become groups with permanent and semi-permanent settlements, which definitively and forever change their previous relationship with the forest. Currently, the Waorani settlements are located in three areas: the westernmost region that corresponds to the so-called “protectorate,” the same one that was defined by the grouping of families initiated by SLI. To the northeast of the ancestral territory on the banks of the Yasuní rivers and their tributaries, there are also small groups and, finally, the areas of roads penetrated by the oil industry or block 16 and block 21.

Now, before 50 years of contact, the Waorani territory and the Yasuní National Park (YNP) are divided into four spaces:

1. A sector dominated by the Kichwa communities located between the banks of the Napo River and the Tiputini River in the north, and the Curaray River in the south.

2. The colonized areas on the axis of the oil route are known as “Auca road.”

3. The Waorani territory in block 16.

4. The entrance road to block 16, shared by Kichwa and Waorani.

3. Conclusions

The contact with national society has been characterized as aggressive, since “homicide and raids mark the uncrossable border between the cowuri and Waorani worlds.” The social solidarity and cultural unity of all the Waorani are marked by the true “human beings,” compared to the cowuri, the “non-human-enemy-cannibals,” however, this interior-exterior dichotomy is also found within the Waorani world. The introduction of the Waorani into the market economy has intensified in recent years. Young people work in oil companies, and with the money, they buy objects of Western culture. This tendency, according to Rival, is the result more than the dynamics of capitalist commodification, of the influence of the formal institution such as the school “that represents modernity and its material manifestation, “Western products” [1].

The relationship with national society has been traumatic for the Waorani people and always violent. There has been a silent war that has caused several clashes and deaths on both sides. The conflicts with settler groups, other indigenous groups like Kichwa and Shuar, oil companies and missionaries have generated an imaginary of violence and savagery among the Wao people… “these are the last savages… they are brave Indians, you have to go there carefully, they are murderers of birth, few civilized and dangerous” [4].

This imagination has created, in contrast, excessive zeal and care on the part of foreign and national conservationist environmental groups, which is why the defense of the Waorani has become the slogan of the struggle of several NGOs, who see in this group the hope for the conservation of large spaces of tropical humid forest.

For the Waorani of recent contact, the process of relationship with the cuwuri reproduces a very characteristic relationship with their jungle environment, exercising the practice of the warrior or collector. Waorani praxis identifies the actors with whom it is important to maintain a relationship, as a strategy in that conception of territory of abundance and limitation is where external actors are incorporated, and with whom the same relationship is established as with the jungle, whether oil workers, settlers, missionaries, formal and informal tourism operators, who are asked for their “contribution” with products or services [1, 4, 9].

In the historical context, the attacks generated during the first years of the previous century occurred against indigenous laborers of haciendas that are located on the banks of several rivers, such as the Napo in its upper and middle course, Curaray, and others. Next, and in the context of oil exploration, the attacks occurred against oil workers, whose victims belonged to several companies that carried out their activities in Yasuní.

In this context, the State’s limited understanding of diversity has led to the assumption that all indigenous peoples have a community character, this being inapplicable in tropical forest societies. The relationship of collecting the resources provided by the actors that operate in their territory, being no longer a “relationship of assistance” but rather a relationship in which “collection” practices or actions are identified and where the Waorani actors establish themselves as “great men” in this new gathering jungle, different from the traditional space of the elderly where the defense of the territory, and the experience of the warrior code established the leaders and socially recognized characters [9].

These great men are Waorani who were children at the time of contact or were already born in the post-contact era, while the elderly, who lived in a traditional way, still maintain memories around the “duranibai” where the warrior ethos prevailed, which configured them as providers and guarantors of family survival in the territory, which today is reduced to a monetized economy dependent on a salaried job, the dramatic change from being Waorani to being an impoverished citizen [1, 9].

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador for funding the article and to the Waorani friends who for more than 20 years have welcomed me into their homes as part of their families.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Appendices and nomenclature

SLI	Summer Linguistic Institute
YNP	Yasuní National Park
NAWE	Nacionalidad Waorani del Ecuador-Waorani Nationality
PIAV	Pueblos Indígenas en Aislamiento Voluntario-Indigenous People in Voluntary Isolation
YNP	Yasuní National Park, Waorani land and principal rivers (home range): Napo, Tiputini, Curaray, Yasuní, Cononaco, Nashiño, Shiripuno, Tivacuno, Tiguino