Zaparo Indians pictured in a
book by the 19th-century Italian explorer Gaetano Osculati.
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My language, my valued possession
My language, my object of affection
My language, my precious adornment.
From
a Maori
poster
(New Zealand)
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The hundred or so Zaparo
Indians who live in the Ecuadorian Amazon are racing against time to save their language,
land and culture
 ‘My
name is Manari, which in my language, Zaparo, means a hefty lizard that lives in
the forest. But if we want to register ourselves for official purposes, we’re obliged
to put down Spanish names. So I’m also called Bartolo Ushigua. The Zaparo used to
be one of the Amazon’s greatest Indian peoples. Our shamans were very powerful because
they knew the medicinal secrets of more than 500 plants.”1
Twenty-five-year-old Manari is the son of the last shaman, who died three years ago,
and chief of the 115 Zaparo who live in the Amazonian province of Pastaza, along
the banks of the Conambo River 240 kilometres south of Quito. The river has brought
all the misfortunes that have speeded up the decline of the Zaparo–settlers, disease,
the rubber boom, slavery, wars, oil drilling and “the modern world”.
“When the white rubber traders came to our forest,” says Manari, “they took away
our people to work as slaves and to sell them off like chattels. They also brought
with them diseases that our shamans didn’t know how to cure. So most of our people
died.”
“The Zaparo are officially extinct in this country,” announced an article published
in Ecuador nearly 10 years ago. But today they are still fighting to survive, though
the number of threats are more than they can count–in their language, numbers only
go up to three.
For the last three years young Zaparo led by Manari and supported by the Pastaza
Indigenous Peoples’ Organization (OPIP) have been engaged in a battle to save their
culture and traditional way of life as hunters and gatherers. They have three main
objectives: to keep alive the Zaparo language, to clearly mark out Zaparo territory
and to arrange a meeting with Zaparo who live over the border in Peru. The results
so far have not been very encouraging.
The
last shaman
They have not been
able to meet their Peruvian kinsfolk, from whom they have been separated since a
war between Ecuador and Peru nearly 60 years ago. The journey can take a month when
the river is low and up to three months during a flood. It was only a couple of months
ago that someone gave the Zaparo a small motor-boat. Diplomatic contacts would also
have to be made to enable the Ecuadorian Zaparo to journey into disputed territory.
“We’re Ecuadorians,” says Manari, “but once upon a time the Zaparo were a single
people living in a single forest. So we’re not used to getting permission to cross
borders or search for our people.”
The plan is for a group of four children, already chosen, to go and meet the shamans
on the Peruvian side who will teach them their methods. This is crucial if the community
is to survive, because when the last shaman died three years ago, the Zaparo lost
their only source of knowledge about their traditions, the healing power of plants
and the secrets of the jungle. “Since my father died, there’s been no one to look
after us, and many people are ill and dying,” says Manari.
Traditional knowledge and the remedies of shamans can only be handed down through
language. Preserving the Zaparo language is more than just a cultural matter. The
physical survival of the community itself is at stake. And the plan to save it is
a race against time because only five very old people still speak Zaparo and they
live several days’ journey from each other. One of them is Sasiko Takiauri, who was
born about 70 years ago on the banks of the Conambo. “In those days,” he says, “everyone
spoke Zaparo. I didn’t learn Quechua until I was 18.”
The story of Zaparo is similar to that of other indigenous languages in the Ecuadorian-Peruvian
region. Zaparo forms part of the Zaparoan linguistic group, together with Arabela,
Iquito and Taushniro, and is related to other languages that have already disappeared
(Konambo, Gae and Andoa). It gave way to Quechua relatively recently. It was about
60 years ago, according to Sasiko, that the Zaparo began identifying with the culture
of the Quechua Indians through frequent trading with the Quechua village of Sarayacu.
These days, Sasiko’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren who live in the Zaparo
villages of Llanchama, Cocha, Jandia Yacu and Mazaramu, are taught Quechua and Spanish
under a bilingual curriculum decreed by the government. The teachers, secondary school
graduates who do not originate from the villages where they teach, are paid $4 a
month and openly say they will leave the region as soon as they can. Most of their
pupils do not speak Spanish and learn Quechua almost entirely in oral form.
“We don’t like asking for help,” says Manari, “but since there are now only a few
of us left, we’re afraid it’s the end of the road.” Meanwhile, the old folk, led
by Sasiko, are once again giving children names in the vernacular–such as Newa, Toaro,
Mukutzagua (Partridge, Parrot, Oriole)–to show the world the Zaparo have not died
out.
1. Manari’s words are taken from a letter
sent two years ago asking the cultural attaché at Ecuador’s embassy in Peru
to intervene so that the Ecuadorian Zaparo could cross the frontier and meet the
Zaparo of Peru.
nauta@speed.net.ec
Postal address of OPIP : Organización de Pueblos Indígenas
del Pastaza
General Villamil s/n y Teniente Hugo Ortiz Puyo, Equateur
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