Canelos Quichua

ETHNONYMS: Alama (pejorative), Canelo, Canelos, Pastaza Quichua, Pastaza Runa, Quijos (incorrect and misleading), Runapura, Yumbo (incorrect, misleading, and pejorative)

Orientation

Identification. The name "Canelos Quichua" is of foreign origin. It designates the mission site of Canelos that ranged historically from near Puyo to its present Río Bobonaza location. "Runa" means "human being" in Quichua, and "Runapura" means "people among ourselves," "us." "Ala" is a form of address among people acknowledged as "us," but use of "Alama" as a reference to Canelos Quichua people is pejorative.

Location. The Canelos Quichua occupy the territory south and east of Puyo, capital of Pastaza Province, and the Río Bobonaza region north of the Curaray and Villano river regions in Ecuador. The territory south of the Bobonaza, from the Río Yatapi east, is Achuar Jivaroan territory, and the territory north of the Curaray from its conjunction with the Río Villano is Waorani territory. The climate is equatorial rain forest that ranges from 300 to 1,000 meters in elevation.

Demography. Ten thousand is a reasonable estimate of the contemporary, expanding Canelos Quichua population. Historically, severe population decline was experienced on many occasions because of infectious diseases.

Linguistic Affiliation. Quechua was the language of the imperial Inca. All Quechua dialects, including those known as Quichua (Kichwa, Kichua) are frequently, although erroneously, associated exclusively with the high Andean regions of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Quichua was a language of conquest in Andean Ecuador in the fifteenth century, but its entry into what has become Canelos Quichua territory and its eventual domination over Jivaroan and Zaparoan languages in parts of Ecuador's Amazonion regions remain an intriguing problem. It may have been introduced from the southeast (Amazonian) region. Related dialects are found on the upper and lower Río Napo. Today it is estimated that at least 20 percent of the Canelos Quichua speak Achuar Jivaroan as a second language, and speaking Spanish as a second or as a third language is common. In a few areas some Zaparoan-Quichua bilingualism also exists.

History and Cultural Relations

Myth, legend, archaeology, and history indicate that the Canelos Quichua migrated into their current area from the east and/or southeast. The ceramics found at Charapa Cocha, on the Río Pastaza, are identified by the Canelos Quichua as made by their ancestors and appear to be a transition from other red-banded Tupí ware to historical and contemporary Canelos Quichua pottery. While the Quichua language was penetrating the upper Napo region from the Andes through conquest, Canelos Quichua was spreading northwestward, replacing Jivaroan and Zaparoan languages. Sporadic contact with Europeans at sites along major rivers was characterized by patterns of indigenous concentration followed by indigenous dispersion. The vast areas away from the major rivers remained virtually out of the Euro-sphere of sporadic influence, although exploration by friars began as early as 1581. Since the early nineteenth century the Canelos Quichua have experienced waves of foreign intrusion and exploitation, the most recent being the Amazon rubber boom (1870-1910), exploration for petroleum (1920-1940), World War II, and the rediscovery of petroleum in the early 1970s.

Settlements

Historically, the Canelos Quichua lived in dispersed residential patterns and aggregated in refuge areas during times of upheaval. Such refuge zones probably attracted the first Catholic friars, who established missions there and visited them sporadically. The emergence of a formative culture occurred 200 to 300 years ago and radiated out of such riverine sites as Puyo, on the Puyo-Pindo rivers, and Canelos, Pacayacu, Sarayacu, Teresa Mama, and Montalvo, on the Río Bobonaza, spreading north from the Bobonaza to the Curaray and Villano rivers. Today the largest population concentration, with perhaps 3,000 people divided into twenty-two hamlets, is on the Comuna San Jacinto del Pindo, south of Puyo. The settlements of Canelos, Pacayaca, Sarayacu, and Curaray have the next largest populations. Kindred segments from these settlements periodically trek to distant garden, fishing, and hunting sites, where they reside for part of the year. All settlements, whether dispersed or nucleated, are divided into sections of about 25 people to (usually) no more than 150. All modern hamlets have a central plaza with a school; some have a Catholic or Protestant chapel. All of the sites mentioned above (except the Comuna San Jacinto), and many others, have an airstrip built by either Catholic or Protestant missionaries.

Economy

Subsistence and Commercial Activities. The Canelos Quichua practice upper Amazonian swidden horticulture, focused especially on manioc and other root crops. Women are in charge of all root-crop production, and men are the cultivators of maize and tobacco. Both sexes fish; men hunt game and birds; men, women, and children collect fruits, wild seeds, snails, shrimps, crabs, tortoises, and turtles. Men plant palms, which provide material for house construction and net and net-bag weaving and natural herbariums for palm weevils and their larvae. Men also plant huayusa trees, the combination of palm and huayusa trees serving as markers for territories established by powerful shamans. Contact with Europeans resulted in acquisition of plantains and bananas, which became male crops. Chickens and foreign ducks were acquired and used in the internal economy. Sporadic demand for the naranjilla (Solanum quitoense ) fruit led to its specialized cultivation by men (but with the help of women) in swidden gardens cleared specifically for it. Near Puyo indigenous people have moved heavily into cattle raising and timber cutting. Many also cut rough planks and boards with chain saws and sell them by the roadside. Other income derives from sporadic seasonal labor on plantations or for petroleum-exploration companies and from traditional and ethnic arts. Protestant missionaries put special emphasis on cattle raising in areas far beyond the reach of the expanding road system, but so far have had little success with the Canelos Quichua.

Trade. Extensive trade networks have long characterized this area of greater Amazonia. There is archaeological documentation of trade networks linking the Andes, upper Amazonia, and coastal Ecuador some 4,500 years ago and coterminous pottery traditions 3,500 years ago with expanded trade networks. The archaeology of Ecuador reveals that agricultural development and ceramic manufacture occurred 1,000 years earlier than in Peru or Mexico. The Canelos Quichua long traded with indigenous neighbors, especially with Zaparoan and Jivaroan (Shuar, Achuar, Huambisa) peoples, with whom they also exchanged raids, as part of a far-flung, regional head-taking system. Trade with the Europeans began in the sixteenth century, and the Canelos came to corner the market for broom fibers and cinnamon bark, which they traded west to Puyo. Prior to large-scale disruption during the Amazon rubber boom, and later because of the Ecuadoran-Peruvian war of 1941, some Canelos Quichua traveled eastward and southward to the region of the Río Marañón to obtain salt and then returned to their territory to trade it up and down the rivers. Such expeditions to obtain salt would take from one to several years.

Division of Labor. Division of labor by gender is pervasive. Women do most of the gardening, except for the cultivation of tobacco, bananas, and maize. Men hunt, clear the swidden of large trees and vines, tend their three principal crops, and explore labor and other financial possibilities in the economic sectors. Women prepare and cook food, mend clothes, and care for children. They also brew manioc mash, store it, and serve chicha (home brew) on a continuous basis. Pottery manufacture is part of this manioc complex, a strictly female domain. Women plant, harvest, and store special black beans to plant with the maize, but such beans are not eaten; they are utilized solely for nitrogen fixation. Hunting for forest game is strictly a male pursuit, as is acquisition of large fish with spears, hooks, or dynamite. Women and men join together in fish-poisoning and -netting expeditions when the rivers are low. Long-distance trade is undertaken by men and by husbands and wives traveling in pairs. Cosmologically speaking, men are predators, women are domesticators. Shamanism, for males, is the paradigmatic complement to female pottery manufacture, and women "help" their shaman fathers and husbands in very specific ways by preparing their tobacco and "clarifying" their visions.

Land Tenure. Aboriginally, large territories were established by powerful shamans who were able to keep both their sons and daughters-in-law, and their own daughters and sons-in-law. From a great oval house in a strategic position, a powerful kindred would grow within three generations to lay claim to considerable territory. As more and more intermarriage occurred, with Achuar to the south and Napo Quichua to the north, such territories became subdivided, with a mission hamlet or condensed region as a permanent, geographical focus. By the 1940s the region that was to become the 17,000-hectare territory of the Comuna San Jacinto del Pindo began to sprout a few hamlets on its periphery; they grew to twenty-two in the late 1980s. In the early 1990s the struggle for land is incessant, as people confront contradictory laws and shifting agencies responsible for various kinds of nationally recognized social organizations including parishes, communes, colony-support systems, and cooperatives. The rhetoric of a given organizational mode is often contradicted by indigenous activity in a specific territory. Basically, though, in the indigenous system the residential kin unit (ayllu ) derives from a shamanic ancestor who laid claim to a territory (llacta ).

Kinship

Kin Groups and Descent. The ayllu is the bilateral kinship system as reckoned with a patrilateral bias for a maximum of three to four generations by male and female individuals and small intermarried groups. This system may be modified cognitively through the use of adjectives such as quiquin (one's own) or caru (distant) or a suffix such as pura (among us, ourselves). Ayllu means "kindred," "extended clan," and "maximal (dispersed) clan." The kinship system is intimately and inextricably tied to male shamanic nodes that merge and separate through time at levels of kindred, territorial clan, and maximal clan. Each powerful shaman is closely connected by consanguinity and/or affinity to a master potter. Affinal relationships of the grandparental generations, both demonstrated and stipulated, are very important in reckoning contemporary kinship structure and transmission patterns. A parallel system of kin-class transmission and cultural transmission takes place: men through men by the vehicle of shamanism, women through women by the vehicle of pottery manufacture.

Kinship Terminology. The primary term for mother's brother is extended to father's sister's husband; mother's brother and father's sister's husband are always in the same kin class. Affinity is important in reckoning consanguinity ties. Affinal and consanguineal kin terms indicate an ideology of parental or grandparental cousin marriage and a kin equation suggesting sibling exchange. These structural features, combined with the bifurcate-merging nature of avuncular terminology, raise the unsolved issue of prior terminological separation of parallel and cross cousins.

Marriage and Family

Marriage. Marriage is about a three-year process; monogamy is the norm. From the male perspective it is warmiyuj (to possess a woman); from the female perspective it is cariyuj (to possess a man). Marriage may result from romantic love and elopement, but preferably it occurs through highly structured exchanges of sons and daughters arranged by parents and even grandparents. In Canelos and Pacayacu, and formerly in Puyo, a visiting friar or priest would marry couples in traditional ceremonies controlled by the clergy. Many couples throughout the area marry in traditional ceremonies without clergy. Some couples register their marriage at a civil registry, and some couples marry in the church in Puyo. Divorce prior to "legal" marriage involves undoing all of the structured consanguineal and affinal ties constructed during the new incorporation of the couple into the minimal kindred and territorial clan and involves great acrimony on the part of many relatives and neighbors. Formal divorce by use of lawyers is rare and expensive and engenders great and lasting hostility between rival kin groups. There is a strong kinship idiom in marriage ideology. Men and women try to marry so as to perpetuate their own male and female inherited and acquired soul and body substances coming to them, in a parallel manner, from the times of the grandparents.

Domestic Unit. The Canelos Quichua traditional house is distinct from the house forms and symbolisms of Shuar and Achuar Jivaroans and of Zaparoans. Until the early 1980s traditional large oval houses with three-generation patrilocal extended families, many of which included Achuar sons-in-law (the Achuar are uxorilocal except for the families of the "great men" or shamans), were characteristic. As of the mid-1980s colonist-style rectangular houses are rapidly replacing the large traditional open-sided dwellings that were oriented on cardinal axes with virtually every portion a representation of cosmic order, but the latter still exist.

Inheritance. The spouse of the deceased inherits all of his or her property, including land. Transmission of property, except land, from a parent to siblings is idiosyncratic. Land is distributed by the rule that the youngest son of a deceased parent inherits land not already distributed, and the oldest daughter of a deceased parent inherits land not already distributed.

Socialization. Socialization practices are geared to the basic male/female division of labor, to the stress on acquisition of knowledge through many sources, and to learning to live successfully within their special environment. Permissiveness in breast feeding, elimination, and exposure to adult experiences is tempered by immediate, unequivocal reprimands, usually verbal, and sometimes reinforced physically, for transgressions such as an older sibling hitting a younger one. Children are loved and valued, and affection is lavished on babies and toddlers by men as well as women. The ability to sustain hard work intelligently in a very harsh environment is taught in myriad ways.

Sociopolitical Organization

Social Organization. Traditionally, it is reported, men dominated women; today strong male-female egalitarianism is characteristic. The yachaj, "one who knows" or shaman, was and is the apex of any three-generational kinship-territorial system. Traditionally, such shamans were themselves the connecting links between the indigenous, dispersed, egalitarian social order and the hierarchical order that placed indigenous people on the bottom, which was characteristic of church and state. Today it is sons-in-law or sons of powerful shamans who have become the cultural brokers, but the modern structure of relationships is a transformation of the traditional. Every minimal territory is organized as a habitat distribution based on kinship and marriage patterns leading to cooperation in swidden-garden allocation (including ample room for forest fallow). The same people of the dispersed habitat and its traditional upper Amazonian organization are incorporated into hamlets that are based in part on the maintenance of hierarchical relationships with dominating governmental, educational, political, and religious personnel.

The structure of social relations is at the same time egalitarian and hierarchical. It is part of a regional organization that may be understood by reference to a fivegenerational model of cultural-ethnic-linguistic identity extending through the dispersed rain-forest settlements to urban Puyo, and includes marriage interchanges among Canelos Quichua, Napo Quichua, Achuar, and Zaparoan peoples through time and across space. In its nucleated dimensions the hamlet replicates features of the national political economy, including a structure of internal ethnicity reflecting divisions of Black, Indian, White, and many variants.

Political Organization. Comunas operate with an elected cabildo (governing board) or directiva, consisting of five officers. The Catholic clergy sporadically dominated many political organizations through the colonial varayuj system, wherein staffs of authority are passed out to four or five indigenous political officers who then serve as liaison to the church and, through the church, to the Ecuadoran nation-state. In some areas, U.S. Protestant evangelists have taken over the role of domination, trying to work with indigenous "leaders" contacted through bilingual school systems that they (the evangelists) introduced. In 1976-1978 polarized indigenous organizations began to form: on one side were anti-Protestant, antigovernment secular movements; on the other side were proevangelical and progovernment ones. By the late 1980s a set of confederations had emerged that extended downward from the national indigenous organization in Quito to the Confederation of Amazonian Organizations housed near Puyo on the edge of Comuna San Jacinto territory, to the Organization of Indigenous Peoples of Pastaza Province (OPIP).

In the early 1980s OPIP was charged by the governor of Pastaza Province with responsibility to speak politically for all the peoples of that province. Since 1988 OPIP has allied closely with Socialist and pro-Socialist parties and with the Catholic church in violent antagonism to other religious organizations and against the national bureaucracy and dominant political party of the president of the republic. Tensions manifest in the national political economy were replicated in the 1980s within OPIP, and many rival organizations of various political and religious persuasions now exist.

Social Control. Gossip, face-to-face public encounters, and social withdrawal (as with the periodic treks to distant swiddens) are ordinary mechanisms of traditional social control. A more powerful mechanism is shamanism and the accusation of shamanic activity. Outright killing of powerful shamans by small groups, and the threat of such killing, may have curtailed shamanic activity or kept it partially in check. Religious figures are often asked to resolve "manageable disputes." By the 1980s not only were police asked to exercise social control between members of rival political-economic organizations, but even the military has been called in on some occasions. Lawsuits filed by indigenous people involve accusations of murder and cattle theft, boundary disputes with encroaching colonists, and witchcraft.

Conflict. Shamanism, accusation of shamanic activity, killing, and the accusation of killing, or hiring a killer constitute traditional sources of fission. No two families or kindreds can be on both sides of a shamanic or killing vendetta. Added to the traditional domains of conflict are new causes of struggle: control of land, control over sectors of the political economy and indigenous activity, religious control, and struggles engendered by rival indigenous organizations in alliance with extraneous forces.

In 1990 some Canelos Quichua participated in a nationwide indigenous uprising (levantamiento indígena ). In April-May of 1992 representatives of Canelos Quichua culture led a march from Puyo to Quito and staged a camp-out in a major park of the capital to demand legalization of their territory, as well as that of the Achuar and Shiwiar. The march and camp-out had clear millenarian dimensions and resulted in large-scale land transfers from the nation-state to indigenous organizations of Pastaza Province.

Religion and Expressive Culture

Religious Beliefs. Transformation (tucuna ) is crucial in understanding relationships among animate essences of inanimate substances and spiritual essences in interaction with soul substances. Unai (mythic time-space) provides a rich cosmographic source of contemporary and ancient knowledge; callarirucuguna (beginning times-places) embraces the period of transformation from unai to times of destruction and times of the ancestors. The future is thought of both as a continuation of the past and present and as a pending transformation of the initial chaos of unai. One origin myth of the Canelos Quichua is that of an incestuous brother-sister relationship between the moon (male) and the Potoo bird (female); part of this myth involves the origin of pottery clay.

The origin of the kinship system is told in mythic segments that deal with the transformation of the Anaconda from the human penis. Soul (aya ) and spirit (supai ) are fundamental concepts that apply to both eschatological knowledge and quotidian life. Humans and spirits interact when one or the other moves to a new plane of existence. Spirits have souls, just as humans do. Three spirit masters serve as focal symbols by which patterned transformations in the spirit would occur. Amasanga is forest-spirit master; his/her transformation is the dangerous master spirit of other people who live in other territories. Sungui is the spirit master of the hydrosphere and first shaman. Nungwi, a strictly feminine spirit, is master of garden soil and pottery clay. Canelos Quichua must balance experiential knowledge (ricsina ) with cultural knowledge (yachana ) and visionary experience (muscuna ) with learning (yuyana ). Central to the transformative paradigm involving these critical concepts is the yachaj, the "one who knows," the "possessor of knowledge." This concept often means "shaman" when applied to males, but may also be used to refer to master potters.

Religious Practitioners. Shamans (male) and master potters (female) constitute the twin nodes of ongoing interpretation through which the system of parallel transmission of cultural knowledge takes place.

Ceremonies. The ayllu festival is held once or twice a year in all hamlets where a Catholic chapel or shrine exists. In it is enacted the cosmogony of the Canelos Quichua, their embeddedness in Catholic and national hegemony, and the invocation of the ultimate source of power, the hydrosphere, as embodied by the Anaconda (amarun ), which may break all bonds of hegemony but contains within itself the genesis of destruction and reemergence of chaos.

Arts. All Canelos Quichua women are potters who manufacture a very fine ware that seems, according to archaeological evidence, to derive from ancient red-banded ware associated with westward-moving Tupí migrations. The potters make black ware for cooking and serving cooked foods, and polychrome ware for storing and serving manioc brew (asua ). The sporadic art markets for fine and crude ceramics provide income to many families, and there is considerable innovation, within traditional boundaries, regarding the size and shapes of vessels made for sale. Men make blowgun quivers, darts, net bags, fish nets, traps, canoes and paddles, carving boards, feather headdresses, and wooden bowls and pestles for pounding manioc mash. Many men and women traditionally wove small bands for blowgun quivers. Blowguns are usually acquired from the Achuar, as is curare dart poison which, in turn, the Achuar acquire from the Cocama.

In 1975 Canelos Quichua men in the Puyo area began experimenting with carved animals and birds for the ethnic-arts market, and carving balsa birds has become a major occupation of many families, allowing them a degree of financial independence.

Medicine. Shamans use Banisteriopsis caapi, called ayahuasca (soul vine), in curing and diagnosing illness. Individuals occasionally use Brugmansia suaveolens (wanduj ) in lone quests within the spirit world. Many other medicines from the rain forest are known and utilized.

Death and Afterlife. Death is associated with the malign action of evil individuals in interaction with evil spirits. The soul leaves the dying person through the mouth as death approaches and remains in the vicinity of the corpse for the one to three days and nights of a wake. To interact with the soul, those not in the immediate ayllu of the deceased play games, some with maize or black beans, but the major one being with a carved die called "canoe." The body is interred along a west-east cardinal line and begins an underground and underwater trip with its soul, over the course of which many transformations of the soul's inanimate existence take place. Souls visit the living, may be captured by a spirit, and may exist in various domains.

Bibliography

Reeve, Mary-Elizabeth (1985). Identity as Process: The Meaning of Runapura for Quichua Speakers of the Curaray River, Eastern Ecuador. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms.

Whitten, Dorothea S., and Norman E. Whitten, Jr. (1988). From Myth to Creation: Art from Amazonian Ecuador. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Whitten, Norman E., Jr. (1985). Sicuanga Runa: The Other Side of Development in Amazonian Ecuador. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Whitten, Norman E., Jr., with the assistance of Marcelo Naranjo, Marcelo Santi Simbaña, and Dorothea S. Whitten (1976). Sacha Runa: Ethnicity and Adaptation of Ecuadorian Jungle Quichua. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

NORMAN E. WHITTEN, JR.