Back to the drawing board: An enlightening but linguistically unsatisfying trip to the Urituyacu
I am writing early from Iquitos following an approximately three-week trip to the Urituyacu river basin with Miguel Angel Cadenas and Manolo Berjón, the parish priests of Santa Rita de Castilla, and two of the four nuns who also reside there, Nancy Roca and Eli Quiroz. The goals of the parish were to carry out yearly baptisms, alongside much needed advocacy work spanning a range of issues from the absence of teachers and/or schools in some communities to large-scale changes in lifestyle that will result from the construction of a new train connecting Iquitos with Yurimaguas, the nearest city with road access to the rest of the country some three days upriver by boat. My goals were to locate (semi-)speakers of Omurano, an undocumented, unclassified language spoken throughout the Urituyacu basin as late as the mid-20th century, and (it appears) historically in the interfluvial region spanning the middle Pastaza, the headwaters of the Urituyacu and Yanayacu rivers (the latter an upper tributary of the former), and pushing northwards towards the Capirona, a tributary of the Corrientes, which empties out into the Tigre river, a major waterway crossing the Peruvian-Ecuadorean border. Although I was able to obtain some 45 words from various individuals during my stays in 7 communities, as well as some important (in grammatical terms) phrases, I was unable to locate a speaker with sufficient fluency in the language to warrant the three-week stay that I had tentatively planned. Nevertheless, teaming up with the parish was mutually beneficial, as they were able to provide me with significant logistical and interpersonal support, and I was able to provide them with much needed linguistic insight in their dealings with Urarina communities on the Urituyacu.
I am back in Iquitos now in order to seek out Catalino Valencia Paima, an 88-year-old man who was formerly a major patrón (a kind of strong man) on the Urituyacu beginning in the 1940s. He is rumored to have learned to speak Omurano fluently from the families that worked under him, and, ironically, may now be the best candidate for a language consultant. Below I summarize my trip, and intersperse some of the linguistic and ethnohistorical details I obtained, the latter of which are numerous, and significant for the understanding of the obsolescence of the Omurano language and people. It is important to note that, for at least the previous century, Omurano families have been strongly intertwined with Urarina families that originally migrated from the greater Chambira basin, both in terms of residence locations and intermarriage. The presence of Urarinas in the Urituyacu appears to be much older than previously thought, and any individual with knowledge of Omurano today uses Urarina as their dominant language of daily life. However, ethnic origins strongly persist, and most individuals can easily identify which other individuals have Omurano roots. Miguel Angel and Manolo estimate some 800 speakers of Urarina on the Urituyacu, which sharply contrasts with previous suggestions that all ethnic Urarinas on the Urituyacu have shifted to Spanish.
I began my trip Monday, June 3, with an attempt to board the lancha Gilmer V, which was set to depart that evening. Upon arriving in port that morning, however, the captain decided they would delay an extra day. Typically this would not have been an issue, but I needed to leave Iquitos on that day to provide sufficient time to reach Santa Rita de Castilla, from which I would depart on Thursday, June 6, with the parish members. With that in mind, I was forced to embark on the much smaller, slower and less pleasant Kike. I had had the good fortune of run into Nancy Roca in Iquitos during a meeting with the the Augustinian Superior Miguel Fuertes, and she joined me on the Kike. Her connections allowed us to get a camarote (room with bunk beds), which, although significantly less pleasant than an open-air hammock on deck, are much safer in terms of potential theft -- and I was carrying a lot of expensive equipment.
We arrived in Castilla Tuesday evening around 8PM following a major delay during the previous evening in which the nighttime captain had gotten turned around on the Amazon and spent several hours heading back towards Iquitos before he realized his mistake near Tamshiyacu. I spent Wednesday buying additional supplies in Castilla -- a large community of some 1,400 individuals, the seat of the District of Parinari, now with several well-stocked shops -- as well as introducing myself to a group of presidentes comunales (local leaders) from communities within the parish of Santa Rita de Casia (which includes the Marañón from the Tigre to the Huallaga, as well as the greater Samiria, Chambira and Urituyacu basins), who had convened in Castilla for a workshop on community title rights. These individuals joined us on the Santa Rita II, the medium-sized parish boat that would take us to the mouth of the Urituyacu the following day.
After dropping off several presidentes comunales in their respective communities on the Marañón, we spent the first night in Maypuco, the seat of the District of Urarinas, the most relevant governing body for individuals living in the upper half of the parish. From there we headed for Nueva Alianza, arriving there Friday morning, and after a few hours of rearranging supplies from the larger parish boat into two smaller boats, we headed off up the Urituyacu. I would join Miguel Angel and Manolo in one boat, which fortunately came equipped with a toldo (a low canopy-like cover), while Nancy & Eli would proceed in a separate boat (unfortunately for them without a toldo). Each team would visit one half of the communities on the Urituyacu, in order to make the trip fit into the roughly two weeks allotted for the visit.
The lower reaches of the Urituyacu flood completely during the wet season, and because of that, the first community from Nueva Alianza, Cafetal, is some five hours by peque-peque, and we arrived there in the late afternoon Friday 6/7. During our one-night stay there, we had the good fortune of meeting with Jaime Ríos Tuesta, a 78-year-old man who came to the Urituyacu in approximately 1965. Data from him laid the groundwork for our understanding of the lower Urituyacu in the mid-20th century. It appears that at this time, and in the decades immediately preceding it, several mixed Urarina-Omurano families worked under (first) the Brazilian patrón José Dosantos González (the man mentioned as the patrón of the Omuranos by the German ethnographer Günter Tessmann during his trip to the region in 1925), and (second) by Catalino Valencia Paima and his father Adolfo Valencia Cumaida. These families lived in a caserío one bend below Cafetal, while Catalino, who would come to take on the role of curaca (a local indigenous leader) with four wives, lived one bend above Cafetal. These Urarina-Omurano families are likely the ones mentioned by Tessmann in his count of 25 Omuranos.
In addition, Jaime reports that, in the first half of the 20th century, another group of "pure" Omuranos lived around a cocha (lake) approximately three hours' walk into the forest opposite Cafetal. (Unfortunately, it is unknown what happened to this group, and they appear to have disappeared by the latter half of the 20th century.) This lake empties out into a quebrada (small tributary) called the Patuyacu, which in the wet season connects to Monterrico on the Marañón. Near this lake is a site locally known as Tejal, where huge amounts of tejas (pottery shards) can be found. More generally, the Urituyacu is an archaeological gold mine, with massive amounts of both intact and fragmented ceramic work found in nearly every community along the river and the chacras (swiddens) of local residents a few minutes' walk into the forest. In fact, in both Cafetal and Lupunayo (see below), residents found tejas and tinajas (intact ceramic pots and jugs) during our stay. Many intact ceramics contain human remains, and their distribution suggests a large population. According to Jaime, Omuranos did not live in permanent settlements (typical of interfluvial groups predominantly dependent on hunting), and quickly abandoned the site where a relative died.
Following our interview with Jaime (most interviews were carried out by both myself and Miguel Angel, with Manolo supplying cigarettes to the interviewee to keep conversation flowing), I was asked to supply a list of candidate names in English for a newly born girl in the community. I went through the names of a number of female friends and relatives with the mother, father and aunt, and they ultimately settled on the combined name Ani Kendra, fusing the names of one of my best friends and my mother!
Following baptisms on Saturday morning and important interviews with Rafael Huaya and Carlos Valencia Otejón, we headed to the community of Juan Velasco, a mixed Kokama-Urarina community. (Note that Kokamas have been displacing Urarinas in the downriver communities of the Urituyacu since 1971, following a major flood on the Marañón that displaced many Kokamas, sending them in search of cultivable land.) Ethnic tensions have risen in Juan Velasco in the last few years, resulting in this small community being roughly split into a Kokama half and an Urarina half. Although I did not manage to locate Omurano speakers in Juan Velasco, we carried out important interviews with Darío Cariajano Yahuarcani and Juan Macusi Inuma (the latter a descendant of Omurano speakers). Darío reports that, as late as the 1940s, when his father first entered the Urituyacu, there was a significant population of relatively isolated Omuranos that lived in the upper reaches of the Urituyacu from the mouth of the Yanayacu upriver. These individuals, purportedly salvajes (savages), are reported to have avoided contact with downriver mitayeros (hunters) and patrones, and been fearful of diseases. Less believably, they are rumored to have been the guardians of a fifteen-meter high golden cashuera (waterfall) that was located three days upriver of the uprivermost community, Abejaico, which disappeared once they disappeared some years later. Whatever the validity of the golden waterfall is, many other individuals (see below) corroborate the presence of a group of more isolated, traditional Omuranos at the mouth of the Yanayacu at least through the late 1940s.
On Sunday, June 9, we headed to Progreso I, a community of two houses occupied by descendants of Juan "Pihuicho" Macusi Nuribe (53), the son of a fluent Omurano speaker, Esteban Macusi Manizari (deceased). Here we stayed in the home of Pihuicho's son-in-law, and spent the whole time conversing about Urituyacu history and the Omurano language. (There were no baptisms to carry out in this community, and even had there been, we likely would have passed the time in the same way, given the limited resources of this family -- e.g., they were able to provide us only very little food -- and the need to talk to them at length about several important issues besides my own interests.) Out of all the individuals I met, Pihuicho exhibits the most knowledge of the Omurano language, and speaks most openly about this ethnic identity, although Urarina is the language he employs in daily life. Pihuicho's mother, Ana Nuribe, was not ethnically Omurano and did not speak Omurano (she was ethnically Urarina and spoke only Urarina), and his only input was from his father, who appears to have used the language infrequently with his children.
Here it is important to mention some important genealogical details about the Macusi family that provide some insight into the recent history of the Omurano language. (I spent many hours collecting genealogical information from various individuals on the Urituyacu in order to better understand the use of Omurano in the 20th century.) Pihuicho's paternal grandfather, Bautista Macusi Ahuite, was half Urarina, half Omurano. His mother (name unknown) appears to have been an Omurano woman from the aforementioned upriver settlement brought to live in the downriver settlement near Cafetal, where Bautista was born, and raised as a peón of the aforementioned patrón Dosantos. Bautista thus acquired Omurano from his mother, but, according to many individuals, used Urarina as his dominant language of daily life. In the late 1920s or early 1930s, Bautista was invited by an Omurano man from the upriver settlement (an area in which many downriver men like Bautista were experienced hunters) to marry his daughter, Sebastiana Manizari. Esteban, Pihuicho's father, is the product of this marriage, and subsequently acquired Omurano from his mother. What is important to note here are two generations of mixed Urarina-Omurano men marrying Omurano women from upriver. I have the impression that this marriage pattern existed for some time, yielding bilingual Urarina-Omurano families around Cafetal, with the Omurano language being replenished by the acquisition of Omurano brides from upriver. However, the disappearance of the upriver settlement brought this pattern to an end some time around the mid-20th century, such that Esteban married an Urarina woman and spoke Urarina in the home, thus limiting Omurano input for Pihuicho's generation. Compounding this situation is the fact that Pihuicho's paternal grandmother, Sebastiana, the Omurano woman, died at a young age, and Bautista's second wife, Asunciona Nuribe, was Urarina and spoke only Urarina. This reduced even further the degree to which Omurano was spoken during Pihuicho's childhood, and the children of this second marriage, Pihuichos' half-aunts and -uncles, appear to have no knowledge of the language.
I collected some 30 words from Pihuicho, as well as some basic phrases. Some of these phrases provide insights into Omurano grammar.
(1) marachí purimatá petené.
marachi purima -ta pete -ne
dog agouti -ACC(?) kill -?
'The dog killed an agouti.'
(2) ñurú purimatá petené.
ñuru purima -ta pete -ne
1SG agouti -ACC(?) kill -?
'I killed an agouti.' ~ 'I am going to kill an agouti.'
(3) burú, chanetá petené?
buru chane -ta pete -ne
old.man peccary.sp. -ACC(?) kill -?
'Viejo, did you kill a peccary?'
Most words in isolation exhibit a final high tone (reminiscent of Urarina). In addition, words in certain syntactic configurations (see (1)-(3)) also exhibit final high tones. The language appears to lack articles, and exhibits apparent SOV word order with a suffix -ta that (minimally) marks patients. Verbs do not inflect for person, although all verbs obtained in sentences such as (1)-(3) exhibit an apparent suffix -ne. Sentences such as (2) may receive either a present or future temporal interpretation, and, interestingly, subjectless clauses appear to be interpreted with second-person subjects, at least in interrogatives, as in (3). I suspect that Pihuicho's linguistic knowledge is greater than is represented in the data I obtained from him, but unfortunately he was unable to manipulate very basic sentences apart from the ones he provided me. This, in combination with difficult circumstances surrounding trying to stay in Progreso I and work with Pihuicho, motivated me to press on. This was a very difficult decision, but so are all decisions involving the abilities of semi-speakers and rememberers of obsolescent languages.
Following one night in Progreso I we headed to the Kokama community of Caimituyo, with a brief stop-over in Progreso II, so as not to arrive too early in Caimituyo and inconvenience our hosts by making them feel that they needed to provide us with two meals for that day. (The general schedule of our visits involved arriving in a community in late afternoon, going for a paseo (walk), bathing, eating dinner provided by a community member (often the church animador), and holding a community meeting that evening in which Miguel Angel, Manolo and myself introduced ourselves and dealt with pertinent community issues, followed by breakfast, a baptismal ceremony and lunch the following day. Although I often attended the baptismal ceremonies, I occasionally used that time to interview other community members that did not attend the ceremony.) The visit to Caimituyo was not relevant to my work, since only a few residents of the community are Urarina, with no ties to the Omurano people or language.
Our next stop, Triunfo, is also an entirely Kokama settlement, although until ~1955, when a massacre occurred there, it was a mixed Urarina-Omurano settlement, its name given by the local patrón Rafael Zubiate some time in the 1940s or early 1950s. (The following narrative is a compilation of data from several different individuals throughout the Urituyacu.) In ~1955, a mestizo named Andrés Meléndez, who had previously resided on the Nucuray (the adjacent river basin to the west of the Urituyacu), stole a Murato woman and fled to Triunfo, where he was accepted by the community because of his ability to play the quena, a type of flute. At that time, a group of Muratos extracted timber from two upriver tributaries of the Urituyacu, Chucllayacu and Sarampión, which they delivered to a patrón at the mouth of the Urituyacu. On one of their return trips upriver, they plotted to steal back the Murato woman in Triunfo. The night before the attack, during which local residents were celebrating with a tomadera (drinking festival), they hid in the nearby forest and unmoored the canoes of the residents living in the settlement on the left bank of the river. Early the following morning, as the festival was coming to a close and many local residents were inebriated, the group of Muratos attacked, killing (likely) between 20 and 40 individuals with shotguns and stealing back the Murato bride. Those who lived on the right bank of the river, including Pihuicho's father and grandfather, were able to flee downriver. This flight resulted in many Urarina-Omurano families deciding to take up residence in Santo Tomás (now Monterrico), upriver from the mouth of the Urituyacu (where many descendants still live to this day).
Following this event, the Muratos themselves fled to a lake named Chayahuita on a quebrada immediately downriver of the current community of San Enrique. They then happened to encounter a man coming down yet another quebrada, the Huacana, who was with two women. The man (the uncle of the current presidente comunal of Guineal), upon returning from a short trip into the forest, found the two women missing, and upon venturing into the forest to search for them, was killed by the Muratos. The Muratos then kidnapped the two women (Catalina and Aurora). Although the two women have never returned to the Urituyacu, Aurora, the first cousin of the same presidente comunal, is rumored to live in Huancayo, a settlement on the Nucuray. This massacre and subsequent kidnapping left a significant scar on the recent history of the Urarina and Omurano peoples of the Urituyacu basin, and is reflective of longer-standing tensions between Muratos and Urarina-Omuranos of the Urituyacu.
Following baptisms in the local Catholic church in Triunfo, we set off for Lupunayo, where, as in Caimituyo, we were given a room in the local school. In Lupunayo they declared a school holiday for our arrival. (Any excuse for a school holiday is a good excuse in Peru.) Lupunayo, like Caimituyo and Triunfo, is a Kokama settlement, but is unlike all other settlements on the Urituyacu in being fully electrified. Additionally, Lupunayo, like Cafetal, is a site with large amounts of archaeological remains. During our visit alone, a small intact mocagua (small squat jar) was found along the malecón (the path that borders the river). Next to it the upper rim of a large intact pot was unearthed, although we urged the local residents to leave it buried since we were unsure of being able to remove it without shattering it. The Urituyacu deserves the attention of a major, multi-year archaeological project. The potential to reconstruct aspects of Omurano population history (especially from human remains in larger jars) is incredible.
From Lupunayo we headed to San Antonio de Bancal, an entirely Urarina settlement. We were uneasy about stopping over in this community, since we had run into the head of the community in Triunfo, who informed us that there would not be any baptisms prepared for our arrival. (Most community leaders were headed downriver to Maypuco on the Marañón for a budgetary meeting with local district leaders.) However, Miguel Angel and Manolo had already agreed with local residents that they would visit the community this year, and they did not want to renege on that promise. In the end we spent the night there, although there was no food available for dinner. The stop-over was worthwhile, as we were able to speak with Jorge Macusi Nuribe (45), Pihuicho's younger brother, who came to visit us the following morning before our departure. Unfortunately, Jorge has substantially less knowledge of the Omurano language than his brother, although like him, he is proud to discuss his Omurano heritage, but notes that there is essentially no one left on the Urituyacu with knowledge of the language. I obtained a small number of lexical items from Jorge and one song, along with a number of important cultural points, which he attributes to his father Esteban. Jorge emphasizes that the Omurano did not add salt to their food, nor did they eat their meat fully cooked, preferring to cook it until just whitened. He adds that his grandfather Bautista's first wife had to learn how to cook "well". Additionally, Jorge points out that the Omurano did not live along the main river, but along the numerous small quebradas that characterize the upper half of the Urituyacu.
From Bancal we stopped of briefly in 8 de Octubre for lunch at the home of Ventura Inuma Vela and Rosalia Macusi Nuribe, the latter a daughter of Bautista Macusi (see above) and his second wife Asunciona. Ventura provided us with important information on his father-in-law's life, as well as on the commercial history of the Urituyacu basin from the mid-20th century forward, which was dominated by timber extraction and the hunting of animals for prized skins. Rosalia is an excellent cook, and we enjoyed some first-rate majás while there.
Later in the afternoon we pressed on towards San Luis, which I had intended to be the location at which I would remain for several weeks in order to work with Rafael Macusi Inuma, Pihuicho's son, and rumoredly the most fluent Omurano speaker (because he grew up with his grandfather Esteban). However, Rafael had, just prior to our entry into the Urituyacu, gone downriver all the way to Nauta to take care of some issues related to his DNI (national ID card). Because of the meeting being held in Maypuco, he would not return until well after our departure. Nevertheless, there was important work to do in San Luis. First, San Luis is the home of Luis "Lucho" Macusi Nuribe, first (and second) cousin of Pihuicho. Lucho's father, Santos Macusi (deceased), was the son of the apu (leader) of Triunfo at the time of the massacre in ~1955, Juaneco Macusi. Lucho claims that his father Santos knew some Omurano, but that he knows none. I suspect this to be false, as the linguistic environment of Lucho's childhood appears to be equivalent to those of Pihuicho, and Lucho is Pihuicho's senior. However, such denial is common in situations of language endangerment, and was particularly prevalent during my trip, and is a major obstacle to the documentation of such languages.
Our first evening in San Luis we held a meeting in which we discussed issues related to the construction of a major railway that will connect Yurimaguas with Iquitos. Two years ago, when I was last in Peru, this project was still a fantasy, but the regional government has now begun clearing a massive 30m trail through the forest, which cuts across the upper Urituyacu four bends upriver of San Luis. The train will cross the Marañón near the Pastaza, follow the path of the Pastaza for some distance, then cut across the upper Urituyacu, Chambira, Tigre and Nanay rivers before descending to Iquitos. The project will decimate the fauna that the Urarina populations of the upper Urituyacu rely on for sustenance, and will further pollute a region already contaminated from some 40 years of petroleum extraction. However, no resident of San Luis has ever been to Iquitos, let alone seen a train, and much of our meeting was spent explaining what a train is, what it looks like and why it is damaging to their way of life. A meeting had been set for June 20 in Reforma, a Kokama settlement, in which leaders of the upriver communities would be invited by local district and project leaders to nominally ask their permission for the continuation of the train project. We do not know how that meeting went, or if community leaders were able to make demands beneficial to their communities in exchange for signing over rights and giving way to further work on the train.
An unrelated, but also damaging, issue confronting San Luis residents is the extraction of timber from the territory of the nearest downriver community, Guineal. Previously, two regional governmental entities, the Fiscalía and Defensoría del Pueblo, had reached an agreement that would prohibit the extraction of timber from all parts of the Urituyacu basin, following years of irreparably damaging policies in the mid- and latter 20th century. However, after being paid off by an extraction company, the Defensoría del Pueblo assisted the community of Guineal in obtaining a permiso forestal, a permit which allowed them to enter into negotiations with a timber extraction firm. The problem is that, although Urituyacu communities are titled and have legally binding boundaries, the communities are too far removed from local oversight for such boundaries to be enforced. The result is that timber extraction has encroached on San Luis territory, and to boot, the community of Guineal has benefited only by receiving one generator powerful enough electrify the small community, but with no wires, no light bulbs, no installation, etc. To compound the issue, the same extraction company paid off the district police to provide them with an underspecified document that grants them permission to extract timber from the entire Urituyacu basin, despite the fact that other communities do not have permisos forestales and that the police are not legally in a position to grant such permission!
Just before departing San Luis, Miguel Angel and I were able to meet with Mamerto Inuma López, who grew up with his Omurano-speaking grandparents, Santiago Macusi Nuribe (deceased) and Narcisa Manizari Ahuite (deceased). He claims to know no Omurano himself. I obtained the names of all of the siblings of each of his grandparents, all of whom are also deceased, and we later met descendants of many of them, to no avail with regard to finding speakers.
We left San Luis Saturday afternoon to visit the downriver community of Guineal, where in the afternoon we dealt with issues surrounding timber extraction and conflicts that local residents are having with an offshoot group of individuals one bend downriver that want to form their own community, and have already given it the name 8 de Octubre (see above). Later that afternoon we returned to 8 de Octubre, where we were lodging, and the following morning Miguel Angel and Manolo baptized. We then returned to Guineal so that they could baptize there. Jorge Macusi had told us that an elderly man in Guineal named Pancho Murayari Macusi knows Omurano. Following our meeting in the local school I did some elicitation with him and his wife, but Pancho only knew greetings and his wife was too embarrassed to speak at all. I suspect that neither of them knows more than they claim, because they do not have the relevant genealogical background that would have produced speakers of Omurano. More generally, it seems that Omurano survives for some individuals only in greetings, but that that occasionally suffices for others to say that a given individual converses in the language, which is, obviously, problematic for the work I am trying to carry out.
Following this failed attempt we returned to 8 de Octubre to interview Juana Macusi Manizari, daughter of Juaneco, the apu that was killed in the massacre at Triunfo. She was only 7 months old at the time of the massacre, and grew up with her maternal aunt and uncle. Rumor had it Juana knew songs in Omurano, and she claims that her aunt Narcisa sang to her as a girl in Omurano. We were able to record several of her songs, which are valuable in their own right, but in the end they turned out to be in Urarina. Issues of "language deception" were commonplace during our visit; on many occasions people claimed to give me many words in Omurano, which, given the phonology and corroboration with other individuals, I was able to deduce were Urarina words. Furthermore, many young people seem to be of the belief that Omurano is an aberrant dialect of Urarina which they can understand. This is patently false, but interesting, and likely derives from the very limited degree to which they have even heard of such a language.
The following two days of our stay in 8 de Octubre were dedicated to running a taller (workshop) with individuals from San Antonio de Bancal, 8 de Octubre, Guineal, San Luis and Ayahuasca. The workshop mainly had two goals. The first was to deduce more about local, recent Urituyacu history through a process of collaboration in which I would "lecture" about the history that we had gathered through oral accounts up to that point, and workshop participants would add and/or correct information. Significant time was also devoted to group work in which men drew maps of the Urituyacu labeling all caños, quebradas and cochas (types of waterways) and women would team up with the nuns in order to better outline the history surrounding the massacre at Triunfo. This proved to be very productive, and through it we learned that the upriver group of Omuranos appears to have been displaced by additional marauding Muratos before the 1960s. (Later, Carlos Valencia, again in Cafetal, reported that his uncle Catalino, the patrón, had nearly been killed in 1946 or 1947 by a party of Muratos on the quebrada Colpayo, a group that may have also been responsible for the aforementioned displacement. As recently as a few years ago, residents of Ayahuasca, the uprivermost Urarina settlement, reported encountering unidentified footprints in the nearby forest that led them to believe that Muratos were still active in the region.) We were also better able to delineate waves of measles epidemics that plagued the Urituyacu through the 1980s, and which also (very likely) contributed to the decimation of the upriver Omuranos. The latter point is an important one, as it appears that the upriver Omuranos disappeared quite suddenly, without downriver inhabitants really knowing at all what happened to them. The second goal was deal with issues regarding the train, timber extraction and other issues such as education. The distribution of schools and teachers in the Urituyacu is sharply skewed toward favoring the Kokama communities, with many Urarina communities lacking a school altogether, or having a school but lacking a teacher with any regular presence.
During the workshop I was also able to work further with Jorge Macusi Nuribe, recording a further song in Omurano. (Note that, unlike others, Pihuicho and his brother Jorge never claimed that a given word or sentence was Omurano when it was really Urarina. Their attitude toward and pride in the Omurano language is marked in comparison to all others we met.) Additionally, I was able to elicit five place names from Simón Inuma Manizari, the community leader of Guineal, whose mother spoke Omurano but died from measles in ~1975. Tragically, that wave of measles appears to have been brought to the Urituyacu from Iquitos by Simón's own brother Agustín, who also died from it around the same time.
We left 8 de Octubre the afternoon that the workshop ended, so as to be able to spend the night again in Triunfo and make it to the mouth of the river (Nueva Alianza) the following afternoon. I had decided the previous day to return with the parish to Santa Rita de Castilla, since I had been unable to find a speaker of Omurano of sufficient fluency to justify the weeks I had planned to spend there. Furthermore, it was totally unclear when Rafael Macusi would return. Arriving in Alianza, Miguel Angel and I made one last ditch effort to speak with the elder sister of Simón Inuma (see above), Martina, who now lives there, hoping that, being ~20 years Simón's senior, she would have had more exposure to Omurano from her mother. While Martina admits that her mother spoke Omurano, she claims to know nothing. We also met with Salvador Macusi Ahuite, a founder of the community of Ayahuasca in 1978, again to no avail.
We returned to Santa Rita de Castilla last Thursday evening, and I stayed there through Tuesday morning, in order to conduct some genealogical research in the parish archives there, so that I would have a better understanding of the relationships between the individuals we had met and deduce something regarding who might still speak the language, based on oral information we had about which ancestor spoke the language, etc. It was also a relaxing place for me to sift through the many historical notes I had accumulated, replete with running water, fresh food prepared by the nuns, and a house totally sealed off from mosquitoes. I plan to write a short paper on the recent history of the Urituyacu basin in the coming weeks, incorporating the information that I have mentioned here into a more detailed account. In addition, I plan to submit an abstract for the January meeting of SSILA (Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas) combining the linguistic facts I have gathered with clarification on Omurano history as it currently exists in the literature. Although the conclusions I can draw regarding Omurano grammar are extremely limited, they are more than currently is known, and provide insight into comparison with nearby, unrelated languages. I aim to retool here in Iquitos for a few days, and depending on whether I am able to meet with Catalino Valencia, I may return to Nueva Alianza next week to try and intercept Rafael Macusi, hoping that he will be there for the monthly pay-out of 100 soles by a regional government program Juntos.
I am back in Iquitos now in order to seek out Catalino Valencia Paima, an 88-year-old man who was formerly a major patrón (a kind of strong man) on the Urituyacu beginning in the 1940s. He is rumored to have learned to speak Omurano fluently from the families that worked under him, and, ironically, may now be the best candidate for a language consultant. Below I summarize my trip, and intersperse some of the linguistic and ethnohistorical details I obtained, the latter of which are numerous, and significant for the understanding of the obsolescence of the Omurano language and people. It is important to note that, for at least the previous century, Omurano families have been strongly intertwined with Urarina families that originally migrated from the greater Chambira basin, both in terms of residence locations and intermarriage. The presence of Urarinas in the Urituyacu appears to be much older than previously thought, and any individual with knowledge of Omurano today uses Urarina as their dominant language of daily life. However, ethnic origins strongly persist, and most individuals can easily identify which other individuals have Omurano roots. Miguel Angel and Manolo estimate some 800 speakers of Urarina on the Urituyacu, which sharply contrasts with previous suggestions that all ethnic Urarinas on the Urituyacu have shifted to Spanish.
I began my trip Monday, June 3, with an attempt to board the lancha Gilmer V, which was set to depart that evening. Upon arriving in port that morning, however, the captain decided they would delay an extra day. Typically this would not have been an issue, but I needed to leave Iquitos on that day to provide sufficient time to reach Santa Rita de Castilla, from which I would depart on Thursday, June 6, with the parish members. With that in mind, I was forced to embark on the much smaller, slower and less pleasant Kike. I had had the good fortune of run into Nancy Roca in Iquitos during a meeting with the the Augustinian Superior Miguel Fuertes, and she joined me on the Kike. Her connections allowed us to get a camarote (room with bunk beds), which, although significantly less pleasant than an open-air hammock on deck, are much safer in terms of potential theft -- and I was carrying a lot of expensive equipment.
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| Camarote on the Kike |
We arrived in Castilla Tuesday evening around 8PM following a major delay during the previous evening in which the nighttime captain had gotten turned around on the Amazon and spent several hours heading back towards Iquitos before he realized his mistake near Tamshiyacu. I spent Wednesday buying additional supplies in Castilla -- a large community of some 1,400 individuals, the seat of the District of Parinari, now with several well-stocked shops -- as well as introducing myself to a group of presidentes comunales (local leaders) from communities within the parish of Santa Rita de Casia (which includes the Marañón from the Tigre to the Huallaga, as well as the greater Samiria, Chambira and Urituyacu basins), who had convened in Castilla for a workshop on community title rights. These individuals joined us on the Santa Rita II, the medium-sized parish boat that would take us to the mouth of the Urituyacu the following day.
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| Marañón River aboard the Santa Rita II |
After dropping off several presidentes comunales in their respective communities on the Marañón, we spent the first night in Maypuco, the seat of the District of Urarinas, the most relevant governing body for individuals living in the upper half of the parish. From there we headed for Nueva Alianza, arriving there Friday morning, and after a few hours of rearranging supplies from the larger parish boat into two smaller boats, we headed off up the Urituyacu. I would join Miguel Angel and Manolo in one boat, which fortunately came equipped with a toldo (a low canopy-like cover), while Nancy & Eli would proceed in a separate boat (unfortunately for them without a toldo). Each team would visit one half of the communities on the Urituyacu, in order to make the trip fit into the roughly two weeks allotted for the visit.
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| Cafetal, Urituyacu River, Loreto, Peru |
The lower reaches of the Urituyacu flood completely during the wet season, and because of that, the first community from Nueva Alianza, Cafetal, is some five hours by peque-peque, and we arrived there in the late afternoon Friday 6/7. During our one-night stay there, we had the good fortune of meeting with Jaime Ríos Tuesta, a 78-year-old man who came to the Urituyacu in approximately 1965. Data from him laid the groundwork for our understanding of the lower Urituyacu in the mid-20th century. It appears that at this time, and in the decades immediately preceding it, several mixed Urarina-Omurano families worked under (first) the Brazilian patrón José Dosantos González (the man mentioned as the patrón of the Omuranos by the German ethnographer Günter Tessmann during his trip to the region in 1925), and (second) by Catalino Valencia Paima and his father Adolfo Valencia Cumaida. These families lived in a caserío one bend below Cafetal, while Catalino, who would come to take on the role of curaca (a local indigenous leader) with four wives, lived one bend above Cafetal. These Urarina-Omurano families are likely the ones mentioned by Tessmann in his count of 25 Omuranos.
In addition, Jaime reports that, in the first half of the 20th century, another group of "pure" Omuranos lived around a cocha (lake) approximately three hours' walk into the forest opposite Cafetal. (Unfortunately, it is unknown what happened to this group, and they appear to have disappeared by the latter half of the 20th century.) This lake empties out into a quebrada (small tributary) called the Patuyacu, which in the wet season connects to Monterrico on the Marañón. Near this lake is a site locally known as Tejal, where huge amounts of tejas (pottery shards) can be found. More generally, the Urituyacu is an archaeological gold mine, with massive amounts of both intact and fragmented ceramic work found in nearly every community along the river and the chacras (swiddens) of local residents a few minutes' walk into the forest. In fact, in both Cafetal and Lupunayo (see below), residents found tejas and tinajas (intact ceramic pots and jugs) during our stay. Many intact ceramics contain human remains, and their distribution suggests a large population. According to Jaime, Omuranos did not live in permanent settlements (typical of interfluvial groups predominantly dependent on hunting), and quickly abandoned the site where a relative died.
Following our interview with Jaime (most interviews were carried out by both myself and Miguel Angel, with Manolo supplying cigarettes to the interviewee to keep conversation flowing), I was asked to supply a list of candidate names in English for a newly born girl in the community. I went through the names of a number of female friends and relatives with the mother, father and aunt, and they ultimately settled on the combined name Ani Kendra, fusing the names of one of my best friends and my mother!
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| Juan Velasco Alvarado, Urituyacu River, Loreto, Peru |
Following baptisms on Saturday morning and important interviews with Rafael Huaya and Carlos Valencia Otejón, we headed to the community of Juan Velasco, a mixed Kokama-Urarina community. (Note that Kokamas have been displacing Urarinas in the downriver communities of the Urituyacu since 1971, following a major flood on the Marañón that displaced many Kokamas, sending them in search of cultivable land.) Ethnic tensions have risen in Juan Velasco in the last few years, resulting in this small community being roughly split into a Kokama half and an Urarina half. Although I did not manage to locate Omurano speakers in Juan Velasco, we carried out important interviews with Darío Cariajano Yahuarcani and Juan Macusi Inuma (the latter a descendant of Omurano speakers). Darío reports that, as late as the 1940s, when his father first entered the Urituyacu, there was a significant population of relatively isolated Omuranos that lived in the upper reaches of the Urituyacu from the mouth of the Yanayacu upriver. These individuals, purportedly salvajes (savages), are reported to have avoided contact with downriver mitayeros (hunters) and patrones, and been fearful of diseases. Less believably, they are rumored to have been the guardians of a fifteen-meter high golden cashuera (waterfall) that was located three days upriver of the uprivermost community, Abejaico, which disappeared once they disappeared some years later. Whatever the validity of the golden waterfall is, many other individuals (see below) corroborate the presence of a group of more isolated, traditional Omuranos at the mouth of the Yanayacu at least through the late 1940s.
On Sunday, June 9, we headed to Progreso I, a community of two houses occupied by descendants of Juan "Pihuicho" Macusi Nuribe (53), the son of a fluent Omurano speaker, Esteban Macusi Manizari (deceased). Here we stayed in the home of Pihuicho's son-in-law, and spent the whole time conversing about Urituyacu history and the Omurano language. (There were no baptisms to carry out in this community, and even had there been, we likely would have passed the time in the same way, given the limited resources of this family -- e.g., they were able to provide us only very little food -- and the need to talk to them at length about several important issues besides my own interests.) Out of all the individuals I met, Pihuicho exhibits the most knowledge of the Omurano language, and speaks most openly about this ethnic identity, although Urarina is the language he employs in daily life. Pihuicho's mother, Ana Nuribe, was not ethnically Omurano and did not speak Omurano (she was ethnically Urarina and spoke only Urarina), and his only input was from his father, who appears to have used the language infrequently with his children.
Here it is important to mention some important genealogical details about the Macusi family that provide some insight into the recent history of the Omurano language. (I spent many hours collecting genealogical information from various individuals on the Urituyacu in order to better understand the use of Omurano in the 20th century.) Pihuicho's paternal grandfather, Bautista Macusi Ahuite, was half Urarina, half Omurano. His mother (name unknown) appears to have been an Omurano woman from the aforementioned upriver settlement brought to live in the downriver settlement near Cafetal, where Bautista was born, and raised as a peón of the aforementioned patrón Dosantos. Bautista thus acquired Omurano from his mother, but, according to many individuals, used Urarina as his dominant language of daily life. In the late 1920s or early 1930s, Bautista was invited by an Omurano man from the upriver settlement (an area in which many downriver men like Bautista were experienced hunters) to marry his daughter, Sebastiana Manizari. Esteban, Pihuicho's father, is the product of this marriage, and subsequently acquired Omurano from his mother. What is important to note here are two generations of mixed Urarina-Omurano men marrying Omurano women from upriver. I have the impression that this marriage pattern existed for some time, yielding bilingual Urarina-Omurano families around Cafetal, with the Omurano language being replenished by the acquisition of Omurano brides from upriver. However, the disappearance of the upriver settlement brought this pattern to an end some time around the mid-20th century, such that Esteban married an Urarina woman and spoke Urarina in the home, thus limiting Omurano input for Pihuicho's generation. Compounding this situation is the fact that Pihuicho's paternal grandmother, Sebastiana, the Omurano woman, died at a young age, and Bautista's second wife, Asunciona Nuribe, was Urarina and spoke only Urarina. This reduced even further the degree to which Omurano was spoken during Pihuicho's childhood, and the children of this second marriage, Pihuichos' half-aunts and -uncles, appear to have no knowledge of the language.
I collected some 30 words from Pihuicho, as well as some basic phrases. Some of these phrases provide insights into Omurano grammar.
(1) marachí purimatá petené.
marachi purima -ta pete -ne
dog agouti -ACC(?) kill -?
'The dog killed an agouti.'
(2) ñurú purimatá petené.
ñuru purima -ta pete -ne
1SG agouti -ACC(?) kill -?
'I killed an agouti.' ~ 'I am going to kill an agouti.'
(3) burú, chanetá petené?
buru chane -ta pete -ne
old.man peccary.sp. -ACC(?) kill -?
'Viejo, did you kill a peccary?'
Most words in isolation exhibit a final high tone (reminiscent of Urarina). In addition, words in certain syntactic configurations (see (1)-(3)) also exhibit final high tones. The language appears to lack articles, and exhibits apparent SOV word order with a suffix -ta that (minimally) marks patients. Verbs do not inflect for person, although all verbs obtained in sentences such as (1)-(3) exhibit an apparent suffix -ne. Sentences such as (2) may receive either a present or future temporal interpretation, and, interestingly, subjectless clauses appear to be interpreted with second-person subjects, at least in interrogatives, as in (3). I suspect that Pihuicho's linguistic knowledge is greater than is represented in the data I obtained from him, but unfortunately he was unable to manipulate very basic sentences apart from the ones he provided me. This, in combination with difficult circumstances surrounding trying to stay in Progreso I and work with Pihuicho, motivated me to press on. This was a very difficult decision, but so are all decisions involving the abilities of semi-speakers and rememberers of obsolescent languages.
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| Catholic church Triunfo, Urituyacu River, Loreto, Peru |
Following one night in Progreso I we headed to the Kokama community of Caimituyo, with a brief stop-over in Progreso II, so as not to arrive too early in Caimituyo and inconvenience our hosts by making them feel that they needed to provide us with two meals for that day. (The general schedule of our visits involved arriving in a community in late afternoon, going for a paseo (walk), bathing, eating dinner provided by a community member (often the church animador), and holding a community meeting that evening in which Miguel Angel, Manolo and myself introduced ourselves and dealt with pertinent community issues, followed by breakfast, a baptismal ceremony and lunch the following day. Although I often attended the baptismal ceremonies, I occasionally used that time to interview other community members that did not attend the ceremony.) The visit to Caimituyo was not relevant to my work, since only a few residents of the community are Urarina, with no ties to the Omurano people or language.
Our next stop, Triunfo, is also an entirely Kokama settlement, although until ~1955, when a massacre occurred there, it was a mixed Urarina-Omurano settlement, its name given by the local patrón Rafael Zubiate some time in the 1940s or early 1950s. (The following narrative is a compilation of data from several different individuals throughout the Urituyacu.) In ~1955, a mestizo named Andrés Meléndez, who had previously resided on the Nucuray (the adjacent river basin to the west of the Urituyacu), stole a Murato woman and fled to Triunfo, where he was accepted by the community because of his ability to play the quena, a type of flute. At that time, a group of Muratos extracted timber from two upriver tributaries of the Urituyacu, Chucllayacu and Sarampión, which they delivered to a patrón at the mouth of the Urituyacu. On one of their return trips upriver, they plotted to steal back the Murato woman in Triunfo. The night before the attack, during which local residents were celebrating with a tomadera (drinking festival), they hid in the nearby forest and unmoored the canoes of the residents living in the settlement on the left bank of the river. Early the following morning, as the festival was coming to a close and many local residents were inebriated, the group of Muratos attacked, killing (likely) between 20 and 40 individuals with shotguns and stealing back the Murato bride. Those who lived on the right bank of the river, including Pihuicho's father and grandfather, were able to flee downriver. This flight resulted in many Urarina-Omurano families deciding to take up residence in Santo Tomás (now Monterrico), upriver from the mouth of the Urituyacu (where many descendants still live to this day).
Following this event, the Muratos themselves fled to a lake named Chayahuita on a quebrada immediately downriver of the current community of San Enrique. They then happened to encounter a man coming down yet another quebrada, the Huacana, who was with two women. The man (the uncle of the current presidente comunal of Guineal), upon returning from a short trip into the forest, found the two women missing, and upon venturing into the forest to search for them, was killed by the Muratos. The Muratos then kidnapped the two women (Catalina and Aurora). Although the two women have never returned to the Urituyacu, Aurora, the first cousin of the same presidente comunal, is rumored to live in Huancayo, a settlement on the Nucuray. This massacre and subsequent kidnapping left a significant scar on the recent history of the Urarina and Omurano peoples of the Urituyacu basin, and is reflective of longer-standing tensions between Muratos and Urarina-Omuranos of the Urituyacu.
Following baptisms in the local Catholic church in Triunfo, we set off for Lupunayo, where, as in Caimituyo, we were given a room in the local school. In Lupunayo they declared a school holiday for our arrival. (Any excuse for a school holiday is a good excuse in Peru.) Lupunayo, like Caimituyo and Triunfo, is a Kokama settlement, but is unlike all other settlements on the Urituyacu in being fully electrified. Additionally, Lupunayo, like Cafetal, is a site with large amounts of archaeological remains. During our visit alone, a small intact mocagua (small squat jar) was found along the malecón (the path that borders the river). Next to it the upper rim of a large intact pot was unearthed, although we urged the local residents to leave it buried since we were unsure of being able to remove it without shattering it. The Urituyacu deserves the attention of a major, multi-year archaeological project. The potential to reconstruct aspects of Omurano population history (especially from human remains in larger jars) is incredible.
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| Brief riverine meeting to coordinate logistics, June 14 |
From Lupunayo we headed to San Antonio de Bancal, an entirely Urarina settlement. We were uneasy about stopping over in this community, since we had run into the head of the community in Triunfo, who informed us that there would not be any baptisms prepared for our arrival. (Most community leaders were headed downriver to Maypuco on the Marañón for a budgetary meeting with local district leaders.) However, Miguel Angel and Manolo had already agreed with local residents that they would visit the community this year, and they did not want to renege on that promise. In the end we spent the night there, although there was no food available for dinner. The stop-over was worthwhile, as we were able to speak with Jorge Macusi Nuribe (45), Pihuicho's younger brother, who came to visit us the following morning before our departure. Unfortunately, Jorge has substantially less knowledge of the Omurano language than his brother, although like him, he is proud to discuss his Omurano heritage, but notes that there is essentially no one left on the Urituyacu with knowledge of the language. I obtained a small number of lexical items from Jorge and one song, along with a number of important cultural points, which he attributes to his father Esteban. Jorge emphasizes that the Omurano did not add salt to their food, nor did they eat their meat fully cooked, preferring to cook it until just whitened. He adds that his grandfather Bautista's first wife had to learn how to cook "well". Additionally, Jorge points out that the Omurano did not live along the main river, but along the numerous small quebradas that characterize the upper half of the Urituyacu.
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| San Luis, Urituyacu River, Loreto, Peru |
From Bancal we stopped of briefly in 8 de Octubre for lunch at the home of Ventura Inuma Vela and Rosalia Macusi Nuribe, the latter a daughter of Bautista Macusi (see above) and his second wife Asunciona. Ventura provided us with important information on his father-in-law's life, as well as on the commercial history of the Urituyacu basin from the mid-20th century forward, which was dominated by timber extraction and the hunting of animals for prized skins. Rosalia is an excellent cook, and we enjoyed some first-rate majás while there.
Later in the afternoon we pressed on towards San Luis, which I had intended to be the location at which I would remain for several weeks in order to work with Rafael Macusi Inuma, Pihuicho's son, and rumoredly the most fluent Omurano speaker (because he grew up with his grandfather Esteban). However, Rafael had, just prior to our entry into the Urituyacu, gone downriver all the way to Nauta to take care of some issues related to his DNI (national ID card). Because of the meeting being held in Maypuco, he would not return until well after our departure. Nevertheless, there was important work to do in San Luis. First, San Luis is the home of Luis "Lucho" Macusi Nuribe, first (and second) cousin of Pihuicho. Lucho's father, Santos Macusi (deceased), was the son of the apu (leader) of Triunfo at the time of the massacre in ~1955, Juaneco Macusi. Lucho claims that his father Santos knew some Omurano, but that he knows none. I suspect this to be false, as the linguistic environment of Lucho's childhood appears to be equivalent to those of Pihuicho, and Lucho is Pihuicho's senior. However, such denial is common in situations of language endangerment, and was particularly prevalent during my trip, and is a major obstacle to the documentation of such languages.
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| Community meeting San Luis, Urituyacu River, Peru |
Our first evening in San Luis we held a meeting in which we discussed issues related to the construction of a major railway that will connect Yurimaguas with Iquitos. Two years ago, when I was last in Peru, this project was still a fantasy, but the regional government has now begun clearing a massive 30m trail through the forest, which cuts across the upper Urituyacu four bends upriver of San Luis. The train will cross the Marañón near the Pastaza, follow the path of the Pastaza for some distance, then cut across the upper Urituyacu, Chambira, Tigre and Nanay rivers before descending to Iquitos. The project will decimate the fauna that the Urarina populations of the upper Urituyacu rely on for sustenance, and will further pollute a region already contaminated from some 40 years of petroleum extraction. However, no resident of San Luis has ever been to Iquitos, let alone seen a train, and much of our meeting was spent explaining what a train is, what it looks like and why it is damaging to their way of life. A meeting had been set for June 20 in Reforma, a Kokama settlement, in which leaders of the upriver communities would be invited by local district and project leaders to nominally ask their permission for the continuation of the train project. We do not know how that meeting went, or if community leaders were able to make demands beneficial to their communities in exchange for signing over rights and giving way to further work on the train.
An unrelated, but also damaging, issue confronting San Luis residents is the extraction of timber from the territory of the nearest downriver community, Guineal. Previously, two regional governmental entities, the Fiscalía and Defensoría del Pueblo, had reached an agreement that would prohibit the extraction of timber from all parts of the Urituyacu basin, following years of irreparably damaging policies in the mid- and latter 20th century. However, after being paid off by an extraction company, the Defensoría del Pueblo assisted the community of Guineal in obtaining a permiso forestal, a permit which allowed them to enter into negotiations with a timber extraction firm. The problem is that, although Urituyacu communities are titled and have legally binding boundaries, the communities are too far removed from local oversight for such boundaries to be enforced. The result is that timber extraction has encroached on San Luis territory, and to boot, the community of Guineal has benefited only by receiving one generator powerful enough electrify the small community, but with no wires, no light bulbs, no installation, etc. To compound the issue, the same extraction company paid off the district police to provide them with an underspecified document that grants them permission to extract timber from the entire Urituyacu basin, despite the fact that other communities do not have permisos forestales and that the police are not legally in a position to grant such permission!
Just before departing San Luis, Miguel Angel and I were able to meet with Mamerto Inuma López, who grew up with his Omurano-speaking grandparents, Santiago Macusi Nuribe (deceased) and Narcisa Manizari Ahuite (deceased). He claims to know no Omurano himself. I obtained the names of all of the siblings of each of his grandparents, all of whom are also deceased, and we later met descendants of many of them, to no avail with regard to finding speakers.
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| Attempted elicitation with Pancho Murayari Macusi & Teolinda Inuma Vela Guineal, Urituyacu River, Loreto, Peru |
We left San Luis Saturday afternoon to visit the downriver community of Guineal, where in the afternoon we dealt with issues surrounding timber extraction and conflicts that local residents are having with an offshoot group of individuals one bend downriver that want to form their own community, and have already given it the name 8 de Octubre (see above). Later that afternoon we returned to 8 de Octubre, where we were lodging, and the following morning Miguel Angel and Manolo baptized. We then returned to Guineal so that they could baptize there. Jorge Macusi had told us that an elderly man in Guineal named Pancho Murayari Macusi knows Omurano. Following our meeting in the local school I did some elicitation with him and his wife, but Pancho only knew greetings and his wife was too embarrassed to speak at all. I suspect that neither of them knows more than they claim, because they do not have the relevant genealogical background that would have produced speakers of Omurano. More generally, it seems that Omurano survives for some individuals only in greetings, but that that occasionally suffices for others to say that a given individual converses in the language, which is, obviously, problematic for the work I am trying to carry out.
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| Recording Urarina songs with Juana Macusi Manizari 8 de Octubre, Urituyacu River, Loreto, Peru |
Following this failed attempt we returned to 8 de Octubre to interview Juana Macusi Manizari, daughter of Juaneco, the apu that was killed in the massacre at Triunfo. She was only 7 months old at the time of the massacre, and grew up with her maternal aunt and uncle. Rumor had it Juana knew songs in Omurano, and she claims that her aunt Narcisa sang to her as a girl in Omurano. We were able to record several of her songs, which are valuable in their own right, but in the end they turned out to be in Urarina. Issues of "language deception" were commonplace during our visit; on many occasions people claimed to give me many words in Omurano, which, given the phonology and corroboration with other individuals, I was able to deduce were Urarina words. Furthermore, many young people seem to be of the belief that Omurano is an aberrant dialect of Urarina which they can understand. This is patently false, but interesting, and likely derives from the very limited degree to which they have even heard of such a language.
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| Lecturing on Urituyacu history 8 de Octubre, Urituyacu River, Loreto, Peru |
The following two days of our stay in 8 de Octubre were dedicated to running a taller (workshop) with individuals from San Antonio de Bancal, 8 de Octubre, Guineal, San Luis and Ayahuasca. The workshop mainly had two goals. The first was to deduce more about local, recent Urituyacu history through a process of collaboration in which I would "lecture" about the history that we had gathered through oral accounts up to that point, and workshop participants would add and/or correct information. Significant time was also devoted to group work in which men drew maps of the Urituyacu labeling all caños, quebradas and cochas (types of waterways) and women would team up with the nuns in order to better outline the history surrounding the massacre at Triunfo. This proved to be very productive, and through it we learned that the upriver group of Omuranos appears to have been displaced by additional marauding Muratos before the 1960s. (Later, Carlos Valencia, again in Cafetal, reported that his uncle Catalino, the patrón, had nearly been killed in 1946 or 1947 by a party of Muratos on the quebrada Colpayo, a group that may have also been responsible for the aforementioned displacement. As recently as a few years ago, residents of Ayahuasca, the uprivermost Urarina settlement, reported encountering unidentified footprints in the nearby forest that led them to believe that Muratos were still active in the region.) We were also better able to delineate waves of measles epidemics that plagued the Urituyacu through the 1980s, and which also (very likely) contributed to the decimation of the upriver Omuranos. The latter point is an important one, as it appears that the upriver Omuranos disappeared quite suddenly, without downriver inhabitants really knowing at all what happened to them. The second goal was deal with issues regarding the train, timber extraction and other issues such as education. The distribution of schools and teachers in the Urituyacu is sharply skewed toward favoring the Kokama communities, with many Urarina communities lacking a school altogether, or having a school but lacking a teacher with any regular presence.
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| Nancy Roca, Miguel Angel Cadenas, Eli Quiroz, me, Manolo Berjón outside the new Catholic chapel 8 de Octubre, Urituyacu River, Loreto, Peru |
During the workshop I was also able to work further with Jorge Macusi Nuribe, recording a further song in Omurano. (Note that, unlike others, Pihuicho and his brother Jorge never claimed that a given word or sentence was Omurano when it was really Urarina. Their attitude toward and pride in the Omurano language is marked in comparison to all others we met.) Additionally, I was able to elicit five place names from Simón Inuma Manizari, the community leader of Guineal, whose mother spoke Omurano but died from measles in ~1975. Tragically, that wave of measles appears to have been brought to the Urituyacu from Iquitos by Simón's own brother Agustín, who also died from it around the same time.
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| Recording Omurano song with Jorge Macusi Nuribe 8 de Octubre, Urituyacu River, Loreto, Peru |
We left 8 de Octubre the afternoon that the workshop ended, so as to be able to spend the night again in Triunfo and make it to the mouth of the river (Nueva Alianza) the following afternoon. I had decided the previous day to return with the parish to Santa Rita de Castilla, since I had been unable to find a speaker of Omurano of sufficient fluency to justify the weeks I had planned to spend there. Furthermore, it was totally unclear when Rafael Macusi would return. Arriving in Alianza, Miguel Angel and I made one last ditch effort to speak with the elder sister of Simón Inuma (see above), Martina, who now lives there, hoping that, being ~20 years Simón's senior, she would have had more exposure to Omurano from her mother. While Martina admits that her mother spoke Omurano, she claims to know nothing. We also met with Salvador Macusi Ahuite, a founder of the community of Ayahuasca in 1978, again to no avail.
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| Santa Rita II and the smaller craft that took us up the Urituyacu Nueva Alianza, Marañón River, Loreto, Peru |
We returned to Santa Rita de Castilla last Thursday evening, and I stayed there through Tuesday morning, in order to conduct some genealogical research in the parish archives there, so that I would have a better understanding of the relationships between the individuals we had met and deduce something regarding who might still speak the language, based on oral information we had about which ancestor spoke the language, etc. It was also a relaxing place for me to sift through the many historical notes I had accumulated, replete with running water, fresh food prepared by the nuns, and a house totally sealed off from mosquitoes. I plan to write a short paper on the recent history of the Urituyacu basin in the coming weeks, incorporating the information that I have mentioned here into a more detailed account. In addition, I plan to submit an abstract for the January meeting of SSILA (Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas) combining the linguistic facts I have gathered with clarification on Omurano history as it currently exists in the literature. Although the conclusions I can draw regarding Omurano grammar are extremely limited, they are more than currently is known, and provide insight into comparison with nearby, unrelated languages. I aim to retool here in Iquitos for a few days, and depending on whether I am able to meet with Catalino Valencia, I may return to Nueva Alianza next week to try and intercept Rafael Macusi, hoping that he will be there for the monthly pay-out of 100 soles by a regional government program Juntos.
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