Tying up loose ends

Since I last wrote about the details of my trip I have been involved in a number of unrelated activities in Iquitos and Nauta, and I would like to mention some of them below.

Upon returning from the Urituyacu basin at the end of June, I accompanied Miguel Ángel and Manolo, the priests I had been traveling with, to visit Catalino Valencia Paima, an 88-year-old man who used to be a labor patrón in the region, in the hopes of getting a small amount of Omurano linguistic data from him.  Unfortunately Catalino was not aware of the presence of multiple ethnic groups in the region -- i.e., Omuranos and Urarinas -- as to him they were all Shimacos, a derogatory name that today is most commonly used in reference to the Urarina.  Interestingly, however, some of the small amount of lexical data that Catalino did retain was actually a mix of both Omurano and Urarina!  In addition, he recognized a handful of Omurano lexical items that I provided him, though not all (and I had few to begin with).

Interviewing Catalino Valencia Paima
Iquitos, June 2013

Catalino began working on the Urituyacu in 1945, with the help of Rafael Zubiate, a patrón that preceded him.  As a consequence, he knew many of the ancestors of the individuals whom I had met while actually on the Urituyacu, although he claims that those individuals only spoke Urarina.  With respect to the Omurano, he believed that the Omurano had picked up and left the Urituyacu basin not long before his own arrival, having possibly headed to the upper Chambira.  Although not a source of new linguistic data, Catalino was a useful source in the collection of further historical details on the greater Urituyacu basin.  Importantly, he indicated that at the time of his arrival there were no individuals living at the mouth of an upper tributary known as the Yanayacu, a site where Omuranos are known to have lived as late as the early 1930s; furthermore, he indicated that a small stream yet further upriver known today as Sarampión (Sp. for 'measles') was already called that in 1945.  This suggests to me that, one, the measles epidemic that likely decimated the remaining, relatively isolated, Yanayacu Omurano population of the early 1930s was the one that gave Sarampión its name, and that, two, this epidemic occurred some time between ~1935 and 1945.  I plan to finish writing a paper on these historical topics when I return to the U.S.

July 4 in Iquitos was celebrated with a two-day city-wide business shut down in protest of recent proposed national legislation.  This unfortunately led to a two-day hiatus in my work at the Vicariato Apostólico de Iquitos, where I had been reviewing baptismal records from San Joaquín de Omaguas.  Protesters also decided to overturn all city trashcans and break the windows of the building next to my hotel, which is associated with the municipal government.

A trash-ridden día de paro
Iquitos, July 4

Throughout this time and into the following week I continued to work on two separate papers dealing with my Omurano work: one a preliminary phonological sketch of the language; the other the abovementioned historical paper.  I also spent some time poring over published Taushiro linguistic data, since at the time I was contemplating a trip to the Tigre River to work with Amadeo García García, rumoredly the last speaker of that language.  That trip ended up being logistically too complicated to fit into my schedule.

On July 13 I began doing daily three-hour elicitation sessions with Omagua speaker Amelia Huanaquiri Tuisima, who lives here in Iquitos.  The goal of this work was mainly to review current and gather further lexical data on Omagua for a new dictionary draft, which will be the one to accompany the published grammar, a draft of which I hope to have completed by the end of the coming academic year.  In addition, I dealt briefly with a handful of remaining issues that had been plaguing our grammatical description of the language, some with more success than others.  This work led, via a connection with the owner of my hotel, Fabiola Moreno Isern, to an interview with Diana López Meléndez, a reporter from the regional newspaper La Región, regarding the Omagua dictionary and, to a limited degree, the Omagua Documentation Project more generally (see here).  This first interview produced a second interview with Amelia, which is set to come out tomorrow, if all goes as planned.

Diana López Meléndez interviewing Amelia Huanaquiri Tuisima
Iquitos, July 18

Most recently I spent Friday July 19 in Nauta, researching sacramental records that are only held in the parish there (copies of which were never sent to Iquitos, as is customary).  This proved to be the most enlightening segment of my research with church archives here, as I was able to locate baptismal records from the 1870s of ancestors of Omagua speakers with whom I work, which are the most valuable to the historical research I am carrying out on San Joaquín de Omaguas because many moments in oral narratives are tied to moments in the lives of these individuals (e.g., "when my grandfather was about ten years old").  More concretely, I was able to find evidence of a first parish visit to a San Joaquín de Omaguas in 1869, which suggests that the community is some fifteen years older than I had originally thought.  I plan to take another trip to Nauta on July 26 to dig through these records a bit more.

Reviewing 19th-century baptismal records
Nauta, July 19

The original purpose of this day-trip, however, had been to participate in a forum on indigenous languages held at Radio Ucamara, a church-affiliated radio station in Nauta, which promotes the Kokama language via, amongst other efforts (see below), an hour-long weekend morning program.  The central purpose of the forum was to reduce resistance on the part of teachers to the introduction of a Kokama language program in a local school, El Colego Nuestra Señora de Loreto.  I spoke mainly about my work on Omagua and Omurano, and touched upon the value of indigenous languages and language documentation more generally.  This generated many questions from the small audience in attendance (which did not include a single teacher, unfortunately), and I barely made it out of the meeting in time to catch a car back to Iquitos at around 7PM.  

Radio Ucamara, Nauta
(note the advertisement)

Kokama, unlike Omagua, still has well over 1,000 speakers and can occasionally be heard on the streets of Nauta (as well as in other communities in the greater Marañón and Huallaga river basins).  However, older speakers of Kokama, a small number of whom serve as language teachers in the school and attended the meeting, are often the subject of local discrimination and are disheartened by the continuation of this discrimination in light of their efforts to introduce the language into the school.  In addition to unwilling teachers, many parents do not help the situation by second-guessing their children's study of the language.  However, important strides are being taken to popularize the Kokama language.  Thanks to Ucamara and a group of filmmakers from Create Your Voice, you can now watch a music video based on a traditional Kokama song (see here).  They have also produced an informative twenty-minute documentary that will soon be released as well.  These attempts, alongside the recent standardization of the Kokama alphabet by the Ministry of Education (part of a broader program that is unfortunately being undertaken far too hastily), go a long way in making Kokama "modern" in the eyes of hesitant locals.  I had the pleasure of lunching this past week with Edinson Huamancayo Curi, a Peruvian linguist now working for the Ministry of Education, and discussing these issues with specific reference to Kakinte, a language I hope to work on for my dissertation.

Life in Iquitos goes on as normal.  Lev & Co. were recently in town for a restocking trip, and I was able to hang out over the course of a few days with two visiting British students from Cambridge, who are now off working in the Napo basin for a sustainable forestry company called Green Gold.  I experienced my first "night out" in Iquitos, at a surreal heavy metal-reggae concert in a hipster bar not far from my hotel -- I didn't know such things even existed here!  I had the unfortunate luck of bringing a debit card with me to Peru that expired in June, and so had to deal with nightmarish crowds at Western Union -- thank God people still wire money.  Tomorrow I head off for four days to San Joaquín de Omaguas to follow up on a day trip I made there on July 12.  All the individuals we have previously worked with are in good health, although the community is suffering from the fall-out of a contested mayoral election, a new election being set for August 11.  I will be working there mostly on issues related to identifying species terms for flora and fauna in the language and taking a day trip to San Salvador de Omaguas, a community where Omagua was historically spoken.