Shamaquis

Last night I had dinner in Pucallpa with Ken and Joy Swift, members of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), who first began working with the Caquinte -- the Kampan Arawak group among which I will be conducting fieldwork in the coming weeks -- in August 1976.  For the five years leading up to that date, Caquintes had approached Wayne Snell -- a fellow SIL member who had begun working among the Matsigenka with his wife Betty in the early 1950s -- requesting a school and mission like those in Nuevo Mundo (Urubamba River).  In 1975 the Caquinte had begun settling around what is today the community of Kitepámpani and clearing the way for an airstrip.  Before this time, Caquintes had lived in scattered family settlements, as is customary for most Kampan Arawak peoples, in the headwaters of the Mipaya and Poyeni basins, which empty into the Urubamba and Tambo rivers, respectively.  Prior to this, all Caquintes had lived on the upper Poyeni, their claimed ancestral homeland.  According to Ken Swift, Caquintes say they were pushed into the headwaters by encroaching Asháninkas, and then in ~1959 scattered into three groups due to an epidemic of disease.  A small group of young Caquintes even came to live at this time in Nuevo Mundo -- attracted by the school there -- where they came to be known as the Poyenisati.  This group later rejoined their relatives in the upper Mipaya, but it is noteworthy that they had been exposed to significant amounts of Matsigenka, a closely related language, for several years.

Indigenous Communities in the Urubamba, Tambo, and Ene Basins
(Instituto del Bien Común)

The Caquinte relate that, during the period that they lived on the Poyeni, their swiddens (Sp. chacras) were continually raided by members of a group they refer to as shamaquis, who, among other locally "savage" traits, ate snakes and lived in the caves in the mountains above the Poyeni.  Caquinte farmers would find their footprints in their swiddens, but then at the edges of the swiddens the footprints would disappear.  In order to get to the bottom of the matter, the Caquintes planted nighttime guards, and soon found that their raiders ran to the edge of a swidden and then climbed into the trees, using a series of poles to communicate from tree to tree to avoid detection.  Apparently the Caquintes in the area convinced some shamaquis to live with them so that they might learn to plant certain cultigens for themselves.  It's unclear to what degree shamaquis actually integrated (or intermarried) with Caquintes, but it seems that at least some tired of a horticulturalist life and returned to their homeland.

This story is of interest to me because of the notable lexical divergence that Caquinte exhibits in relation to other Kampan Arawak languages.  This divergence is usually of two types.  In the first type, Caquinte lexemes simply show no relation to surrounding (related and unrelated) languages.  In the second type, Caquinte lexemes are clearly morphologically complex forms that have been lexicalized, e.g., tsovironaqui 'house', from tsoviro 'be round' and -naqui, a classifier -- instead of the root panko, which reconstructs to Proto-Kampan.  (According to Ken Swift, some Caquintes also use panko, and it is unclear if this is due to Matsigenka influence, or if the derived form is a recent innovation.)  It is the first type of divergence that is notable in light of the shamaquis, and it seems likely that at least part of Caquinte's lexical divergence is due to influence from an unrelated group that they had contact with when pushed into the headwaters of the Poyeni by the Asháninka.