Caquinte-Asháninka Conflicts
This post summarizes a lengthy text in Caquinte regarding conflicts in the Pogeni river basin between Caquintes and Asháninkas in the early twentieth century, and seeks to date them as closely as possible. The text ultimately centers around a legendary Caquinte warrior named Tataki, the grandfather and great-grandfather of numerous current Caquinte adults. He was famed for his bow technique and ability to seemingly magically avoid Asháninka gunfire. He is treated by many Caquintes as a savior of sorts: without him their population would have been overrun by Asháninkas.
Originally, Tataki, along with most Caquintes, lived at the mouth of the Pogeni River near a community now known by the same name. His story actually begins with an unnamed Caquinte man who was attacked by Asháninkas, but who would not respond to their attacks with further violence because he was a shaman. Two years pass, and Asháninkas from Keshi (a community whose location I still have not determined) arrive with their children. One young man falls in love with a daughter of this unnamed Caquinte man and settles among the Caquintes. A considerable amount of time passes (Caq. okoramanivaetapohake), and the young Asháninka man's father-in-law still will not respond to Asháninka threats, and so the young man decides to return to Keshi in order to bring certain sedges (Caq. sankenakoharivenki) that will enable them to fight the Asháninkas. An unsual amount of time passes without the young Asháninka man's return, and his father-in-law, the shaman, begins to suspect that he has died. Eventually, though, he does return, and begins training with his brothers-in-law for battle (n.b., against his own fellow Asháninkas).
One year passes, and Asháninkas return from upriver along the Tambo (the larger river into which the Pogeni empties), and the Caquintes manage to kill all of them, but when these Asháninka fail to return home, a considerable number of fellow Asháninkas come in search of them and this is when real conflict is said to have begun, with Caquinte arrows fighting against Asháninka guns. The Caquintes again, however, manage to kill all but one Asháninka, and this Asháninka escapes downriver to notify his compatriots in nearby communities such as Chempo and Betania, but also reaching as far as Atalaya, the upper Perené River, and even Satipo. This large Asháninka contingent returned to the Pogeni, and blowing shells to sound the call of battle, they land their canoes and Caquintes begin firing upon them, telling their own women and children to flee. They kill the aforementioned shaman, and all but two Caquinte men, brothers-in-law, either are killed or flee to the headwaters of the Pogeni River near the mountain of Tsoroja, also the name of a current Caquinte community in the region. This appears to have been a decisive moment at which Caquintes ceased living near the mouth of the Pogeni, which came to be occupied by Asháninkas themselves.
A considerable amount of time passes (ibid.) and Caquintes begin to multiply, and at this moment a Caquinte man named Kamotsontopari (kamotsonto Sp. 'catahua', a tree species, and pari 'root') enters the scene, along with a mestizo man with the surname of Perara, who contracted Asháninkas to raid surrounding communities for women for sale in nearby commercial centers such as Atalaya in exchange for metal tools and guns. In particular, Asháninkas begin to raid for Caquinte women of the upper Pogeni, and on the first such occurrence, Kamotsontopari receives word of their advance ahead of time, and, in waiting for them near the river, manages to kill all but one, who escapes. As a result, a larger number of Asháninkas return (Caq. ikaramirinkavaeke), saying they will not hesitate to kill women and children if necessary to achieve their ends. During this raid, an unfortunate Caquinte man bathing near the river is shot, but it is unclear who should be said to have come out the victor.
In response, Kamotsontopari states that Caquintes will now pursue Asháninkas into their own territory, and a party is put together to descend to the mouth of the Pogeni. They attack straight away, and the Asháninkas cannot manage to kill Kamotsontopari with their guns, and he returns back upriver. The Asháninkas pursue him, but for some reason they turn around and Kamotsontopari's party pursues them back downriver and successfully kills those Asháninkas living just up- and downriver of the mouth of the Pogeni. Apparently, although this portion is hard to believe, they pursued them all the way to Satipo, nearly exterminating the Asháninkas, at which time Kamotsontopari returns to the Pogeni headwaters.
At this point the story switches to introduce another Caquinte man, Chanta (also a bee species), whom Kamotsontopari went to visit. (Note that Caquintes traditionally lived in scattered family settlements some distance from one another in the forest, and that such visits were often significant events.) Chanta's origins, however, are mysterious. He is said to have been found as an infant at the base of a recently collapsed cliff, by a woman who had gone to harvest plantains. She brings him home, wraps him up, and places him in a basket, but he refuses to be breastfed. The woman suspects that he will like tobacco, which they give to him, and indeed this becomes his main foodstuff. But within a year, he had already grown to be an adolescent (Caq. ikenkevaritanake), and he eventually takes a wife named Kanihaneri (also a large earthworm species), and they have a son named Pontsopontso ('agouti'). Chanta cannot build his house correctly, and his wife cannot make cushmas well, and most of the lexical items in Chanta's speech are marked with a peculiar ending =tia that appears to have no other meaning in Caquinte.
One day Chanta goes off to work for mestizos in order to be able to purchase clothes, but he brings back disease to the upper Pogeni. Kamotsontopari confronts him as to why this may have happened, and he can think of no reasons, since they otherwise fed him well, filling him with plantains. Many children begin to die, but Chanta recovers and moves his family some distance further away. Kamotsontopari pursues them, and Chanta flees from his new dwelling into the forest, leaving his wife and child behind, whom Kamotsontopari kills. Kamotsontopari then begins to mimic a cry for help as if he were Chanta's wife, luring Chanta back to the house, at which moment Kamotsontopari reveals himself (having been hidden wrapped in a sitting mat), grabs Chanta, and ties him up against a house post, shooting arrows into his whole body and making him resemble bunches of plantains, but Chanta won't die. He claims that if Kamotsontopari kills him, then others will kill Kamotsontopari. Chanta begins to split blood all over Kamotsontopari, but in order to kill him, Kamotsontopari must shoot him in each of his fingers and toes, which he proceeds to do, and then Chanta dies.
Kamotsontopari returns to his own house, but in the meantime he had missed a visit by his adopted son, and again we enter into a digression. Years previously, Kamotsontopari had killed an unnamed Caquinte man, married his widow, and adopted her children as his own. One of these children is the adopted son whose visit Kamotsontopari missed, at which time the mother confessed to her son that Kamotsontopari was not his real father. Afterwards, the son claims that he will return and within one week kill his stepfather Kamotsontopari, and that he will need his mother's help to do so, and she acquiesces. The plot hinges around getting Kamotsontopari alone so the son can avoid harming his own mother, and in order to achieve this, she is to fake her period, which will allow her to sleep separately from Kamotsontopari at night. (Caquinte warriors abstained from sleeping with their wives during their menstruation.) When the son returns, he fires three arrows to signal to his mother that he is about to approach the house, which apparently escape Kamotsontopari's notice, and she tells her husband Kamotsontopari that her period has begun. That night, Kamotsontopari, also a shaman, takes ayahuasca (Caq. santomaritsa), a hallucinogen, and the son finds him standing on his shaman's ladder, after which he goes up to the upper part of the house. An Asháninka man accompanying the son named Oshatyaki (n.b., Caq. shatyaki 'fingernail') finally sees Kamotsontopari descending his ladder, and he shoots him with a gun. He tries to run back up the ladder, but crashes into the ridgebeam (Caq. ovankagito) of the house; he begins to fall, but is elevated again (possibly with the assistance of his helper spirits heokarihite), and vanishes like a wind. The son orders his mother to hurriedly burn the ladder (i.e., so Kamotsontopari cannot return from the spirit world), and the son flees into the forest with Oshatyaki, who stops to drink rainbow vapor (the cultural significance of which still alludes me).
At this point, the mother, wife of Kamotsontopari flees to another Caquinte man Kiavenkiri (an adjective used to describe flowers that have lost their petals, and said of this man apparently because he is said to have lost his hair at a young age), who had as well been battling Asháninkas, and they flee to a mountain named Ahavinteni. As many years pass (Caq. oshekini aavaetapohakageti ahagantsini), they continue to wage war against Asháninkas, and Kiavenkiri's son-in-law is captured and taken slightly downriver on the Tambo where he continues to grow to manhood (Caq. ikenkevaritake), and at some later date his captors inform him that he must go visit his fellow Caquintes. He returns to his father-in-law Kiavenkiri, who had thought him dead and is surprised to see him grown larger, but then the son-in-law leaves soon thereafter to return to the Tambo. Two years pass, and the son-in-law returns in the company of Asháninkas, inciting Kiavenkiri's ire, and the son-in-law promises not to bring them again. One year passes, and the son-in-law returns alone and asks his father-in-law Kiavenkiri to prepare him arrows made of peach palm, and when he receives them, he returns to the Asháninkas. The son-in-law ultimately betrays Kiavenkiri, and plans with Asháninkas to kill him with his own peach palm arrows.
When the son-in-law returns with Asháninkas, the bijao leaves they use as temporary sitting mats in the upper Pogeni are later discovered by a Caquinte girl who goes to the river to bathe, but when she returns to her house and notifies her relatives, her granduncle insists that she must be lying. At the same time, a heavy storm of thunder and lightning ensues, and we find Kiavenkiri's wife giving birth. Lightning strikes close to the house, and Kiavenkiri worries that someone must have masticated sedge in order to attempt to kill them, and so he goes to his father's house to ask what the meaning of the lightning is. In a somewhat odd digression, the father claims the storm has nothing to do with Kiavenkiri's possible death, but that instead is a sign that his wife has been unfaithful to him. He returns to his house and finds his wife bathing their newborn girl in hot water (a widespread Kampan cultural practice), but unbeknownst to them, their son-in-law is approaching with Asháninkas and they shoot the newborn girl in the leg with the arrows that Kiavenkiri made. Kiavenkiri's wife berates him for not having tied up his arrows better, but when he goes to his arrow bundles he finds them all in order and tied off as they should be, and as he moves to place them further out of reach he is shot in the armpit. He removes it and manages to pierce an oncoming Asháninka man with it, but then his son-in-law runs up and pins him against a house post, trapping him with his own cushma. Kiavenkiri calls for help from his father whose house he has just come from, but the father instead flees into the forest. Kiavenkiri, wounded, manages to kill an Asháninka man he had kept a hold on, and his son Kishaiva (newly introduced into the narrative) grabs another arrow and fires at his brother-in-law; the latter runs off, dying on the path. At the same time, the accompanying Asháninkas retreat and Kiavenkiri dies.
Early the next morning, Kiavenkiri's father returns to find his daughter-in-law left with her murdered husband; he begins to cry, and she asks who is shaking the corn tenki tenki tenki (an onomatopoeia, and a general cultural reference I do not understand). Things get worse when Kiavenkiri's father mistakes his grandson Kishaiva for the murderer, and shoots him in the crown of his head killing him. The grandmother, who appears to have accompanied Kiavenkiri's father, her husband, sees what has happened and insists they must bury him. Kiavenkiri's father blames his daughter-in-law, slapping her upside the head and claiming that she should have watched over her son Kishaiva.
Kiavenkiri's widow flees to Tataki and informs him that they've killed Kiavenkiri. (Note that this is the second time that the widow of a murdered Caquinte man has fled to another Caquinte man, and that we never find out what became of Kamotsontopari's widow.) An unspecified character informs Tataki that he must go to the mountains, and that, when he does, he will encounter a bear up in a tree. He is to call to the bear and ask "Grandfather, what are you doing?" The bear will clap its hands and a special sedge will fall from the tree, and he is to masticate it. That night Tataki dreams, and the next day he goes to the mountain and encounters the bear; the sedge falls, he masticates it, returns home, and gets an incredible bitter taste in his mouth. Tataki calls to his three brothers, Kapatsakigihari (also the name of a mythical river of rocks and mud), Koviriharisati, and Oityo, and they begin preparing for battle by testing to see whether various instruments will pierce their skin: they begin with the fruit of the pona tree (Caq. oitsoki kamonaitsoki), and move on to arrow shafts (Caq. ovi shikiripi) and small rocks (Caq. orihanihaniki kenashivirori). They predict that if, in the end, an arrowhead does not pierce their skin, then neither will a bullet. Following their preparations, they hide all of their women and children in a mountain named Tinkanashi (n.b., tinkana, a species similar to Sp. ungurahui).
Two years pass, and the Asháninkas say they will go back to battle the Caquintes, but they are unaware that such a man as Tataki exists. Caquintes spot the Asháninkas on their approach upriver, and Tataki notifies his brothers; they go to the river and wait for them and when they come they shoot them in their sides. The Asháninkas respond with gunfire, but they manage only to graze Tataki's hair. In the end, the Caquintes finish off the Asháninkas, and destroy their guns by throwing them to the ground, crushing them with rocks, and piling them up, along with the bodies of the Asháninkas in the aforementioned mountain Ahavinteni. However, two Asháninkas had escaped, they notify their compatriots that shotguns cannot kill Tataki, and a massive party of Asháninkas returns to the upper Pogeni. Tataki and his brothers see them coming upriver, and he tells them not to be afraid. They ascend a steep ridge and begin shooting at the Asháninkas from there, piercing them in the neck. Returned gunfire subsequently ceases, but it's done nothing to Tataki and the Asháninkas see him standing high on the ridge unharmed. The Caquintes return with an onslaught of arrow fire and all but a few Asháninkas are killed; the remainder flee downriver, wondering how they will ever kill Tataki.
A year goes by, and an Asháninka spy named Tereso goes to visit Tataki, who immediately suspects him to be what he is but lets him stay for a few days nevertheless. Tereso returns to the Asháninkas reporting that all is normal, and begins to come every month to spy on Tataki. Finally, a massive Asháninka party returns, and Tataki is sitting at his fire knotching arrows. He hears them approaching and challenges them to come closer, saying he'll have them fed to the vultures. Then he hears more muddled noises, as the Asháninkas are in reality approaching the edge of the forest. They plan to shoot Tataki simultaneously from four angles, but when they fire, he manages to dodge and twist his body such that the Asháninkas only manage to shoot a woman named Keminaki, whose guts spill out. Tataki grabs an arrow and shoots it straight through the body of an attacking Asháninka, who falls to the ground dead. The Asháninkas fire on him further, and Tataki turns around to see Tereso sitting tamping his shotgun. He quickly grabs an arrow and shoots him in his testicles, and Tereso flings himself onto the ground to avoid further fire, but he's unable to remove the arrow because it's been knotched extremely well (Caq. itoshinchaavoakimahakero). Asháninka gunfire eventually subsides, but Tataki is still there, although he finally starts to tire. He calls to his brother saying that the Asháninkas have already set fire to the house, and that he (the brother) must escape, and he does. Tataki continues to battle, and the Asháninkas flee; Tataki goes away, and the Asháninkas think they've cured Tereso, but he dies two months later.
Two years pass and an unspecified character brings more Asháninkas with the aim of killing of Tataki's brother Kapatsakigihari. Instead, however, they come across Tataki's daughter Vicho bathing at the river and they capture her. Tataki, who had been battling nearby, finishes most of the Asháninkas off, but then he is notified that his daughter has been captured. They go after the fleeing Asháninkas, passing by a mountain named Shitekitsini (named so for a race of humans who lived there with big, frizzy, fro-like hair); they follow a steep ridge and get ahead of the Asháninkas and wait for them. The first of the Asháninkas approaches and hears a disturbance, but thinks it's an ungurahui that's fallen; shortly thereafter, he is shot in the ribs and with this one shot collapses. Other of his compatriots follow, and Tataki does the same to them. Once a large enough group of the fleeing Asháninkas amasses, though, Tataki realizes he must go and confront them if he is to get his daughter back. The Asháninkas see him approach and place her in the middle of all of them so he cannot get to her. Tataki and his brother fight them at the river's edge, but the brother begins to tire and says it's better for him to die on behalf of Vicho than for Tataki to. With that in mind, he daringly darts across the river and they shoot him in the rib. He almost falls into the water, but rises up again and reaches the rocky outcropping on the other side, but as he begins to return he collapses on a rock and dies.
The Asháninkas take his body, thinking it is that of Tataki, and smoke it over a massive fire, later reaching the mouth of the Pogeni with Vicho. Before her capture, however, we learn that Tataki had told Vicho that she must relay his words to any possible captor, informing them that if they are to avoid death, that they must bathe in a scalding ayahuasca concoction mixed with a (to me) unknown red-colored plantain plant (Caq. kityonkari chopekinato). Back in the headwaters, Tataki laments the death of his brother.
After some time passes (Caq. okaramanitapohakegeti), the Asháninkas plot to return to the Caquintes to capture more women for sale in Atalaya. They arrive in the headwaters, and see that the Caquintes have planted swiddens near the river's edge. Tataki, in usual fashion, is prepared, and kills all but one of them, who escapes. Tataki subsequently goes to Sonte, another Caquinte man, telling him to bring him two collared peccaries that he had killed. Sonte, an apparently eccentric character, goes off singing and drawing attention to himself. The Asháninkas are waiting for him, as they'd come across the peccary bodies and knew that someone must eventually return for them. They shoot Sonte, but it only grazes his neck, and he cries out in panic and runs off zigzagging and fleeing up into Tinkanashi mountain. He comes to Tataki's wife (named elsewhere as Ampi), and she has little sympathy for Sonte, asking why he insisted upon making such a racket. Tataki goes after the Asháninkas and killed all of them, piling their bodies in a mountain named Anparentsi (n.b., anpare, a haunting spirit type). Fellow Asháninkas wait downriver, but because none of them return, Tataki thinks he has killed all of them.
Many years go by, and some Asháninkas return, but they are few in number, and at this time Vicho has come to live in Mayapo, an Asháninka community downriver of the mouth of the Pogeni. They decide not to sell her because she is hardworking, and she plots to escape: she prepares much strong manioc beer, inviting all the surrounding Asháninkas to participate in a feast. She crucially refuses an offer for her to drink herself (citing a cultural prohibition against the makers of manioc beer drinking their own "brew"), and at night, once everyone has passed out, she flees with her daughter Metaki upriver to the Pogeni, where she arrives at dawn. With Asháninkas hot on her heels, she decides to hide under a large piece of pona-like bark (Caq. tsentero), and they pass her by. She decides to proceed the rest of the journey entirely in the forest, and eventually makes it far upriver to her father Tataki, who was waiting on a beach with his son-in-law (Vicho's husband) Ake. At fist Tataki suspects it might be Asháninkas approaching, but eventually he recognizes his daughter and they go to her. Shortly thereafter, Tataki kills all of her pursuing captors.
At this time, another to-be famed Caquinte, Manavirontsi, was coming of age (Caq. ikenkevaritanake), and he also began to battle with Asháninkas. Several years pass, and Asháninkas continue to try to battle against in Tataki, but they only manage to kill another one of his brothers Koviriharisati. Several more years pass, and they *still* cannot kill him, but they manage to capture Manavirontsi and tie him up, but he shortly thereafter wiggles free and escapes. Several years pass, and American missionaries arrive among the Asháninkas, convincing them to make peace with the Caquintes, but Tataki, still alive, refuses to see them. He eventually crosses over the mountains separating the Tambo and Urubamba drainages, settling in the headwaters of the Yori river, where he grows to apparently quite old age, his hair turning white and he barely being able to stand, and there he dies, both because of age and also apparently because of cold weather. Here the narrative ends.
Now, the date of Vicho's capture is more or less determinable. To do so relies on the assumption that Vicho was pregnant when she was captured: there is no mention of her and an infant being captured, and yet she returns with her infant girl Metaki, known independently to be Ake's daughter, who we see in this narrative was already married to Vicho when she was captured. Separately, we can deduce that Metaki gave birth to her eldest child, Esperanza, in approximately 1939. We know that many Caquinte women begin bearing children around the age of 15, which would place Metaki's birth, and Vicho's capture, around 1924. At this point I will not try to work backwards from this date based on the various time intervals that are mentioned in the narrative in any specific way, but it seems that the events beginning with the unnamed Caquinte shaman and Kamotsontopari likely took place in the last decade of the 19th century. A useful corroboration of this would be to track down records of the mestizo patrón Perara who is mentioned at the time of Kamotsontopari.
It's also worthy of mention that other Caquinte ancestors have been mentioned by living Caquintes as having suffered in dire fashion at the hands of Asháninka raids. These names include Narori, whose children were captured and who was subsequently killed; Chanta (possibly the same mentioned here) and Oshivinti, both of whom were killed along with their entire extended family groups; and, notably, Sonte (also possibly the same mentioned here), whose wife was captured by Yines, because of which he has no descendants. I only recently learned that Caquintes had historical contact with Yines, to whom they refer in their language as mitsiri ['miːtsɨɾi] (notably different than the Matsigenka term shimirintsi). Living Caquintes say that Yines from the Urubamba would raid by ascending into the headwaters and crossing the mountains over to the Pogeni, which would mean that Caquintes were being pursued viciously from both of the directions in which they might have possibly taken refuge.
Further dates as to Tataki's life are hard to pin down. He was married twice, first to Ampi, by whom he had six children, and, after her death, to Katsi, the sister of the aforementioned Manavirontsi, with whom he had one son. Vicho, if the dates here are correct, appears to have been born c1909, and, for independent reasons, appears to have been one of Tataki's older children. That suggests to me that he may have been born c1890, putting him in the prime of his fighting career come the mid-1920s. He lived at least until c1955, at which point a granddaughter, Avataka, known to have met him, would probably have been a young girl. Given the mentions of his extreme age, I suspect that he lived into the 1960s. Today, I have met no one wh can name a historical Caquinte of a generation prior to Kamtsontopari, beyond whom we appear to enter into a more mythical past.
Originally, Tataki, along with most Caquintes, lived at the mouth of the Pogeni River near a community now known by the same name. His story actually begins with an unnamed Caquinte man who was attacked by Asháninkas, but who would not respond to their attacks with further violence because he was a shaman. Two years pass, and Asháninkas from Keshi (a community whose location I still have not determined) arrive with their children. One young man falls in love with a daughter of this unnamed Caquinte man and settles among the Caquintes. A considerable amount of time passes (Caq. okoramanivaetapohake), and the young Asháninka man's father-in-law still will not respond to Asháninka threats, and so the young man decides to return to Keshi in order to bring certain sedges (Caq. sankenakoharivenki) that will enable them to fight the Asháninkas. An unsual amount of time passes without the young Asháninka man's return, and his father-in-law, the shaman, begins to suspect that he has died. Eventually, though, he does return, and begins training with his brothers-in-law for battle (n.b., against his own fellow Asháninkas).
One year passes, and Asháninkas return from upriver along the Tambo (the larger river into which the Pogeni empties), and the Caquintes manage to kill all of them, but when these Asháninka fail to return home, a considerable number of fellow Asháninkas come in search of them and this is when real conflict is said to have begun, with Caquinte arrows fighting against Asháninka guns. The Caquintes again, however, manage to kill all but one Asháninka, and this Asháninka escapes downriver to notify his compatriots in nearby communities such as Chempo and Betania, but also reaching as far as Atalaya, the upper Perené River, and even Satipo. This large Asháninka contingent returned to the Pogeni, and blowing shells to sound the call of battle, they land their canoes and Caquintes begin firing upon them, telling their own women and children to flee. They kill the aforementioned shaman, and all but two Caquinte men, brothers-in-law, either are killed or flee to the headwaters of the Pogeni River near the mountain of Tsoroja, also the name of a current Caquinte community in the region. This appears to have been a decisive moment at which Caquintes ceased living near the mouth of the Pogeni, which came to be occupied by Asháninkas themselves.
A considerable amount of time passes (ibid.) and Caquintes begin to multiply, and at this moment a Caquinte man named Kamotsontopari (kamotsonto Sp. 'catahua', a tree species, and pari 'root') enters the scene, along with a mestizo man with the surname of Perara, who contracted Asháninkas to raid surrounding communities for women for sale in nearby commercial centers such as Atalaya in exchange for metal tools and guns. In particular, Asháninkas begin to raid for Caquinte women of the upper Pogeni, and on the first such occurrence, Kamotsontopari receives word of their advance ahead of time, and, in waiting for them near the river, manages to kill all but one, who escapes. As a result, a larger number of Asháninkas return (Caq. ikaramirinkavaeke), saying they will not hesitate to kill women and children if necessary to achieve their ends. During this raid, an unfortunate Caquinte man bathing near the river is shot, but it is unclear who should be said to have come out the victor.
In response, Kamotsontopari states that Caquintes will now pursue Asháninkas into their own territory, and a party is put together to descend to the mouth of the Pogeni. They attack straight away, and the Asháninkas cannot manage to kill Kamotsontopari with their guns, and he returns back upriver. The Asháninkas pursue him, but for some reason they turn around and Kamotsontopari's party pursues them back downriver and successfully kills those Asháninkas living just up- and downriver of the mouth of the Pogeni. Apparently, although this portion is hard to believe, they pursued them all the way to Satipo, nearly exterminating the Asháninkas, at which time Kamotsontopari returns to the Pogeni headwaters.
At this point the story switches to introduce another Caquinte man, Chanta (also a bee species), whom Kamotsontopari went to visit. (Note that Caquintes traditionally lived in scattered family settlements some distance from one another in the forest, and that such visits were often significant events.) Chanta's origins, however, are mysterious. He is said to have been found as an infant at the base of a recently collapsed cliff, by a woman who had gone to harvest plantains. She brings him home, wraps him up, and places him in a basket, but he refuses to be breastfed. The woman suspects that he will like tobacco, which they give to him, and indeed this becomes his main foodstuff. But within a year, he had already grown to be an adolescent (Caq. ikenkevaritanake), and he eventually takes a wife named Kanihaneri (also a large earthworm species), and they have a son named Pontsopontso ('agouti'). Chanta cannot build his house correctly, and his wife cannot make cushmas well, and most of the lexical items in Chanta's speech are marked with a peculiar ending =tia that appears to have no other meaning in Caquinte.
One day Chanta goes off to work for mestizos in order to be able to purchase clothes, but he brings back disease to the upper Pogeni. Kamotsontopari confronts him as to why this may have happened, and he can think of no reasons, since they otherwise fed him well, filling him with plantains. Many children begin to die, but Chanta recovers and moves his family some distance further away. Kamotsontopari pursues them, and Chanta flees from his new dwelling into the forest, leaving his wife and child behind, whom Kamotsontopari kills. Kamotsontopari then begins to mimic a cry for help as if he were Chanta's wife, luring Chanta back to the house, at which moment Kamotsontopari reveals himself (having been hidden wrapped in a sitting mat), grabs Chanta, and ties him up against a house post, shooting arrows into his whole body and making him resemble bunches of plantains, but Chanta won't die. He claims that if Kamotsontopari kills him, then others will kill Kamotsontopari. Chanta begins to split blood all over Kamotsontopari, but in order to kill him, Kamotsontopari must shoot him in each of his fingers and toes, which he proceeds to do, and then Chanta dies.
Kamotsontopari returns to his own house, but in the meantime he had missed a visit by his adopted son, and again we enter into a digression. Years previously, Kamotsontopari had killed an unnamed Caquinte man, married his widow, and adopted her children as his own. One of these children is the adopted son whose visit Kamotsontopari missed, at which time the mother confessed to her son that Kamotsontopari was not his real father. Afterwards, the son claims that he will return and within one week kill his stepfather Kamotsontopari, and that he will need his mother's help to do so, and she acquiesces. The plot hinges around getting Kamotsontopari alone so the son can avoid harming his own mother, and in order to achieve this, she is to fake her period, which will allow her to sleep separately from Kamotsontopari at night. (Caquinte warriors abstained from sleeping with their wives during their menstruation.) When the son returns, he fires three arrows to signal to his mother that he is about to approach the house, which apparently escape Kamotsontopari's notice, and she tells her husband Kamotsontopari that her period has begun. That night, Kamotsontopari, also a shaman, takes ayahuasca (Caq. santomaritsa), a hallucinogen, and the son finds him standing on his shaman's ladder, after which he goes up to the upper part of the house. An Asháninka man accompanying the son named Oshatyaki (n.b., Caq. shatyaki 'fingernail') finally sees Kamotsontopari descending his ladder, and he shoots him with a gun. He tries to run back up the ladder, but crashes into the ridgebeam (Caq. ovankagito) of the house; he begins to fall, but is elevated again (possibly with the assistance of his helper spirits heokarihite), and vanishes like a wind. The son orders his mother to hurriedly burn the ladder (i.e., so Kamotsontopari cannot return from the spirit world), and the son flees into the forest with Oshatyaki, who stops to drink rainbow vapor (the cultural significance of which still alludes me).
At this point, the mother, wife of Kamotsontopari flees to another Caquinte man Kiavenkiri (an adjective used to describe flowers that have lost their petals, and said of this man apparently because he is said to have lost his hair at a young age), who had as well been battling Asháninkas, and they flee to a mountain named Ahavinteni. As many years pass (Caq. oshekini aavaetapohakageti ahagantsini), they continue to wage war against Asháninkas, and Kiavenkiri's son-in-law is captured and taken slightly downriver on the Tambo where he continues to grow to manhood (Caq. ikenkevaritake), and at some later date his captors inform him that he must go visit his fellow Caquintes. He returns to his father-in-law Kiavenkiri, who had thought him dead and is surprised to see him grown larger, but then the son-in-law leaves soon thereafter to return to the Tambo. Two years pass, and the son-in-law returns in the company of Asháninkas, inciting Kiavenkiri's ire, and the son-in-law promises not to bring them again. One year passes, and the son-in-law returns alone and asks his father-in-law Kiavenkiri to prepare him arrows made of peach palm, and when he receives them, he returns to the Asháninkas. The son-in-law ultimately betrays Kiavenkiri, and plans with Asháninkas to kill him with his own peach palm arrows.
When the son-in-law returns with Asháninkas, the bijao leaves they use as temporary sitting mats in the upper Pogeni are later discovered by a Caquinte girl who goes to the river to bathe, but when she returns to her house and notifies her relatives, her granduncle insists that she must be lying. At the same time, a heavy storm of thunder and lightning ensues, and we find Kiavenkiri's wife giving birth. Lightning strikes close to the house, and Kiavenkiri worries that someone must have masticated sedge in order to attempt to kill them, and so he goes to his father's house to ask what the meaning of the lightning is. In a somewhat odd digression, the father claims the storm has nothing to do with Kiavenkiri's possible death, but that instead is a sign that his wife has been unfaithful to him. He returns to his house and finds his wife bathing their newborn girl in hot water (a widespread Kampan cultural practice), but unbeknownst to them, their son-in-law is approaching with Asháninkas and they shoot the newborn girl in the leg with the arrows that Kiavenkiri made. Kiavenkiri's wife berates him for not having tied up his arrows better, but when he goes to his arrow bundles he finds them all in order and tied off as they should be, and as he moves to place them further out of reach he is shot in the armpit. He removes it and manages to pierce an oncoming Asháninka man with it, but then his son-in-law runs up and pins him against a house post, trapping him with his own cushma. Kiavenkiri calls for help from his father whose house he has just come from, but the father instead flees into the forest. Kiavenkiri, wounded, manages to kill an Asháninka man he had kept a hold on, and his son Kishaiva (newly introduced into the narrative) grabs another arrow and fires at his brother-in-law; the latter runs off, dying on the path. At the same time, the accompanying Asháninkas retreat and Kiavenkiri dies.
Early the next morning, Kiavenkiri's father returns to find his daughter-in-law left with her murdered husband; he begins to cry, and she asks who is shaking the corn tenki tenki tenki (an onomatopoeia, and a general cultural reference I do not understand). Things get worse when Kiavenkiri's father mistakes his grandson Kishaiva for the murderer, and shoots him in the crown of his head killing him. The grandmother, who appears to have accompanied Kiavenkiri's father, her husband, sees what has happened and insists they must bury him. Kiavenkiri's father blames his daughter-in-law, slapping her upside the head and claiming that she should have watched over her son Kishaiva.
Kiavenkiri's widow flees to Tataki and informs him that they've killed Kiavenkiri. (Note that this is the second time that the widow of a murdered Caquinte man has fled to another Caquinte man, and that we never find out what became of Kamotsontopari's widow.) An unspecified character informs Tataki that he must go to the mountains, and that, when he does, he will encounter a bear up in a tree. He is to call to the bear and ask "Grandfather, what are you doing?" The bear will clap its hands and a special sedge will fall from the tree, and he is to masticate it. That night Tataki dreams, and the next day he goes to the mountain and encounters the bear; the sedge falls, he masticates it, returns home, and gets an incredible bitter taste in his mouth. Tataki calls to his three brothers, Kapatsakigihari (also the name of a mythical river of rocks and mud), Koviriharisati, and Oityo, and they begin preparing for battle by testing to see whether various instruments will pierce their skin: they begin with the fruit of the pona tree (Caq. oitsoki kamonaitsoki), and move on to arrow shafts (Caq. ovi shikiripi) and small rocks (Caq. orihanihaniki kenashivirori). They predict that if, in the end, an arrowhead does not pierce their skin, then neither will a bullet. Following their preparations, they hide all of their women and children in a mountain named Tinkanashi (n.b., tinkana, a species similar to Sp. ungurahui).
Two years pass, and the Asháninkas say they will go back to battle the Caquintes, but they are unaware that such a man as Tataki exists. Caquintes spot the Asháninkas on their approach upriver, and Tataki notifies his brothers; they go to the river and wait for them and when they come they shoot them in their sides. The Asháninkas respond with gunfire, but they manage only to graze Tataki's hair. In the end, the Caquintes finish off the Asháninkas, and destroy their guns by throwing them to the ground, crushing them with rocks, and piling them up, along with the bodies of the Asháninkas in the aforementioned mountain Ahavinteni. However, two Asháninkas had escaped, they notify their compatriots that shotguns cannot kill Tataki, and a massive party of Asháninkas returns to the upper Pogeni. Tataki and his brothers see them coming upriver, and he tells them not to be afraid. They ascend a steep ridge and begin shooting at the Asháninkas from there, piercing them in the neck. Returned gunfire subsequently ceases, but it's done nothing to Tataki and the Asháninkas see him standing high on the ridge unharmed. The Caquintes return with an onslaught of arrow fire and all but a few Asháninkas are killed; the remainder flee downriver, wondering how they will ever kill Tataki.
A year goes by, and an Asháninka spy named Tereso goes to visit Tataki, who immediately suspects him to be what he is but lets him stay for a few days nevertheless. Tereso returns to the Asháninkas reporting that all is normal, and begins to come every month to spy on Tataki. Finally, a massive Asháninka party returns, and Tataki is sitting at his fire knotching arrows. He hears them approaching and challenges them to come closer, saying he'll have them fed to the vultures. Then he hears more muddled noises, as the Asháninkas are in reality approaching the edge of the forest. They plan to shoot Tataki simultaneously from four angles, but when they fire, he manages to dodge and twist his body such that the Asháninkas only manage to shoot a woman named Keminaki, whose guts spill out. Tataki grabs an arrow and shoots it straight through the body of an attacking Asháninka, who falls to the ground dead. The Asháninkas fire on him further, and Tataki turns around to see Tereso sitting tamping his shotgun. He quickly grabs an arrow and shoots him in his testicles, and Tereso flings himself onto the ground to avoid further fire, but he's unable to remove the arrow because it's been knotched extremely well (Caq. itoshinchaavoakimahakero). Asháninka gunfire eventually subsides, but Tataki is still there, although he finally starts to tire. He calls to his brother saying that the Asháninkas have already set fire to the house, and that he (the brother) must escape, and he does. Tataki continues to battle, and the Asháninkas flee; Tataki goes away, and the Asháninkas think they've cured Tereso, but he dies two months later.
Two years pass and an unspecified character brings more Asháninkas with the aim of killing of Tataki's brother Kapatsakigihari. Instead, however, they come across Tataki's daughter Vicho bathing at the river and they capture her. Tataki, who had been battling nearby, finishes most of the Asháninkas off, but then he is notified that his daughter has been captured. They go after the fleeing Asháninkas, passing by a mountain named Shitekitsini (named so for a race of humans who lived there with big, frizzy, fro-like hair); they follow a steep ridge and get ahead of the Asháninkas and wait for them. The first of the Asháninkas approaches and hears a disturbance, but thinks it's an ungurahui that's fallen; shortly thereafter, he is shot in the ribs and with this one shot collapses. Other of his compatriots follow, and Tataki does the same to them. Once a large enough group of the fleeing Asháninkas amasses, though, Tataki realizes he must go and confront them if he is to get his daughter back. The Asháninkas see him approach and place her in the middle of all of them so he cannot get to her. Tataki and his brother fight them at the river's edge, but the brother begins to tire and says it's better for him to die on behalf of Vicho than for Tataki to. With that in mind, he daringly darts across the river and they shoot him in the rib. He almost falls into the water, but rises up again and reaches the rocky outcropping on the other side, but as he begins to return he collapses on a rock and dies.
The Asháninkas take his body, thinking it is that of Tataki, and smoke it over a massive fire, later reaching the mouth of the Pogeni with Vicho. Before her capture, however, we learn that Tataki had told Vicho that she must relay his words to any possible captor, informing them that if they are to avoid death, that they must bathe in a scalding ayahuasca concoction mixed with a (to me) unknown red-colored plantain plant (Caq. kityonkari chopekinato). Back in the headwaters, Tataki laments the death of his brother.
After some time passes (Caq. okaramanitapohakegeti), the Asháninkas plot to return to the Caquintes to capture more women for sale in Atalaya. They arrive in the headwaters, and see that the Caquintes have planted swiddens near the river's edge. Tataki, in usual fashion, is prepared, and kills all but one of them, who escapes. Tataki subsequently goes to Sonte, another Caquinte man, telling him to bring him two collared peccaries that he had killed. Sonte, an apparently eccentric character, goes off singing and drawing attention to himself. The Asháninkas are waiting for him, as they'd come across the peccary bodies and knew that someone must eventually return for them. They shoot Sonte, but it only grazes his neck, and he cries out in panic and runs off zigzagging and fleeing up into Tinkanashi mountain. He comes to Tataki's wife (named elsewhere as Ampi), and she has little sympathy for Sonte, asking why he insisted upon making such a racket. Tataki goes after the Asháninkas and killed all of them, piling their bodies in a mountain named Anparentsi (n.b., anpare, a haunting spirit type). Fellow Asháninkas wait downriver, but because none of them return, Tataki thinks he has killed all of them.
Many years go by, and some Asháninkas return, but they are few in number, and at this time Vicho has come to live in Mayapo, an Asháninka community downriver of the mouth of the Pogeni. They decide not to sell her because she is hardworking, and she plots to escape: she prepares much strong manioc beer, inviting all the surrounding Asháninkas to participate in a feast. She crucially refuses an offer for her to drink herself (citing a cultural prohibition against the makers of manioc beer drinking their own "brew"), and at night, once everyone has passed out, she flees with her daughter Metaki upriver to the Pogeni, where she arrives at dawn. With Asháninkas hot on her heels, she decides to hide under a large piece of pona-like bark (Caq. tsentero), and they pass her by. She decides to proceed the rest of the journey entirely in the forest, and eventually makes it far upriver to her father Tataki, who was waiting on a beach with his son-in-law (Vicho's husband) Ake. At fist Tataki suspects it might be Asháninkas approaching, but eventually he recognizes his daughter and they go to her. Shortly thereafter, Tataki kills all of her pursuing captors.
At this time, another to-be famed Caquinte, Manavirontsi, was coming of age (Caq. ikenkevaritanake), and he also began to battle with Asháninkas. Several years pass, and Asháninkas continue to try to battle against in Tataki, but they only manage to kill another one of his brothers Koviriharisati. Several more years pass, and they *still* cannot kill him, but they manage to capture Manavirontsi and tie him up, but he shortly thereafter wiggles free and escapes. Several years pass, and American missionaries arrive among the Asháninkas, convincing them to make peace with the Caquintes, but Tataki, still alive, refuses to see them. He eventually crosses over the mountains separating the Tambo and Urubamba drainages, settling in the headwaters of the Yori river, where he grows to apparently quite old age, his hair turning white and he barely being able to stand, and there he dies, both because of age and also apparently because of cold weather. Here the narrative ends.
Now, the date of Vicho's capture is more or less determinable. To do so relies on the assumption that Vicho was pregnant when she was captured: there is no mention of her and an infant being captured, and yet she returns with her infant girl Metaki, known independently to be Ake's daughter, who we see in this narrative was already married to Vicho when she was captured. Separately, we can deduce that Metaki gave birth to her eldest child, Esperanza, in approximately 1939. We know that many Caquinte women begin bearing children around the age of 15, which would place Metaki's birth, and Vicho's capture, around 1924. At this point I will not try to work backwards from this date based on the various time intervals that are mentioned in the narrative in any specific way, but it seems that the events beginning with the unnamed Caquinte shaman and Kamotsontopari likely took place in the last decade of the 19th century. A useful corroboration of this would be to track down records of the mestizo patrón Perara who is mentioned at the time of Kamotsontopari.
It's also worthy of mention that other Caquinte ancestors have been mentioned by living Caquintes as having suffered in dire fashion at the hands of Asháninka raids. These names include Narori, whose children were captured and who was subsequently killed; Chanta (possibly the same mentioned here) and Oshivinti, both of whom were killed along with their entire extended family groups; and, notably, Sonte (also possibly the same mentioned here), whose wife was captured by Yines, because of which he has no descendants. I only recently learned that Caquintes had historical contact with Yines, to whom they refer in their language as mitsiri ['miːtsɨɾi] (notably different than the Matsigenka term shimirintsi). Living Caquintes say that Yines from the Urubamba would raid by ascending into the headwaters and crossing the mountains over to the Pogeni, which would mean that Caquintes were being pursued viciously from both of the directions in which they might have possibly taken refuge.
Further dates as to Tataki's life are hard to pin down. He was married twice, first to Ampi, by whom he had six children, and, after her death, to Katsi, the sister of the aforementioned Manavirontsi, with whom he had one son. Vicho, if the dates here are correct, appears to have been born c1909, and, for independent reasons, appears to have been one of Tataki's older children. That suggests to me that he may have been born c1890, putting him in the prime of his fighting career come the mid-1920s. He lived at least until c1955, at which point a granddaughter, Avataka, known to have met him, would probably have been a young girl. Given the mentions of his extreme age, I suspect that he lived into the 1960s. Today, I have met no one wh can name a historical Caquinte of a generation prior to Kamtsontopari, beyond whom we appear to enter into a more mythical past.
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