Yurema and Yuema: Boas, Metal Tools, and Names in Northwest Amazonia

For Brazilians, the Amazon River proper is formed at the mouth of the Rio Negro, above which it is known as the Solimões. (For Peruvians, the Amazon is formed at the confluence of the Marañón and Ucayali, in their territory.) Brazilian anthropologist Antônio Porro, in his (1983) article "Os solimões ou jurimaguas: Território, migrações e comércio intertribal," details how Solimões as a hydronym derives from an ethnonym that Jesuit Cristóbal de Acuña (1641:29) first wrote as Yoriman, based on travel in 1639, suggesting a pronunciation more faithfully rendered in modern orthographies as Yorimã, and which Jesuit Samuel Fritz (1651-1725) rendered as Yurimaua (n.b., Fritz spoke Yurimagua well enough to preach to them in their language and live in their villages without the use of interpreters). In 1649, Franciscan Laureano de la Cruz, with good experience, understood Yoriman (also his spelling) territory to lie on the right bank of the Amazon below Aisuare territory (de la Cruz 1651:143; see here for the manuscript), the first major group upriver of the Rio Negro, thus the importance for the hydronym. By 1691, when Fritz drew his famous map, some (but not all) Yurimagua villages had come to be located upriver of Aisuare villages. Porro (ibid.:35) includes a useful map bracketing Yurimaguas' successively smaller and more upriver territory as Portuguese slave raids intensified in the latter half of the 17th century. In this post, I want to gather together lexical data that warrants further investigation, related in part to the ethnonym Yurimagua and in part to the name of a Yurimagua chief, which Fritz wrote in 1702 in his own hand as Soëmarini (MSS #713, Biblioteca Ecuatoriana Aurelio Espinosa Pólit). I connect the former to an apparent Wanderwort for boa, and the latter to another apparent Wanderwort for metal.

Fritz writing about the killing of Yurimagua chief Soëmarini (second line)

By way of linguistic background, it is worth noting that effectively nothing is known of the Yurimagua language, with the exception of a few personal names, a place name, one other specific lexical item, and a handful of general observations regarding difference. This is despite the fact that Hervás y Panduro (1787:66), in his Catalogo delle lingue conosciute, claims that Jesuit Matías Lazo (1676-1721) wrote a grammar of the language; the location of the grammar is currently not known. In a July 2, 1691 letter, Fritz writes in his own hand of an another chief, Matiua (MSS #537, BEAEP). In the (1738:249) manuscript of his Noticias auténticas del río Marañón (see here for the manuscript, cited here), Jesuit Pablo Maroni (1695-1757), in seeming to copy from Fritz's diaries, writes that the Yurimaguas played a flute to summon Guaricana, this representation deriving from an original Guaracaya crossed out in the manuscript. (As anthropologist Robin Wright points out in his (2018:128) article "The Kuwai Religions of Northern Arawak-Speaking Peoples: Initiation, Shamanism, and Nature Religions of the Amazon and Orinoco," citing Métraux in the Handbook of South American Indians, this practice would seem to be similar to the yuruparí flutes found in other Amazonian societies. Fritz's diaries exist only in the form of a compilation of the originals. This compilation exists in two manuscript copies, one of which is in Maroni's hand as part of his Noticias -- more on this in another post.)

In an August 20, 1696 letter, Fritz writes again in his own hand that the Yurimagua language "es diferente totalmente de la omagua" (MSS #623, BEAEP). In the same letter, he writes of a Yurimagua chief from the village of Macuaya. Finally, Fritz writes in his diaries (Maroni 1738:248, emphasis mine) that "La gente yurimagua, y Aiçuare, aunque sean Naciones diferentes, y de diversas lenguas son casi de unas costumbres." In 1651, Laureano de la Cruz had written (p. 143) that the Yurimaguas came to see his traveling party with arrows that they threw by hand, and with an instrument that they called palleta. In the parts of his writings having to do with travel through Omagua villages, de la Cruz's use of Spanish llaman 'they call' cites Omagua-language words for things (e.g., pinagua for the flowering plant (Sp.) irapay, Lepidocaryum; cf. Omagua /pinawa/), making it seem that palleta here is a Yurimagua-language word. (It is not Omagua.) De la Cruz is also in agreement with Fritz, reporting of his travel downriver of Omagua villages in 1649 that, after leaving Aisuare territory, where their interpreter had been able to communicate, their interpreter ceased being able even to understand the local languages, including Yurimagua. So that is chiefs Matiua and Soëmarini, the village Macuaya, a spirit Guaricana, an instrument palleta, and a language different from both Omagua and Aisuare. The discovery of Lazo's grammar would revolutionize our understanding of the linguistic landscape of the upper Amazon in the colonial period.

Maroni copying Fritz writing about Yurimagua spirit Guaricana

In at least three Arawak languages of northwest Amazonia, there is a word resembling yurema referring to a boa species: Baniwa do Içana dzoléema (Ramírez 2001), Kurripako yoleema (Bezerra's (2012) New Tribes Mission dictionary manuscript, Alexandra Aikhenvald, p.c. May 26, 2019), and Tariana yuréma (A.A., p.c. ibid.). In Morse et al.'s (1999:325) Kubeo dictionary, it is defined as "güio (largo y mediano; manchado amarillo claro y café)." What first made me interested in these terms was mention by linguist Thiago Chacon in the introduction of his (2012:10) dissertation on the phonology and morphology of Kubeo, an unrelated Eastern Tukanoan language, that Yuremawa was the name of a Kubeo sib. Indeed in his (1963:104, emphasis original) The Cubeo: Indians of the Northwest Amazon, Irving Goldman writes of the Djurémawa that "Nimuendajú has identified them as the Yiboya-Tapuyo of the Aiarí River in Brazil. He says they came to the mouth of the Querarí on the Vaupés in 1904. According to Koch-Grünberg, they were once hostile Arawakan Baniwa who had assimilated to Cubeo and are close kin of the Káua of the Aiarí. The Uanana, Koch-Grünberg reports, call them Maxka-Pinopona (Boa)." As Chacon explained to me (p.c. March 5, 2013), "Yuremawa comes from the word yurema 'a boa sp.' and -wa 'plural animate'. It is a borrowing from an Arawakan language, perhaps Curipaco." But he cautions against "speculat[ing] whether they can be direct descendents of the Yurimaguas, unless -- besides the sound resemblance -- we find meaning resemblance between yurema and yurima(guas)." Furthermore, Stephanie Farmer claims that 'boa' reconstructs in proto-Eastern Tukanoan as *pino (p.c. May 28, 2019), suggesting more strongly that yurema is indeed a loan into Kubeo.

It is unlikely that the Kubeo word yuremawa is the source of Yurimagua. The word yurema may be an Arawak loan into Kubeo, but the animate plural suffix -wa is Tukanoan. Colonial ethnonyms often originate in words neighboring groups had for others. If an early explorer were told by some group that a neighboring group were the yuremawa, this would most likely have to be a Tukanoan-speaking group that had already borrowed yurema. However, Acuña and de la Cruz's representation of this word from the 1630s and '40s was Yoriman. This could suggest that some group was understood to refer to Yurimaguas simply as boas, or that yurema was a word in the Yurimagua language, among other possibilities. In this vein, there are inconclusive but interesting connections. The compiler of Fritz's diaries wrote of the Yurimaguas that they said that "quando gentiles solian con encantos llamar á sus casas las culebras especialmente la que llaman madre del agua para copiar las manchas, y figuras, que tienen dibujadas en su pellejo," as an explanation for the striking designs on Yurimagua jugs (Sp. cántaro). Separately, as part of patterns of social organization attested more broadly in this region of Amazonia, reference to serpents is integral to the relative rank of descent groups. For example, as Janet Chernela writes in The Wanano Indians of the Brazilian Amazon: A Sense of Space (1993:51), "The sib ancestors are brothers ranked according to the order of their emergence from the ancestral anaconda canoe." In the Wanano case, the sibs are named after individual ancestral brothers, not the anaconda, of course, but the Kubeo case demonstrates one instance in which a descent group is named, effectively, "Snake People."

If Yurimaguas of the Amazon, given Acuña and de la Cruz's representations, are to be understood as having been known as "Snakes," then the connection with the Kubeo sib "Snake People" remains interesting. While it may seem implausible on geographical grounds, long-distance migrations north of the Amazon are attested by other groups, as part of the general flight from the Amazon in response to the Portuguese. Indeed in reference to the Yurimagua specifically, Fritz had this to say in 1689 regarding previous movements (Maroni 1738:249, emphasis mine): "Sus aldeas eran de una legua, y mas de largo de caserios, pero despues que se vieron perseguidos se retiraron muchos à otras tierras, y rios para estar algo mas seguros." The dislocation of Taruma (isolate) people from the lower Rio Negro (their mission has been said to have lain across from the modern-day city of Manaus) to modern-day southern Guyana, a distance of some 650 kilometers in a straight line, is a useful point of reference. The distance from the Yurimaguas' Amazon River villages to the mouth of the Querarí River (left-bank tributary of the Vaupés) is some 100 kilometers less than that. On the map below, approximate locations are given for Santa María de las Nieves, the Yurimagua mission (based on Fritz's map), and the Taruma mission, in addition to the Querarí (where the ancestors of the Kubeo yuremawa are said to have arrived), Maruranau (a Wapichan village used as a proxy for the location of Tarumas in southern Guyana), and the Urubaxi River, the route well documented by Fritz and others by which Manao people (also known as Manabes) traveled from the Rio Negro to the Caquetá/Japurá and the Amazon proper, for trade with Yurimaguas and others (see Porro). Yurimaguas could have in principle used this or a similar route to escape into the upper Rio Negro. The Querarí is indeed considerably closer than the Peruvian city of Yurimaguas, the former site of a Jesuit mission on the Huallaga River established for Yurimaguas and Aisuares after they fled to the Jesuit headquarters at Lagunas in the fall of 1700, as Fritz describes in his diaries. It seems difficult to me to overstate the severity of flights from the middle and upper Amazon during this period.

Yurimagua and Taruma dislocations

Regardless, in the 1850s, when Henry Walter Bates (1825-1892) was living in Tefé (Ega), squarely within former Yurimagua territory per Fritz's (1691) map, he had this to say about them, in the second volume of his The Naturalist on the River Amazons (1863:241): "The extinct tribe of Yurimaúas, or Sorimóas, from which the river Solimoens derives its name, according to traditions extant at Ega, resembled the Passés in their slender figures and friendly disposition. These tribes (with others lying between them) peopled the banks of the main river and its by-streams from the mouth of the Rio Negro to Peru. True Passés existed in their primitive state on the banks of the Issá [aka Putumayo], 240 miles to the west of Ega, within the memory of living persons. The only large body of them now extant are located on the Japurá, at a place distant about 150 miles from Ega: the population of this horde, however, does not exceed, from what I could learn, 300 or 400 persons. I think it probable that the lower part of the Japurá and its extensive delta lands formed the original home of this gentle tribe of Indians."

In the brief remainder of this post, I want to turn to the name of Yurimagua chief Soëmarini, noting the possibly Arawak morphology -ri (masculine gender suffix) and -ni, together with the proto-Omagua-Kukama (POK) *yuema 'metal' (Sp. hierro). POK *yuema is a borrowing from a non-Tupí-Guaraní language, and Ticuna (isolate) seems to have subsequently borrowed Omagua yuema as juema 'axe' (Amalia Skilton, p.c. November 23, 2015), although other sources are a possibility. The exact form yuema is even found in Alemany's (1906:29) Castellano-piro: Vocabulario de bolsillo as hierro, that is, the Arawak language Yine, spoken on the lower Urubamba River in the southeastern Peru. Furthermore, the form yoëmamay is strikingly distributed across Fritz's map, in three right-bank (southern) hinterland regions of the Amazon: between the Jutaí and the Juruá; between the Juruá and the Tefé; and between the Catoa and Cuchiuara, the modern-day Coari and Purús.

Distribution of yoëmamay in Fritz's (1691) map

Importantly, yoëmamay seems to be an Omagua word consisting of yuema 'metal' and relativizer -mai, resulting in a meaning paraphrasable as "that which is X." This construction, in which -mai attaches to a noun, is found in modern Omagua, yielding a meaning by which the referent of the noun functions in a particular way without being the best exemplar (e.g., "that which serves as clothes"). Unlike the northern reaches of the Amazon River on Fritz's map, the southern reaches are less detailed with regard to specific, named groups. It would seem, then, that yoëmamay referred to Indigenous others, unknown people of the hinterland, for which, of course, a meaning of "that which serves as metal" is unexpected. (It is also unexpected given that Omagua retains a reflex of the expected Tupian root for Indigenous other, namely tapɨya.) Returning to Soëmarini, if this Yurimagua chief's name consists of the same root, a meaning in metal may be expected given Yurimaguas' active role in trade routes that brought goods from European traders in the Orinoco basin far to the north. Regardless, it would seem to have an Arawak-style word structure, which could provide extremely slight evidence for the linguistic affiliation of the Yurimagua language. Indeed Omagua leaders of the period, such as "Payoreva," have names with Tupí-Guaraní-style word structure (i.e., payuru ɨwa 'tronco de lacre').

In the future, it will be worthwhile to learn more about yuema as a Wanderwort. It may very well be that it is found with another (related) meaning that would make its apparent use in Fritz's map more sensible. It also may ultimately be the case that the yoëma of Fritz's map is not related to the Soëmarini of his diaries and letters; the current suggestion does require different representation from one and the same hand. Unfortunately, Fritz's diaries do not include any mention of yoëmamay for comparison of the handwriting (and the map may not be in Fritz's hand), a fact striking in itself, since other ethnonymic labels on his map do appear there (e.g., Curina, Guareicu, Cayuisana). But there are other ethnonyms that Fritz seems to have only learned about from previous sources (e.g., Pariana, Pauana). The similarity between yurema 'boa sp.' and yuema 'metal' is certainly a coincidence. I bring them together in this post as an expositional convenience, and also to encourage them to be treated separately in subsequent explorations into their distribution and meaning elsewhere.