Aché
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Aché (also known by the hostile names Guayakí, Guaiaqui, Guoyagui, Guayaki, which literally mean rabid or ferocious rats; and the alternate spellings Ache or Axe meaning in their language human or person) are an indigenous people who lived in the subtropical forest of Eastern Paraguay as fulltime hunters until the 1970s, when they were confined to reservations. They have been the subject of anthropological research by Pierre Clastres.
The Aché tribe was subject to genocidal acts under the government of then-dictator Alfredo Stroessner from 1968 to 1972. By 2002, despite continued deforestation and displacement, their population had recovered to nearly 1,500.
Contents |
[edit] Geography and Subdivisions
The Aché now live primarily in seven settlements: Chupa Pou, Arroyo Bandera, Kuêtuvy, KuêTuwyVe, Cerro Moroti, Puerto Barra, and Ypetimi. KuêTuwyVe was created in 2000, by the Aché organization La Liga Nativa por la Autonomía, Justicia y Ética (Native League for Autonomy, Justice and Ethics; Spanish acronym LINAJE means lineage).[1]
Internally, the Aché were divided into the following subgroups in the mid-20th century: southern Aché (anthropologist Philippe Edeb Piragi suggests their sole survivors are now the Aché of Ñacunday), the Aché Wa (Aché of Yñarõ in etnographic literature, of Ypetimi in recent discussion), the Aché Gatu (the Aché Wa also describe themselves by this name), and the Ybytyrusu group.
[edit] History
The Aché traditionally lived as a hunting and gathering people. Their livelihood was dependent on hunting and on collecting fruits, honey and forest roots.
[edit] Killings, Enslavement and Confinement
In 1968, the Aché’s forested home was made accessible by a new road, sending its value on the market skyrocketing as forest product and ranching interests bid for new territory. The Aché became the subject of a campaign by their Paraguayan neighbors of raids, kidnapping and enslavement. A pre-existing colonial legacy of hunting Indians was intensified into a systematic effort wherein manhunters and soldiers attacked with bullets, machetes, poison meals, traps and dogs. Survivors of the hunts were concentrated at the Guayakí National Reserve, a reservation at Cecilio Baez, and some children were separated from the community. There they were denied the right to continue their culture: their own rituals, songs, customs, group activities, language, and original names were forbidden. Adequate food and health care were denied while abuses included humiliation, rape, and torture. The administration of the reservation by the fundamentalist New Tribes Mission, beginning in September 1972, reduced overt brutality, but not deculturation. The government’s desire for assimilation and the missionaries’ regard for the Aché “as degenerate and given to dealings with the devil” meshed into cooperation. The head missionary participated in the hunt, while the official he replaced had used the reservation to acquire Aché slaves. Both the hunts and the reservation served as sources for slaves of all ages for fieldwork, domestic service, and sexual slavery. By 1978, Professor Robert C. Smith of the University of Kansas reports, “the manhunt against the Achés appeared to have stopped because they have killed almost all the Achés in that area and there is no one left to hunt.” However, sporadic killings and kidnappings of Achés continued into the 1980s.
The Inter-American Human Rights Commission heard denunciation of the abuses in March 1974. It provisionally concluded that most abuses could be attributed to private individuals or abusive officials and that, "the policy of the Government of Paraguay is not a policy aimed at eliminating the Aché Indians, but rather a policy aimed at promoting assimilation and providing protection insofar as limited resources will allow." Requests for information by the commission were ignored by the Paraguayan government. It concluded, per its policy, that the denounced events had in fact occurred, and demanded government action to hold the perpetrators to account. Observing the record, Shoah survivor and moralist Elie Wiesel concluded that genocide was occurring and pleaded for activism.
[edit] Recent history
The rapid deforestation of eastern Paraguay which undermined Aché life prior to the manhunts have continued. So too have Christian evangelization attempts by the New Tribes Mission. In 1991, the US-based Nature Conservancy and the Paraguay-based Fundación Moisés Bertoni founded the Mbaracayú Forest Nature Reserve. The transaction was a classic debt-for-nature swap arranged with the International Finance Corporation, a branch of the World Bank. The reserve has acted as a bulwark against deforestation within its boundaries and a surrounding buffer zone, but has not stopped it elsewhere. Some 160,000 acres have been preserved from cutting. However, the Global Forest Coalition alleges that investment in Aché living standards have been meager, that the Aché are employed identifying forest resources for outside use with no benefit to them--a form of biopiracy, and that Aché themselves have limited rights to the Reserve, forcing them into settlements (an abandonment of their nomadic lifestyle) which are open to missionaries like New Tribes Mission.
Others, however, claim that the Global Forest Coalition allegations are poorly documented and have little bearing on reality. With the almost complete destruction of Paraguay's forest outside the reserve area, the notion that Aché nomadism could be continued is unrealistic at best. Claims of biopiracy overlook the fact that the employment of Aché in identifying forest resources was at the center of an attempt to involve the Aché in the management of the natural resources they continue to rely on, and which they continue to hold rights to, within the reserve. Finally, the idea that the creaton of the nature reserve drove the Aché into the hands of missionaries is ludicrous, at best; by providing the Aché with non-missionary derived outlets for livelihood, it seems likely that the creation of the reserve lessened the missionaries' power over the Aché
[edit] References
- Richard Arens (ed.), Genocide in Paraguay.
- Pierre Clastres, Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians.
- Kim Hill, A. Magdalena Hurtado, Ache Life History: The Ecology and Demography of a Foraging People.
- Miguel Lovera, paraguay: life as commerce?
- Philippe Edeb Piragi, "Los Aché del Paraguay y las revelaciones de la 'Palabra de los Ancestros' : de la tradición oral a la resistencia cultural", Suplemento Antropológico, Vol.XXXVI, N°1, junio 2001, pp.: 147-245, CEADUC, Asunción, PARAGUAY. Modified extract online.
- ↑ Philippa Edeb Piragi, "Los Aché del Paraguay y las revelaciones de la 'Palabra de los Ancestros' : de la tradición oral a la resistencia cultural."
- ↑ US State Department, "Indians", Paraguay country study.
- ↑ Mark Münzel, “Manhunt” in Arens (ed.), Genocide in Paraguay, 38.
- ↑ Quoted in Rex Wyler, Blood of the Land: The Government and Corporate War Against the American Indian Movement, 226.
- ↑ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Case 1802 (PARAGUAY).
- ↑ Elie Wiesel, epilogue, Richard Arens (ed.), Genocide in Paraguay.
