Yagua

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There are approximately 3,000 to 4,000 Yagua people in northeastern Peru. Currently, they live near the Amazon, Napo, Putumayo and Yavari Rivers and their tributaries. Ethnographic descriptions of the Yagua are found in Fejos (1943) and P. Powlison (1985). The history and migrations of the Yagua are described in Chaumeil (1983). As of 2005, apparently some Yagua have migrated northward to Colombia, near the town of Leticia.

Currently the Yagua live in some 30 communities scattered throughout a section of the Peruvian and Colombian Amazon basin which can roughly be described as a rectangle 200 miles wide and 350 miles long (70,000 sq. miles) extending southward from the second to the fifth parallel and westward from the seventieth to the seventy-fifth meridian (Powlison, 1969).

As for present day population, approximately three thousand people would identify themselves as Yaguas. Of these, 75% of the women and 25% of the men are monolingual in Yagua, the rest being bilingual in Spanish to varying degrees.

There are two possible etymologies for the term 'yagua', both of which originate outside of the Yagua language. First, the Quechua term yawar meaning 'blood' or 'the color of blood', is a likely possibility due to the Yagua custom of painting their faces with achiote, the blood red seeds of the annatto plant (Bixa orellana).

During the pre-conquest period, the Yaguas were undoubtedly in close contact with the Incas, as to this day there are far more Quechua (Inca) words in Yagua than there are Spanish words. The term in Quechua would have been something like yawar runa, 'the blood-red people', which could easily have been assimilated into Spanish as yagua.

Second, the term yagua in Spanish means 'royal palm'. This term could have been applied to the Yaguas by the Spanish explorers due to the fact that much of the native clothing is made of palm fiber. Unfortunately, there is no data on whether a name resembling yagua was first used by the Quechuas of the area or the Spanish, therefore there is no principled way to distinguish between these two possible etymologies.

The only native term that might be thought of as a self-referent is nijyąąmíy 'people.' This word is often used in contrast with mááy 'white people' and munuñúmiy 'savages', 'enemies' or 'non-Yaguas'. However, nijyąąmíy is also clearly the generic term for all human beings. Currently the term 'Yagua' is recognized by all Yaguas and is for all intents and purposes the contemporary self-referent.

The earliest documented European contact with the Yagua was probably made by the Spanish explorer Francisco de Orellana in January of 1542. While exploring in the area of modern day Pebas, Orellana encountered a village called Aparia, and captured two chiefs named Aparia and Dirimara, as well as some others (Medina 1934:257). These names could conceivably have come from the Yagua words (j)ápiiryá 'red macaw clan' and rimyurá 'shaman' respectively. The former could very well be a village name as well as a name applied to an individual; today clan names are still used by many Yaguas as family names. The word for shaman might also be used to refer to an individual, especially one singled out as a 'chief'. Regular European contact began in 1686 with the establishment of a Jesuit mission at San Joaquin de los Omagua, on an island in the Amazon river probably near what is now the mouth of the Ampiyacu river (Chaumeil, 1981:18). Though this mission was established to serve the Omagua people, there was undoubtedly contact with the Yaguas as well. From the 17th century to the last half of the 19th century, contact with the Yaguas was mainly through the Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries. In the early 18th century, Portuguese raiding parties attacked the Spanish missions throughout the Amazon region causing much geographic dispersion of the tribes that were in contact with the Spanish, and inflicting severe casualties (Espinosa, 1955).

The present extreme geographic dispersion of the Yagua, however, is due largely to the effects of the 'rubber boom' in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At that time Europeans arrived in large numbers from Brazil and began to exploit the indigenous people to extract natural latex from the jungle. Many Yaguas died in conflicts with these Europeans, as well as by exposure to European diseases. Others were exploited as slave labor. Still others fled to remote regions of the jungle. Ever since the rubber boom, the Yagua sense of unity and of common culture has declined.

The tremendous distances between villages make it very difficult to have consistent interaction with Yaguas outside of one's home village. All economic activity outside of the village is with non-Yagua peoples, usually Spanish-speakers. Thus there is economic and social pressure to learn Spanish and assimilate to the general Peruvian culture. Villages are also characteristically quite small (2 to 30 families). This fact further limits the breadth of interaction with other Yaguas, and increases the tendency to want to reach out beyond one's village for social and economic advantages.

However, the Yagua culture and language do continue to be viable, especially in some of the larger and more isolated communities. Some children grow up speaking only Yagua, and native artisanship is a significant economic activity.

There is no doubt, however, that because of geographic dispersion combined with economic and sociolinguistic pressures, the Yagua language is declining in its use. Greenberg (1960), Loukotka (1968), and Voegelin and Voegelin (1977) all classify Yagua as the only extant member of the Peban or Peba-Yaguan language family of the Ge-Pano-Carib Phylum. The only closely related languages that have been documented are Peba (Rivet, 1911) and Yameo (Espinosa, 1955), both of which are now extinct. Greenberg's classification of Peba-Yaguan as part of the Ge-Pano-Carib phylum (on which both Loukotka's and Voegelin and Voegelin's seem to be based) is not supported by any concrete evidence, and thus is not to be considered authoritative. In fact the very existence of the Ge-Pano-Carib and Andean-Equatorial phyla has not been sufficiently documented, and therefore offers no real help in identifying the more distant genetic relations of Yagua. Doris Payne (1984) has made some intriguing observations indicating a possible connection between the Zaparoan languages, purportedly part of the Andean Equatorial phylum, and Yagua. These observations, however, have yet to be corroborated by an in-depth research program. Even if Yagua and the Zaparoan languages were shown to be related genetically, the relationship would certainly be very distant. Historical reconstrution and genetic classification of the languages of the Amazon region is definitely an area where much research is needed. Such research, however, will require much more consistent and accurate descriptions of these languages than what are now available, and will need to carefully distinguish between areal features and genetically transmitted similarities. For the purposes of this dissertation, then, we will assume that Yagua has no extant relatives. Further issues of genetic classification will not be dealt with.

The language is documented in various works by Paul Powlison, Esther Powlison, Doris L. Payne (1990), and Thomas E. Payne (1992).

[edit] References

• Chaumeil, J. P. 1983. Historia y migraciones de los yagua. Lima: Peru.
• Fejos, Paul. 1943. Ethnology of the Yagua. Viking.
• Powlison, Paul. 1985. Yagua Mythology: Epic Tendencies in a New World Mythology. Dallas:
• Payne, Doris Lander. 1990. The pragmatics of word order: typological dimensions of verb-initial languages. Berlin and New York: Mouton
• Payne, Doris L. and Thomas E. Payne. 1990. A grammatical sketch of Yagua. Handbook of Amazonian languages, vol. 2, ed. by Desmond C. Derbyshire and Geoffrey Pullum. The Hague: Mouton.
• Payne, Thomas E. 1992. The twins stories: participant coding in Yagua narrative. Berkeley: University of California Press.