Maina Indians

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This article incorporates unedited text from the public-domain Catholic Encyclopedia, which may be out of date, or may reflect the point of view of the Catholic Church as of 1913. It should be edited to reflect broader and more recent perspectives.
(October 2006)

The Maina Indians are a group of tribes constituting a distinct linguistic stock, the Mainan, ranging along the north bank of the Marañón River in South America.^[1]

Their earlier habitat is supposed to have been the upper waters of the Morona and the Pastaza, Ecuador. Briton gives them six tribes, or dialects, viz: Cahuapana, Chapa, Chayavita, Coronado, Humurano, Maina, Roamaina. Hervas gives them two languages in six dialects, viz: Maina (Chapo, Coronado, Humurano, Maina, Roamaina dialects) and Chayavita (Cahuapano and Paranapuro dialects).

The Maina are notable as having been the first tribes of the upper Amazon region to have been evangelized by the Catholic Church, so that they gave their name to the whole mission jurisdiction of the region, and to the later province of Mainas, which included the larger part of the present Ecuador and northern Peru, east of the main Cordillera, including the basins of the Huallaga and Ucayali.

In the missionary province of Mainas, according to Hervas, 157 Jesuit missionaries of Quito labored from 1638 until the expulsion in 1767. They founded 152 missions, and eight of these missionaries won the palm of martyrdom. The work was begun by Jesuit Fathers Gaspar de Cuxia and Lucas de la Cueva, from Quito. The missionaries established a series of missions beginning from the new town of San Francisco de Borja (now Borja) on the northern bank of the Marañón below the junction of the Santiago, and extending down the river on both sides. In 1682, Rodríguez enumerated three missions of the Maina proper, in proximity to Borja, and one each of the Chayavita Coronados, Paranapura, and Roamaina, besides others in the surrounding tribes. In 1798 Hervas names San Ignacio, San Juan, Conceptión, Presentación, and presumably San Borja, as missions occupied by Maina tribes. All the missions were then far on the decline, which he ascribes chiefly to the inroads of the Brazilian slave hunters (see Mameluco). The mission population is now either extinct or assimilated with the general civilized population, but a few tribes still live in the forests.