For the Aguaruna people's language, see Aguaruna language.
The Aguaruna (or Awajún, their endonym) are an indigenous people of the Peruvian jungle. Historically, they lived primarily on the banks of the Marañón River, a tributary of the Amazon in northern Peru near the border with Ecuador. Currently, they possess titled community lands in four of Peru's regions: Amazonas, Cajamarca, Loreto, and San Martin. According to Peru's 1993 Census the Aguaruna numbered approximately 45,000. World Census data for 2000 lists their population at just over 38,000.
The Awahún have the reputation of being brave warriors, standing out for their skills in war. They live in the geographical area of the Marañón river, that is to say in the banks of the Marañón river and of its tributaries, the rivers Santiago, Nieva, Cenepa, Numpatakay and Chiriaco.
Contents |
The language of the Awajun belongs to the Jivaroan family, along with Shuar, Achuar and Huambisa.
Living arrangements
The Aguaruna families, either monogamous or polygamous, live in dispersed areas and are grouped into extensive families or towns of major magnitude.
Examples of Aguaruna towns include Yutupiza on the Santiago River and Japaime on the Nieva.
The towns for which there exists a pattern of nucleate population are called "yáakat" in their native language, and do not have streets, footpaths, or squares, but rather are constituted of houses of traditional construction. These houses are distributed in a kind of asymmetric form and the tendency is usually to place them in a linear form along the river.
Between the Aguarunas, there is the traditional institution of mutual help known in their language as ipáámu, which can be seen in action primarily when they are constructing housing for young couples, cleaning small farms and, with less frequency, sowing yuca and peanuts.
The Aguarunas are traditionally a seminomadic population, due to the unsuitability of the soil for agriculture and the extremely elementary traditional agrarian technology, which consequently depletes the soil in a short period of two or three years.
Hunting, gathering and agriculture
Major species of animals that are hunted by the Aguaruna include the sajino, the huangana, the Brazilian Tapir (sachavaca), the Little Red Brocket, the ocelot and the otorongo (jaguar). Species which are less commonly hunted include the majaz, the ronsoco, the achuni, the añuje, the carachupa, the otter, diverse classes of monkeys and birds.
The animals that they hunt not only provide meat; the skin, feathers, teeth and bones are also used. Hunting therefore has a double purpose: for dietary needs and also for making handicrafts, medicines and items used in witchcraft. Traditionally, the tribe hunted with a spear perfected with pijuayo (a palm tree of very hard wood) and the blowpipe. At present the spear has been almost completely displaced by the pellet shotgun but they also continue using the blowpipe.
They gather the wild fruit of some palm trees, like the uvilla some shrubs, and buds of palm trees, as well as stems, bark, and resins. They extract leche caspi and gather the honey of wild bees, edible worms (suris), coleopterous, medicinal plants and lianas. They use everything that they gather either for food, crafts, traditional medicine, in witchcraft or as fuel, adhering to an ancestral pattern of self-sufficiency.
As agricultural instruments, they use the traditional tacarpo (a stick with a sharp end, made from the wood of the palm tree pijuayo), along with the axe, the machete and the shovel.
Other activities
The principal crafts are masculine activities like ropemaking, basketry, the construction of canoes, and textiles; and feminine activities like ceramics and making necklaces from seeds, insects' small wings and beads. The men make headdresses of exquisite feathers as well as cotton ribbons on the ends of which they place feathers and human hair. These adornments are kept in bamboo cases.
Unlike many other cultural groups in what is now Peru, the Aguaruna were never successfully conquered by the Inca, although there are accounts of attempts to extend into the territory by Incas Huayna Capac and Tupac Inca Yupanqui.
The Spanish conquistadors first encountered the Aguaruna in 1549 when the towns of Jaén de Bracamoros and Santa Maria de Nieva were founded. Fifty years later, a rebellion among the indigenous people of the region forced the Spaniards out of the area. An agricultural colony was later established at Borja in 1865. Attempts by Dominican and Jesuit missionaries to convert the Aguarunas were largely unsuccessful.
Traditionally, the economy of the Aguaruna is based mostly on hunting, fishing and subsistence agriculture. However, over the last few decades they have increasingly become engaged in various market activities. Some communities now cultivate rice, coffee, cocoa and bananas for sale, either in local markets or for transport to coastal cities like Chiclayo. Maintenance of the transandean oil pipeline and the medicinal plant industry also play roles in the local economy.
The Aguarunas traditionally believed in many spirits and mythological figures, among them: Etsa, or the Sun; Núgkui, or mother earth, who ensures agricultural success and provides the clay for ceramics; Tsúgki, water spirits who live in the rivers; and Bikut, or father shaman, who transforms himself into hallucinogenic plants that, mixed with ayahuasca, allows one to communicate with other superior worlds.
Young men would traditionally take drugs including ayahuasca to help them see visions. The visions were believed to be the souls of dead warriors, and if the young man showed no fear he would receive spirit power known as ajútap. A man with such spirit power would be invulnerable in battle.
In the past, the Aguarunas engaged in the practice of shrinking human heads to make tzantza.
Evangelical missionaries began contacting the Aguaruna in the mid-20th century, and today many Aguarunas have converted to Christianity.
In the latter half of the 20th century, the arrival of Protestant and Jesuit missionaries, the building of roads, and the construction of an oil pipeline created substantial tension between the Aguaruna people, poor agricultural colonists, state agencies, and profit-seeking corporations [1]. In response to new threats to their way of life the Aguaruna began to organize a political and social response to defend themselves on the basis of principles consistent with other rights of indigenous peoples. The most historic organizations of Aguaruna communities include the Organización Central de Comunidades Aguarunas del Alto Marañon (OCCAAM), founded in 1975, and the Consejo Aguaruna y Huambisa (CAH), an organization founded in 1977 that represents the Aguaruna and a closely related ethnic group, the Huambisa. Since then, Aguaruna community organizers have founded more than 12 local organizations (including an Aguaruna women's federation), although not all "local organizations" attain the same stature.
The Consejo Aguaruna y Huambisa is widely regarded the primary political entity representing the Aguaruna (and Huambisa) peoples. The Aguaruna, through the Consejo Aguaruna Huambisa (CAH), played an absolutely central role in national level indigenous movements in Peru and in the founding of the Coordinating Body of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA), which represents Amazonian peoples from all over the South American continent.
In the mid 1990s Aguaruna were involved in negotiating a novel bioprospecting agreement with a US based pharmaceutical multinational, G.D. Searle & Company (then part of Monsanto), and a group of ethnobotanists from Washington University. The project involved a controversy over violations of the Aguarunas' rights over their genetic and cultural resources and to an equitable share in the potential profits derived from pharmaceuticals based on their traditional knowledge of medicinal plants. The US National Institutes of Health froze funding to the Washington University scientists,
Negotiations that began between Washington University and CAH on a bioprospecting agreement failed when Washington University's Walter Lewis collected Aguaruna medicinal plants and knowledge without a benefit-sharing agreement in place, leading to claims of biopiracy. The CAH terminated its relationship with Walter Lewis, Washington University, and their US government sponsors.
As Tim Cahill wrote in his Outside Magazine account of a father's search for closure, A Darkness on the River, "On the evening of January 18, 1995", just before the outbreak of the border war with neighboring Ecuador, "two 26-year-old Americans, Josh Silver and Patchen Miller, floated down the Maranon on a large balsa-wood raft they had built several days earlier. They tied off in the eddy at the downriver tail of the island. About 9:30 that night, they were shot and left for dead. Josh Silver survived and was treated for his wounds at an army base and then transferred to a hospital in Santa María de Nieva. The American consul general in Peru, Thomas Holladay, was informed that two Americans had been attacked. One was alive; the other was missing and feared dead." Patchen's body was never recovered nor the crime solved. The attackers were drunk Aguarunas, probably from the nearby village of Huaracayo. There has been speculation that the two Americans were mistaken by the Aguaruna for Washington University specimen hunters. It is also possible the Peruvian Army suspected them of espionage on the eve of the outbreak of war with Ecuador in the nearby border area. Despite Embassy attempts to elicit strong action, the Peruvian government showed no serious effort to get to the bottom of the killing, leaving the investigation to the badly equipped local police outpost at Nieva. The Army conducted its own investigation immediately after Josh showed up on the jetty of the army outpost at Urakuza but does not appear to have shared its findings with civilian authorities. The outbreak of war may have distracted them from following up.
Subsequently Washington University entered into negotiations with OCCAAM as well as their national representative organisation the Confederación de Nacionalidades Amazónicas del Perú (CONAP). One of the first demands of these organisations was that all material and knowledge previously collected by Washington University be returned. They also demanded that a traditional meeting in the form of an IPAAMAMU be held on Aguaruna territory. At the IPAAMAMU attended by over eighty representatives of sixty Aguaruna communities particiapnts approved continuing negotiations and called upon CONAP, its legal adviser and a representative of the Peruvian Environmental Law Society (SPDA) to provide them with advice and support in the negotiations.
The SPDA legal advisor, the Irish lawyer Brendan Tobin, had repeatedly offered his legal services to the Consejo Aguaruna Huambisa (CAH), and had repeatedly been turned down. In significant measure, this was due to SPDA's tight relationship with the corrupt and human rights violating government of then Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori.
The negotiations with OCCAAM and the other participating organisations led to the conclusuion of a group of agreements including a "know-how license" which was entered into by the participating Agaurauna organisations CONAP, and Monsanto's pharmaceutical arm Searle and Company. The licensing arrangement was designed to give the Aguarunas greater control over the use of their knowledge once it left their direct control.
The "know-how license" concept as applied to indigenous peoples' knowledge is a legal first, according to Professor Charles McManis of Washington University School of Law. Professor McManis worked for the same university profiting from the arrangement and, in any event, the license earned nobody any money or fame except the SPDA advisor. For the Aguaruna, it earned them exactly nothing.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||