Tribe

Huni Kuin

Shaman gives and takes life. To become a shaman, one goes alone into the forest and binds everything with envira [Daphnosis racemosa]. You lie at a crossroads with your arms and legs open. First come the night butterflies, the husu, which cover the whole body. Then come the juxin that eat the husu until they reach your head. Then you hug him tightly. It turns into murmuru [Astrocaryum murumuru], which has thorns. If you have strength and don't let go, the murmuru will transform into a cobra that wraps itself around your body. You hold on, it transforms into a jaguar. You continue to hold on. And so you go on, until you hold on to nothingness. You beat the test and then you speak, then you explain that you want to receive muka and he gives you.

-[Siã Osair Sales]

The Kaxinawá belong to the Pano linguistic family that inhabits the tropical forest in eastern Peru, from the foothills of the Andes to the Brazilian border, in the state of Acre and southern Amazonas, covering respectively the area of Alto Juruá and Purus and the Javari valley.

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The Pano groups designated as Nawa form a sub-group of this family because they have very close languages and cultures and because they have been neighbours for a long time. Each is called huni kuin, true men, or people with known customs. One of the characteristics that distinguish the huni kuin from other men is the system of name transmission. This system exists among the Kaxinawa as well as the Sharawana, Mastanawa, Yaminawa and other Nawa.

In the early accounts of travellers in the area, there is a confusion of ethnic names that persists to this day. This is because the names did not reflect a consensus between denominators and denominators. The Pano denominator calls (almost) all others as nawa, and himself and his relatives as huni kuin. Thus, the Kulina were called de pisinawa (“those who stink”) by the Kaxinawá, while the Paranawa called the Kaxinawá themselves de pisinawa. The name Kaxinawá itself seems to have been originally an insult. Kaxi means bat, cannibal, but it can also mean people with a habit of walking at night.

Today the Kaxinawá call all those related groups as “Yaminawa”; both those who maintain contact with the whites and the Pano groups who live in the headwaters of the rivers between the Upper Juruá and the Purus and remain remote and hidden, without “peaceful” contact with the national society.

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Location and population

The Kaxinawá inhabit the Brazil-Peru border in the western Amazon. The Kaxinawá villages in Peru are located on the Purus and Curanja rivers. Villages in Brazil (in the state of Acre) extend along the Tarauacá, Jordão, Breu, Muru, Envira, Humaitá and Purus rivers.

I conducted field research in the villages of Cana Recreio, Moema and Nova Aliança, on the Purus River, close to the border with Peru. The Peruvian and Brazilian Kaxinawá were separated in the early 20th century when a group that had been concentrated in a cauchal on the Envira River moved to the headwaters of the Purus River in Peru after a rebellion against a cauchero (McCallum 1989a: 57-58; Aquino 1977; Montag 1998). The groups originating in Peru were linked by intermarriage, although differences in lifestyle can be observed between the two groups.

There are Kaxinawá groups that migrated from the Envira River, where they were involved in rubber tapping, to the Purus. Most of these Kaxinawá from the Envira settled in the village of Frontera and in several nearby nuclei (centres, settlements). During these two decades the migratory movement did not cease; other Kaxinawá from Peru, Envira and Jordão came to settle in the villages of the Purus.

In the TI (Indigenous Land) of the Upper Purus, the Kaxinawá also cohabit with their traditional neighbours, the Kulina, for whom this reserve was originally created.

Historical

The first accounts of travellers in the Upper Juruá area that mention the Kaxinawá consider the Muru, Humaitá and mainly Iboiçu rivers, three tributaries of the Envira (itself a tributary of the Juruá), as their “original” habitat, before the arrival of the rubber tappers. Of these rivers they occupied the right bank, the left bank being occupied by the Kulina (McCallum 1989; Tocantins 1979). It seems that as early as the 18th century, the colonisers organised excursions in search of slaves in this region. But there is no record of this contact. These early incursions were very fragmentary and short-lived.

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At the end of the 19th century, from 1890 onwards, a wave of invasions by Peruvian rubber tappers began, which lasted no more than twenty years. To obtain rubber, the trees had to be cut down, and the region was soon exhausted. On the other hand, the extraction of latex from the Hevea brasiliensis by regular cutting preserves the tree. For this reason, the arrival of the Brazilian rubber tappers was not temporary, despite the ups and downs of the market. 

In this violent contact, the local indigenous groups suffered violence from the exploiters who brought, among other things, diseases. In 1913, the Juruá region had 40,000 migrants (mostly from the state of Ceará) and the Purus had 60,000. Violence was organised. The function of the lumberjacks was not only to open the rubber routes, but also to clear the area of brave Indians. The reaction of the Kaxinawá was to rob and assault, although some groups allowed themselves to be tamed by the rubber tappers. This was the case with the Kaxinawá group from Iboiçu, who agreed to work for Felizardo Cerqueira in exchange for goods. Felizardo took them from the Iboiçu to the Alto Envira and from there, in 1919, to the Tarauacá, where they were used in the massacre of the Papavó (McCallum 1989). In 1924 they reached the Jordão River, where they remain to this day, long after the death of the patron saint. The oldest Kaxinawá of this river are still marked with the initials FC (Felizardo Cerqueira) of the patron’s name.

Until 1946, the Kaxinawá of Peru remained there, in the virgin forest, far from the rivers navigated by traders. They preferred independence and isolation to the dependence that came with greater access to weapons and metal utensils. Through the Yaminawa they got a few things, but it seems that in the mid-1940s they decided they needed more and sent a six-man team to the Taraya River for direct negotiations.

Eventually, the Kaxinawá made the decision to pursue contact with civilisation, a decision with profound consequences, which was questioned by the Kaxinawá themselves.

Contact may be inevitable in the long term. In the short term, however, it depends on the initiative of the group, which a generation earlier had chosen the opposite position. And this in a region where, even today, there live ethnic groups, Pano and Arawak language groups, who avoid any contact with non-indigenous society.

In 1946, when a Brazilian visitor came to the Huni Kuin, they knew what they wanted from him: the industrialised goods, metal machetes, shotguns, etc. The trader took timber and rubber in exchange, but also enlisted some young men to work with him, which was not foreseen (Kensinger 1975: 10-11).

Then, in 1951, the German travellers Schultz and Chiara arrived: “We found a total of eight villages, with a number of inhabitants varying between twenty and 120 individuals. We estimate the total number of Kaxinawa individuals at between 450 and 500” (Schultz 1955). As a result of this visit, 75 to 80 percent of the adult population died as a result of a measles epidemic. According to Deshayes and Keifenheim (1982), for the Kaxinawá, who at the time were trying to explain the tragedy, the film reduced the image of a person and thus, with their juxin yuda diminished, the person died.

The survivors fled to the Envira and Jordão in Brazil, where their relatives lived and worked in the rubber plantations. But by the dry season of the following year, most of the refugees decided to return to the Curanja, where there was no rubber and no employers.

Balta, the largest Kaxinawa community in Peru, is a creation of SIL (International Society of Linguistics). With the arrival of the missionaries, an airstrip was built to transport goods to Pucallpa and a radio was installed to maintain contact with the SIL base in Yarinacocha. By the early 1920s, Balta had attracted so many Kaxinawá that their numbers reached 800 individuals.

Conta, the second largest Kaxinawá village in Peru, was built on the Purus near Puerto Esperanza in 1968 by Kaxinawá from Envira. By 1985, Conta had surpassed Balta in number of inhabitants, thanks mainly to Kaxinawá migrants from Balta and Santarém, the village above Balta, who left the Curanja in search of new ways to obtain the products that until then had been provided by the missionaries.

Conta maintains trade relations with Puerto Esperanza, a small port built around a military border post. Some Kaxinawá from Conta have done military service in that port, a shocking and in some cases traumatic experience.

The two Kaxinawá villages where I did my fieldwork, Cana Recreio and Moema, on the upper Purus River, represent the conjunction of these two Kaxinawá traditions of the last century: the Peruvian and the Brazilian. The former, which maintained its autonomy for longer and saw its village life interrupted for less time, is considered more “traditional” (culturally more indigenous), despite being marked by contact with missionaries and the Peruvian military; the latter lived for years in a more dispersed way and became familiar with the rubber culture through the work of two generations for the boss, but today lives a profound process of recovery of the “traditions”.

The life stories of the Kaxinawá of Cana Recreio and Moema refer to the long journey between the Envira and Jordão in Brazil and the Alto Purus and Curanja in Peru to reach Cana Recreio, on the Purus on the Brazilian side.

In April 1989, one third of the population of Cana Recreio founded a new village: Moema.

During my stay there, the new village had seven houses.

Fronteira is the third Kaxinawá community in the indigenous area of the Upper Purus. It is the oldest on the Purus River on the Brazilian side and was founded by the Kaxinawá rubber tappers of the Envira. The leader of this village, Mario Domingos, moved from the Vista Alegre rubber plantation in the Envira to the Triunfo rubber plantation in the Alto Purus in the early 1970s, at the request of the owner of the said plantation, Chico Raulino.

The Funai (National Indian Foundation) post was installed in Fronteira, which was given an airstrip, now in disuse, as well as a school, a pharmacy, a radio station linked to the Funai administration in Rio Branco and a house for the post chief, which ended up serving as a house for the family of the Kaxinawá leader, Mario.

In 1978, Cimi (Consejo Indigenista Misionero) volunteers convinced a group of 32 people in Santa Rosa, on the border with Brazil, who had descended the Curanja and Purus from Balta during the previous year, to move to the Funai post in Fronteira. This group was led by Francisco Lopes da Silva, Pancho, who two years later founded the village of Cana Recreio, an hour and a half downstream from Fronteira.

The relocation to Fronteira is a process that has not yet been fully completed. The families seem to appreciate their independence from each other more than in the villages of Moema and Cana Recreio. The houses are a little more distant from each other, there are about ten heads of cattle grazing between the houses, and the families maintain a relatively independent economy. There are, for example, individual exchanges with itinerant traders who ply the river and sell goods in exchange for rubber, cattle hides and chickens. While these transactions tended to be controlled by the collectivity and leaders in other Purus villages, the leader of Fronteira did not, at the time of my research, intend to control these transactions and there was no cooperative responsible for the economy of the community as a whole, as there was in Cana Recreio.

A number of tasks, however, are carried out jointly: collective fishing in the lake or in the igarapés [narrow canals] with timbó (barbasco), the opening of new rozas and hunting expeditions on the occasion of the big feasts. One problem for these festivities is that Fronteira has no song leaders to “pull” the singing.

The tendency to split villages is common among the Pano and reflects the democratic basis on which the community is built. Any parent may decide, for whatever reason, to move to another place in order to build a new community, if he or she has the ability to persuade others to follow. There is no coercion in these cases; each individual, man or woman, chooses where or with whom he or she lives. The only pressure is affective; no one likes to live away from close relatives.

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Rituals

The set of rituals that take place every three or four years in the xekitian, the time of green corn (December and January), is called nixpupimá, kaxinawá “baptism”. The nixpupimá is an initiation rite. From the moment they “commemorate” nixpu for the first time, the bakebu (creatures) become txipax and bedunan, boys and girls. They become sex-differentiated and are suitable to be initiated into the tasks and roles specific to their sex.

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The nixpu is a forest plant whose broken stem is repeatedly struck against the teeth, staining them a shiny black. This effect is beautiful, aesthetic for the Kaxinawá. In mythology Isa hana (seven-coloured bird) is called nixpupia hawendua (beautiful because it ate nixpu): it has a black beak. Isa hana is a bird that is very concerned with beauty. Its own plumage is already beautiful: blue with a red cauda. Isa hana saw that Bixku txamini’s body was covered with mange so foul-smelling that his wife abandoned him. Ixmi (the king hen) came to eat him, but Bixku fought back and Ixmi lost a lot of his white feathers. Then Isa hana arrived and cured Bixku with medicinal plants in exchange for the white feathers that ixmi lost. With the white feathers Isa hana made himself a nice cocar [feather crown] to wear nixpupima.

The blackened teeth are part of the make-up for parties and rituals, as well as designing the body with jenipapo [fruit of the Genipa americana] and painting the body with red achiote paste (maxe), with peanut oil (tama xeni) or pupunha [Bactris gasipaes] (bani xeni), mixed with perfume (ininti), a habit that has become, due to the use of clothes, rarer nowadays. The nixpu is considered crucial for the health of the teeth; the Kaxinawá say that its juice protects and strengthens them.

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Txidin

Txidin occurs annually at xekitian, the time of green corn, or after the funeral rite following an important death (a chief or shaman). The grief and sadness caused by loss can threaten the vitality and well-being of the community, and the txidin serves to reinforce faith in life and lift spirits: its purpose is to protect the living.

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The txidin is characterised by the dewe songs (which tell of the creation of the world), by the dance of the song leader (txana xanen ibu) and his companion, an apprentice, stamping their backs with shells on their shells, and by the costume of the song leader. This is the only occasion when the cushima is worn, a long dress, all keneya (with design), a cocar (maite) of white and red feathers from the parrot’s tail, the hawe (ornament hanging on the back), with sparrow hawk feathers and caudas made from the feathers of various birds (kuxu dani, hana dani, etc.) and with the tail of the coatipuru (kapa hina).

The song leader, thus adorned, represents the Inca and his allies: the sparrowhawk (tete), the king hen (ixmin), the txana. The Inca is linked to half of the inubakebu (sons of the jaguar) and there is a whole set of symbolic associations that revolve around him: the corn, the cold, eternal life, the jenipapo and the sun.

Half of the duabakebu (sons of brightness), on the other hand, is linked to the cobra, to red, to cyclical movement, to putrefaction, to the moon. However, these are contextualised complementarities, which means that the meaning of each element of the pair changes according to the situation.

The txidin is part of the nixpupimá ritual sequence. The song leader in the nixpupimá stomps around the fire lit near the place, in the house, enclosed with mats, where the inmates are in their hammocks. He is dressed in the clothes of the Txidin, the Inca, and the songs of the first part of the nixpupimá ritual tell of the men’s (dua) visit to the Inká (inu) village. Capistrano’s young informant told him that they take part in the preparation of the feast and Omã (nixpupimá), the collective hunt, the making of the stools (kenan), the frame of the tene (the support for the hawk feather ornament), the ornament that characterises the txidin. Then the nixpu and the pupunha thorns (banin muxa) are taken to pierce the lower lip and nose flaps. The first part of this initiation rite is an exhaustive run from one side of the courtyard to the other, the whole day; hand in hand with the mother, in the case of a girl, and with the father, in the case of a boy. The children run with sparrowhawk feathers on their backs.

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Katxanawá

The Katxanawá, the fertility ritual, exists in various versions and can initiate the nixpupimá “festival”. Katxanawá usually takes place several times a year. Visually, the ritual is characterised by the dance of the juxin of the forest (covered from head to toe with jarina straw and painted, in the parts that appear below the achiote straw) around the hollow trunk of the paxiúba (tau pustu, katxa). The trunk was cut, debarked and emptied into the forest by the men of the half that remained with the ritual role of the invader.

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Before the missionaries’ campaign against the use of alcoholic beverage, the caiçuma [a kind of masato] was kept for six days in the trunk of the paxiúba (covered with banana tree leaves) to ferment. The village would dance for five days around the katxa and on the sixth day, guests from the other villages would arrive to drink the fermented drink (muxetan) together. Only one person told me that the fermentation was accelerated by spitting into the brew (a custom still in use among the Katuquina and Yaminawa).

With visitors, dancing and drinking all night, the contents of the katxa were emptied. After emptying, the same katxa is used to receive vomit: “Vomiting is good so that people do not become sluggish, soft; just like in nixi pae (ayahuasca), people also vomit to clean the belly and become strong. You throw up and hold on again, don’t you? Then you can take more, always take. In the early morning the katxa is taken back to the forest and destroyed.

The katxa is the symbol of the womb, and the reference to the hollow trunk where the first Kaxinawá were created. This feminine element is adorned with yucca and banana tubes, masculine symbols. A group of men, all of the same half, begin the dance by coming out of the forest like yuxin from the forest who invade the village singing ho, ho, ho. This is the central element of the rite: the invaders from the forest are initially greeted with hostility: the other half, who did not go into the forest, represent the “inside”, the huni kuin, and take up their weapons to welcome the enemies. But after approaching the yuxin in the forest, the weapons are put aside and the two groups dance around the katxa, calling all the cultivated plants by their names.

In addition to dancing and chanting for a plentiful harvest with the help of the juxin of the forest, the Katxanawá involves the ritual exchange of hunting and fishing between the halves. Thus, a real Katxanawá is preceded by a collective hunt, carried out by each half separately, which can last from ten days to two weeks. In the morning it is one half that gives, at night it is the other half that gives. The same goes for the dance. On the first day the inubakebu come from the forest and the duabakebu receive. On the second day, the roles are reversed.

The Katxanawá has the characteristic of complementarity between the sexes. Both sexes participate in the ritual and this participation has explicit sexual connotations. After having called all kinds of bananas, cassava and maize, the men start chanting insults and ritualised provocations to the women. These are immediately responded to by the women, who form a dancing line, arm clasping the neighbour’s shoulder, and run in the direction of the men’s circle, tempting to break it. The women’s chants have a different rhythm and a significantly higher pitch than the men’s, and they try to detune the men’s chanting. This competitive exchange of insults is called kaxin itxaka (insulting the “bat-vampire”, a metaphor for the vagina) and hina itxaka (insulting the cauda, the penis), in a game that provokes much hilarity.

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New Fire Festival

This feast took place with the Katxanawá more than once a year, and consisted of putting out the old fire and lighting the new fire in a ritualised way, preceded by a collective hunt, which provided enough smoked meat for several days of feasting. The remains of the old fire were thrown away and on the day of lighting the new one everyone took a bath in the early morning. Nowadays the fiesta has lost its raison d’être. Like the ancestors, the Kaxinawá now make a new fire every day.

Nixpupima

In the evening, the children are called to gather at the leader’s house. Only the children who lost their childhood teeth and whose permanent teeth have grown in are ready for the initiation. Their hammocks are hung on the edge of the house and fenced with mats so that they can’t see anything.

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Mothers sit next to their children’s hammocks and start swinging them, chanting “kawa, kawa”. The children have to stay stretched out and cannot move. If any of them have to get out of the hammock, they can only look down at their feet. If they look up at the sky or the trees, a cobra or an ant with a sting as strong as a cobra’s could sting them. The children’s parents dance around the fire and chant pakadim, specific prayers for their children to “become strong and learn quickly”.

Early in the morning, the boys take medicinal baths to make them grow up to be hard workers (dayadau), and the girls receive a special bath to learn the design (kenedau). In addition to that, all children have their hair cut on that occasion.

After the bath, the children are painted black with jenipapo. They also brush their teeth with flat pebbles and sand to clean the impurities. After the washing, the children can drink caiçuma (mabex) made of corn.

Still in the early morning the corrida takes place. The men take the boys by the hand and run with them from one side of the courtyard to the other. When they stop to rest, it is the turn of the girls to run hand in hand with the women. This goes on for the whole day and for the next two days. “Those who fall will not live long, those who don’t fall will survive. In the evenings after the run, the men sing the pakadim, as on the first night, and the women swing the hammock, singing “kawa, kawa”. The children don’t eat anything, they only drink mabex.

In between the running, the children rest on the benches (kenan) made by the parents for the occasion. The child’s mother paints the bench with the juice from the leaves and wood of the txaxuani, which she dyes black, and with maxepa (achiote bravo), which dyes the wood a reddish colour. The motifs used include the xunu kene (sumauma design). The bench is made from the sacupima (aerial root, bema) of the sumaúma (xunu), a light, white wood. The xunu is a very large tree and considered powerful by the Kaxinawá. It hosts giant yuxin (the nixu, hida yuxin).

Women do not receive benches, just as they do not take xixi pae (hallucinogenic drink, ayahuasca). The female custom is to sit cross-legged on a mat, whereas the men sit on a bench (kenan, tsauti), on a jabuti [kind of turtle] shell, on an upturned xaxu, hollow side down or, when the man is the oldest in the house or an important visitor, on the sitting hammock (hisin).

On the evening of the last day of the corridas, the children receive a plate of nixpu as they lie down in the hammock. They chew the nixpu and spit it into a plate. They chew it until their teeth are black. Then they fast (samake) for five days: they can only eat maize caiçuma. They can eat again when the blackness has come out of the teeth, i.e. after they have left the liminal phase, marked by the blackness. [/expand]

Dau

The dau category includes white remedies, ornament and body care, and phytotherapy. To be attractive and beautiful, the Kaxinawá person washes herself a lot (twice a day), removes all the hair from her body, paints herself red with achiote paste with oil (but without overloading the colour, so as not to look like Kulina, which is ugly) and lets herself be styled with jenipapo. The nails are cleaned and cut with a fine stone, the teeth are brushed with sand and stone, the hair and face are washed with white clay. To shave, men rub ash on their jaw and remove the beard with a conch shell (information that I could not verify by observation). In the past, women plucked their eyebrows.

Men, women and children wore white cotton sashes (huxe) on the wrists, ankles and arms (puxte), necklaces (teuti) around the neck made of black beads (meimatsi) and cotton cords or crossed necklaces on the chest (mane haxkanti) before the entry of clothes. Men wore a thin ribbon (tinetxi) that secured the penis, women wore a cotton skirt (xanpana) painted with perfumed annatto. Men and women wore ornaments on the lower lip piercings (cotton, beads or a thin piece of wood: mane keu), on the ears (pau), on the nose (one or several white or blue beads: dexu), a cotton thread between the nose and the ears (dedi). At festivals, men also wore parrot feathers on their nose flaps (demu) and feather crowns. Various types of dau were hung on the sashes, necklaces and headbands (or skirts): fragrant leaves, monkey, jaguar and jacaré teeth (the jacaré tooth is considered a means of protection against cobras), various types of beads, shells and pieces of leather.

Marriage

From the first menstruation onwards, the village men’s interest in the girl is legitimate. Suitors begin to appear and, sooner or later, she must marry. For the first marriage, the girl’s parents consider her kinship with the young, unmarried men in the community. It is important that the husband is a close cross-cousin, preferably from the same village.

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Before marriage, the mother consults the daughter, the suitor consults the mother, she talks to the husband, then to the suitor’s mother and finally the suitor asks for the young woman’s hand in front of the parents. The step from falling in love to marriage takes place from the moment the girl leaves her parents’ house and goes to sleep at her in-laws’ house. If he already has another wife, the man builds a house for himself, near his father-in-law’s house, where he will live with his wives.

On the morning after the first night, the new couple and their respective parents go to the leader’s house. The leader talks to the groom about his duties as a good husband: he has to make a roza for his wife, plant a lot of bananas, cassava and corn, be a good hunter, take good care of the children, and give love to his wife. To the bride the leader tells her that she has to take good care of her husband, make food for him, offer food to his visitors, weave his hammock, wash his clothes, give him love, take good care of the children. After the sermon, and after drinking the chicha that the leader’s wife offers them, the couple returns to the house with the bride’s parents; the groom’s parents go to their house.

Marriage is no reason for a party or for a greater ceremony than the one described. From the moment a man and a woman live in the same house, the expectation is that she will soon become pregnant. Only after the first child is born is the marriage considered consummated (infertility between the couple is reason enough to break the union). It is from the moment she becomes a mother – and not from the moment of marriage – that the girl ceases to be an adolescent (txipax) and becomes a woman.

The emergence of wirakotxa on Earth is therefore the result of Inka’s disobedience to Pawa, who had initially separated the Ashaninka from the whites. In indigenous mythology, Inka’s irresponsibility is more an example of a long list of mistakes made by Pawa’s sons in the original times. These mistakes together explain the current situation of the Ashaninka and the imperfections of their world.

The importance of this event is reinforced by many who believe that it was as a direct consequence of this act that the creator God ascended to heaven. Tired of the successive disobedience of his children, Pawa decided to leave them alone on earth and live in heaven, where he remains to this day, enjoying a perfect world. Others say that Pawa stayed for a while on earth, where he tried to build a wall to separate the Ashaninka from the whites.

In a general way, the vision that the Ashaninka of the Amônia River construct of the white can be likened to the generic category of malevolent spirits, kamari. Like them, the white is associated with death and disease (matsiarentsi). Indians believe that diseases are the result of these nefarious beings or the activity of an evil shaman through sorcery. In the face of the lazy and unknown diseases of the whites (mãtsiari wirakotxa), sheripiari wisdom is ineffective.

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