Zaparo's lost secrets - Zaparo Indians try to save their language and culture - Brief Article

Carlos [*] Andrade

The hundred or so Zaparo Indians who Live in the Ecuadorian Amazon are racing against time to save their language, land and culture

'My name is Manari, which in my language, Zaparo, means a hefty lizard that lives in the forest. But if we want to register ourselves for official purposes, we're obliged to put down Spanish names. So I'm also called Bartolo Ushigua. The Zaparo used to be one of the Amazon's greatest Indian peoples. Our shamans were very powerful because they knew the medicinal secrets of more than 500 plants."[1]

Twenty-five-year-old Manari is the son of the last shaman, who died three years ago, and chief of the 115 Zaparo who live in the Amazonian province of Pastaza, along the banks of the Conambo River 240 kilometres south of Quito. The river has brought all the misfortunes that have speeded up the decline of the Zaparo--settlers, disease, the rubber boom, slavery, wars, oil drilling and "the modern world".

"When the white rubber traders came to our forest," says Manari, "they took away our people to work as slaves and to sell them off like chattels. They also brought with them diseases that our shamans didn't know how to cure. So most of our people died."

"The Zaparo are officially extinct in this country," announced an article published in Ecuador nearly 10 years ago. But today they are still fighting to survive, though the number of threats are more than they can count--in their language, numbers only go up to three.

For the last three years young Zaparo led by Manari and supported by the Pastaza Indigenous Peoples' Organization (OPIP) have been engaged in a battle to save their culture and traditional way of life as hunters and gatherers. They have three main objectives: to keep alive the Zaparo language, to clearly mark out Zaparo territory and to arrange a meeting with Zaparo who live over the border in Peru. The results so far have not been very encouraging.

The last shaman

They have not been able to meet their Peruvian kinsfolk, from whom they have been separated since a war between Ecuador and Peru nearly 60 years ago. The journey can take a month when the river is low and up to three months during a flood. It was only a couple of months ago that someone gave the Zaparo a small motor-boat. Diplomatic contacts would also have to be made to enable the Ecuadorian Zaparo to journey into disputed territory.

"We're Ecuadorians," says Manari, "but once upon a time the Zaparo were a single people living in a single forest. So we're not used to getting permission to cross borders or search for our people."

The plan is for a group of four children, already chosen, to go and meet the shamans on the Peruvian side who will teach them their methods. This is crucial if the community is to survive, because when the last shaman died three years ago, the Zaparo lost their only source of knowledge about their traditions, the healing power of plants and the secrets of the jungle. "Since my father died, there's been no one to look after us, and many people are ill and dying," says Manari.

Traditional knowledge and the remedies of shamans can only be handed down through language. Preserving the Zaparo language is more than just a cultural matter. The physical survival of the community itself is at stake. And the plan to save it is a race against time because only five very old people still speak Zaparo and they live several days' journey from each other. One of them is Sasiko Takiauri, who was born about 70 years ago on the banks of the Conambo. "In those days," he says, "everyone spoke Zaparo. I didn't learn Quechua until I was 18."

The story of Zaparo is similar to that of other indigenous languages in the Ecuadorian-Peruvian region. Zaparo forms part of the Zaparoan linguistic group, together with Arabela, Iquito and Taushniro, and is related to other languages that have already disappeared (Konambo, Gae and Andoa). It gave way to Quechua relatively recently. It was about 60 years ago, according to Sasiko, that the Zaparo began identifying with the culture of the Quechua Indians through frequent trading with the Quechua village of Sarayacu.

These days, Sasiko's grandchildren and great-grandchildren who live in the Zaparo villages of Llanchama, Cocha, Jandia Yacu and Mazaramu, are taught Quechua and Spanish under a bilingual curriculum decreed by the government. The teachers, secondary school graduates who do not originate from the villages where they teach, are paid $4 a month and openly say they will leave the region as soon as they can. Most of their pupils do not speak Spanish and learn Quechua almost entirely in oral form.

"We don't like asking for help," says Manari, "but since there are now only a few of us left, we're afraid it's the end of the road." Meanwhile, the old folk, led by Sasiko, are once again giving children names in the vernacular--such as Newa, Toaro, Mukutzagua (Partridge, Parrot, Oriole)--to show the world the Zaparo have not died out.

(*.) Ecuadorian linguist and journalist

(1.) Manari's words are taken from a letter sent two years ago asking the cultural attach[acute{e}] at Ecuador's embassy in Peru to intervene so that the Ecuadorian Zaparo could cross the frontier and meet the Zaparo of Peru.

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