Indignous people in the Peruvian Amazon Struggle to Survive

In the mid 1980s, while attending the School of International Service (SIS) at The Americn University in Washington, D.C., I met Evaristo Nugkuag, a remarkable man who helped organise the indigenous people of the Amazon Basin. He received the Right Livelihood Award in recognition of his achievements. We became good friends and Evaristo would visit me and my family whenever he was in Washington, D.C. He invited me to visit the Peruvian Amazon and see for myself how his people were organizing themselves to confront their challenges. I did so on numerous occasions, providing advice on development projects and facilitating several workshops. I also wrote several articles. Over the years, I would work with indigenous people in numerous countries, and even in Siberia, and sadly discover that they all faced, and continue to face, similar problems. Environmentalists haven't always been their best friends. Native Americans in the U.S. and Canada and indigenous people everywhere could benefit tremendously by sharing information and collaborating. It has been going on for years, but it needs to be stepped up. The new social communication tools available through the internet should help with this.

Having just finished reading Sherman Alexie's The Lone-Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, a collection of related fictional stories about life in and around the Spokane Indian Reservation in the U.S. state of Washington, I thought I would share this article about the struggle of the Aguarunas and Huambisas. The article was published by several newspapers in the U.S.

NAPARUCA, Peru – The two Aguaruna Indians – sullen men in their 30s – arrived here with an unconscious seven-year-old girl in a peke-peke, a long, narrow dugout canoe powered by a sputtering nine-horsepower motor.

The girl was haemorrhaging from the nose and mouth.

One of the men was the girl’s father, the other was the owner of the canoe. They were both from the same village.

The girl had been bitten by a poisonous snake while picking fruit near her hut earlier in the day. By the time her mother returned from fishing and her father returned from hunting, she was already unconscious.

Because it was late at night and the Rio Maranon is dotted with treacherous whirlpools – especially in the rainy season – it took nearly four hours to get from the girl’s village to Naparuca, which has the only clinic within a two-day’s journey.

At the clinic, Lucio “Lucho” Yuu Tsamahain, 35, the newly appointed director of health for the Consejo Aguaruna y Huambisa (CAH), tried desperately to save the girl’s life. She was more than a patient to him – she was also his niece.

However, Yuu’s eight years’ experience as a paramedic told him that his attempts were useless. Too many hours had already passed. There was nothing he could do to counteract the snake’s venom.

The girl died.

Yuu’s eyes welled up with tears. The bloodstained body on the examination table became a watery blur, and he could no longer see the father’s pain. He could only hear the sobs – his own and the father’s.

Alone, the two men stood near the table and grieved.

After a while, the father wiped the blood from his daughter’s face, picked her up and carried her down to the muddy bank of the river for the long journey home.

Yuu locked up the clinic for the night. He paused for a few seconds at the door, looked toward the river, then headed in the opposite direction.

Exhausted from another 16-hour day, saddened by the girl’s death and angry at his inability to save her life, Yuu walked slowly, hesitantly, past the CAH headquarters, a long, concrete building with a tin roof. He walked past the hut that sheltered the generator, and on past the guest house, where foreign development workers frequently stayed while inspecting the projects their organizations had funded.

With so many changes in the last few years, Yuu wondered, were his people really better off than before?

That is a question being asked more and more by Indians throughout the Amazon Basin, as they daily attempt to confront a host of threats to their environment and culture.

In this sense, the Aguarunas and Huambisas are representative of all Amazon Indians.

Until recently, ceremonial war and headhunting played a prominent part in Aguaruna life. They were key to a man’s self-image. Life was meant to be adventurous and dramatic, death heroic.

The most highly prized virtues for a man were virility and contempt for death. Women were expected not to shy away from committing suicide if they felt their dignity was offended.

However, the last inter-tribal war between the Aguaruna and Huambisa was fought in the 1950s. No one is sure of the exact date. The last major internal war, a blood feud involving a large number of Aguaruna families, was fought in the late 1960s.

Today, 45 years after the Indians established contact with the outside world, the 47,000 Aguarunas and Huambisas of Condorcanqui province are undergoing a painful transition.

They are threatened by colonization, an influx of impoverished peasans from the Andes. Their culture is being undermined by fundamentalist Christian missionaries. And the penetration of the Peruvian market economy is having an adverse effect on the Indians’ environment.

Although traditional enemies, the Aguarunas and Huambisas decided in 1976 to unite and confront their common threats together. They formed the Consejo Aguaruna y Huambisa (CAH) – the Aguaruna and Huambisa Council.

While the CAH is a non-governmental, Indian development organisaton, it also serves as the Indians’ political structure. With the help of European development organizations, the CAH set up five programs: health, education and culture, legal defense, economic promotion, and a motorboat repair shop.

Today, the CAH has one of the best health-care systems in the Amazon. It boasts of a clinic with a pharmacy, as well as 100 “health posts” in as many villages. A trained paramedic is assigned to each post.

It is now looking into the possibility of acquiring computers powered by solar cells. With a modem, CAH officials would be able to keep in touch with the Lima offices of the Coordinating Body for the Indigenous Peoples’ Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA) – an international, lobbying organization founded by one of their former members, Evaristo Nugkuag.

The computer could also be used by the clinic to gather needed medical information, and th3 economic promotion program to keep abreast of the latest prices for plantains, the banana-like fruit that is a primary foodstuff.

Despite the CAH’s advances, life for the Indians of Condorcanqui province is still tough, by any measure. The average life expectancy is 39. Instead of heroic death, there is only death by snakebite, malaria, tuberculosis and diarrhea.

Although men continue to desire two or three wives, they can no longer afford to keep that many. Since their involvement in the market economy prevents them from hunting or otherwise providing for their families, they tend to abandon one of the wives, who usually hav anywhere from eight to 12 children.

The woman’s response, all too frequently, is to commit suicide.

“At least 28 women killed themselves last year alone,” said Maria Rebeca Deten Regoso, who is in charge of te clinic’s maternal and infant health unit. “Because of the many abandoned women, widows and single mothers, it is impossible for them to support their families. They need help.”

Deten is attempting to form a women’s organization that would offer counselling, and design and implement small-scale enterprises for women.

“But,” she asked, “where are we going to get the funding?”

While the Aguarunas and Huambisas have never been very organized beyond the extended family, they have always had the ability to forge key alliances when facing a common threat. This flexibility, according to anthropologists, allowed them to form the CAH.

Last fall the CAH inaugurated a two-month, bilingual/bicultural course for approximately 500 Aguaruna and Huambisa teachers. CAH officials said it marked the beginning of the Indians’ struggle to reclaim their culture.

“We need to re-establish or own traditional values before it is too late,” insisted Santiago Manuin Valera, the CAH’s vice president.

At the opening ceremony, Manuin summed up the feelings of the Indian community. In a speech directed at the few Peruvian government officials who had bothered to accept the CAH’s invitation to attend the inauguration, Manuin said:

“We have heard the government representative say that we should live together, mestizo (mixed-blood) and Indian, in peace and harmony. These are beautiful words. Beautiful. But we don’t want any more words. We want concrete action. For too long the indigenous people have been repressed. For too long the indigenous people have been exploited. But now I say, ‘Enough is enough!’”

Later that day, Yuu wondered whether his people would be able to survive. The problems seem overwhelming. The resources few.

But then Yuu smiled as he thought of something past that gave him encouragement.

“The Incas tried to defeat us,” he said. “Then the conquistadores came. They tried to defeat us. Then the mestizo came.”

Yuu’s smile spread across his face.

“You know, we have never been defeated,” he said proudly.