THE FOREST INDIANS
The people of a tropical forest live under conditions not unlike those
of the desert. The Sahara contains 2,000,000 persons within its borders,
a density of one-half to the square mile. This is almost precisely the
density of population of a tract of equivalent size in the lowland
forests of South America. Like the oases groups in the desert of aridity
are the scattered groups along the river margins of the forest. The
desert trails run from spring to spring or along a valley floor where
there is seepage or an intermittent stream; the rivers are the highways
of the forest, the flowing roads, and away from them one is lost in as
true a sense as one may be lost in the desert.
A man may easily starve in the tropical forest. Before starting on even
a short journey of two or three days a forest Indian stocks his canoe
with sugar cane and yuca and a little parched corn. He knows the
settlements as well as his desert brother knows the springs. The Pahute
Indian of Utah lives in the irrigated valleys and makes annual
excursions across the desert to the distant mountains to gather the
seeds of the nut pine. The Machiganga lives in the hills above the
Urubamba and annually comes down through the forest to the river to fish
during the dry season.
The Machigangas are one of the important tribes of the Amazon basin.
Though they are dispersed to some extent upon the plains their chief
groups are scattered through the heads of a large number of valleys near
the eastern border of the Andes. Chief among the valleys they occupy are
the Pilcopata, Tono, Piñi-piñi, Yavero, Yuyato, Shirineiri, Ticumpinea,
Timpia, and Camisea (Fig. 203). In their distribution, in their
relations with each other, in their manner of life, and to some extent
in their personal traits, they display characteristics strikingly like
those seen in desert peoples. Though the forest that surrounds them
suggests plenty and the rivers the possibility of free movement with
easy intercourse, the struggle of life, as in the desert, is against
useless things. Travel in the desert is a conflict with heat and
aridity; but travel in the tropic forest is a struggle against space,
heat, and a superabundant and all but useless vegetation.
The Machigangas are one of the subtribes of the Campas Indians, one of
the most numerous groups in the Amazon Valley. It is estimated that
there are in all about 14,000 to 16,000 of them. Each subtribe numbers
from one to four thousand, and the territory they occupy extends from
the limits of the last plantations--for example, Rosalina in the
Urubamba Valley--downstream beyond the edge of the plains. Among them
three subtribes are still hostile to the whites: the Cashibos, the
Chonta Campas, and the Campas Bravos.
In certain cases the Cashibos are said to be anthropophagous, in the
belief that they will assume the strength and intellect of those they
eat. This group is also continuously at war with its neighbors, goes
naked, uses stone hatchets, as in ages past, because of its isolation
and unfriendliness, and defends the entrances to the tribal huts with
dart and traps. The Cashibos are diminishing in numbers and are now
scattered through the valley of the Gran Pajonal, the left bank of the
Pachitea, and the Pampa del Sacramento.[2]
The friendliest tribes live in the higher valley heads, where they have
constant communication with the whites. The use of the bow and arrow has
not, however, been discontinued among them, in spite of the wide
introduction of the old-fashioned muzzle-loading shotgun, which they
prize much more highly than the latest rifle or breech-loading shotgun
because of its simplicity and cheapness. Accidents are frequent among
them owing to the careless use of fire-arms. On our last day’s journey
on the Urubamba above the mouth of the Timpia one of our Indian boys
dropped his canoe pole on the hammer of a loaded shotgun, and not only
shot his own fingers to pieces, but gravely wounded his father (Fig. 2).
In spite of his suffering the old chief directed our work at the canoe
and even was able to tell us the location of the most favorable channel.
Though the night that followed was as black as ink, with even the stars
obscured by a rising storm, his directions never failed. We poled our
way up five long rapids without special difficulties, now working into
the lee of a rock whose location he knew within a few yards, now
paddling furiously across the channel to catch the upstream current of
an eddy.
The principal groups of Machigangas live in the middle Urubamba and its
tributaries, the Yavero, Yuyato, Shirineiri, Ticumpinea, Timpia,
Pachitea, and others. There is a marked difference in the use of the
land and the mode of life among the different groups of this subtribe.
Those who live in the lower plains and river “playas,” as the patches of
flood plain are called, have a single permanent dwelling and alternately
fish and hunt. Those that live on hill farms have temporary reed huts on
the nearest sandbars and spend the best months of the dry season--April
to October--in fishing and drying fish to be carried to their mountain
homes (Fig. 21). Some families even duplicate _chacras_ or farms at the
river bank and grow yuca and sugar cane. In latter years smallpox,
malaria, and the rubber hunters have destroyed many of the river
villages and driven the Indians to permanent residence in the hills or,
where raids occur, along secret trails to hidden camps.
Their system of agriculture is strikingly adapted to some important
features of tropical soil. The thin hillside soils of the region are but
poorly stocked with humus, even in their virgin condition. Fallen trees
and foliage decay so quickly that the layer of forest mold is
exceedingly thin and the little that is incorporated in the soil is
confined to a shallow surface layer. To meet these special conditions
the Indian makes new clearings by girdling and burning the trees. When
the soil becomes worn out and the crops diminish, the old clearing is
abandoned and allowed to revert to natural growth and a new farm is
planted to corn and yuca. The population is so scattered and thin that
the land assignment system current among the plateau Indians is not
practised among the Machigangas. Several families commonly live together
and may be separated from their nearest neighbors by many miles of
forested mountains. The land is free for all, and, though some heavy
labor is necessary to clear it, once a small patch is cleared it is easy
to extend the tract by limited annual cuttings. Local tracts of
naturally unforested land are rarely planted, chiefly because the
absence of shade has allowed the sun to burn out the limited humus
supply and to prevent more from accumulating. The best soil of the
mountain slopes is found where there is the heaviest growth of timber,
the deepest shade, the most humus, and good natural drainage. It is the
same on the playas along the river; the recent additions to the flood
plain are easy to cultivate, but they lack humus and a fine matrix which
retains moisture and prevents drought or at least physiologic dryness.
Here, too, the timbered areas or the cane swamps are always selected for
planting.
The traditions of the Machigangas go back to the time of the Inca
conquest, when the forest Indians, the “Antis,” were subjugated and
compelled to pay tribute.[3] When the Inca family itself fled from Cuzco
after the Spanish Conquest and sought refuge in the wilderness it was to
the Machiganga country that they came by way of the Vilcabamba and
Pampaconas Valleys. Afterward came the Spaniards and though they did not
exercise governmental authority over the forest Indians they had close
relations with them. Land grants were made to white pioneers for special
services or through sale and with the land often went the right to
exploit the people on it. Some of the concessions were owned by people
who for generations knew nothing save by hearsay of the Indians who
dwelt in the great forests of the valleys. In later years they have been
exploring their lands and establishing so-called relations whereby the
savage “buys” a dollar’s worth of powder or knives for whatever number
of dollars’ worth of rubber the owner may care to extract from him.
The forest Indian is still master of his lands throughout most of the
Machiganga country. He is cruelly enslaved at the rubber posts, held by
the loose bonds of a desultory trade at others, and in a few places, as
at Pongo do Mainique, gives service for both love and profit, but in
many places it is impossible to establish control or influence. The
lowland Indian never falls into the abject condition of his Quechua
brother on the plateau. He is self-reliant, proud, and independent. He
neither cringes before a white nor looks up to him as a superior being.
I was greatly impressed by the bearing of the first of the forest tribes
I met in August, 1911, at Santo Anato. I had built a brisk fire and was
enjoying its comfort when La Sama returned with some Indians whom he had
secured to clear his playa. The tallest of the lot, wearing a colored
band of deer skin around his thick hair and a gaudy bunch of yellow
feathers down his back, came up, looked me squarely in the eye, and
asked
“Tatiry payta?” (What is your name?)
When I replied he quietly sat down by the fire, helping himself to the
roasted corn I had prepared in the hot ashes. A few days later when we
came to the head of a rapid I was busy sketching-in my topographic map
and did not hear his twice repeated request to leave the boat while the
party reconnoitered the rapid. Watching his opportunity he came
alongside from the rear--he was steersman--and, turning just as he was
leaving the boat, gave me a whack in the forehead with his open palm. La
Sama saw the motion and protested. The surly answer was:
“I twice asked him to get out and he didn’t move. What does he think we
run the canoe to the bank for?”
To him the making of a map was inexplicable; I was merely a stupid white
person who didn’t know enough to get out of a canoe when told!
The plateau Indian has been kicked about so long that all his
independence has been destroyed. His goods have been stolen, his
services demanded without recompense, in many places he has no right to
land, and his few real rights are abused beyond belief. The difference
between him and the forest Indian is due quite largely to differences of
environment. The plateau Indian is agricultural, the forest Indian
nomadic and in a hunting stage of development; the unforested plateau
offers no means for concealment of person or property, the forest offers
hidden and difficult paths, easy means for concealment, for ambush, and
for wide dispersal of an afflicted tribe. The brutal white of the
plateau follows altogether different methods when he finds himself in
the Indian country, far from military assistance, surrounded by fearless
savages. He may cheat but he does not steal, and his brutality is always
carefully suited to both time and place.
The Machigangas are now confined to the forest, but the limits of their
territory were once farther upstream, where they were in frequent
conflict with the plateau Indians. As late as 1835, according to General
Miller,[4] they occupied the land as far upstream as the “Encuentro”
(junction) of the Urubamba and the Yanatili (Fig. 53). Miller likewise
notes that the Chuntaguirus, “a superior race of Indians” who lived
“toward the Marañon,” came up the river “200 leagues” to barter with the
people thereabouts.
“They bring parrots and other birds, monkeys, cotton robes white and
painted, wax balsams, feet of the gran bestia, feather ornaments for the
head, and tiger and other skins, which they exchange for hatchets,
knives, scissors, needles, buttons, and any sort of glittering bauble.”
On their yearly excursions they traveled in a band numbering from 200 to
300, since at the mouth of the Paucartambo (Yavero) they were generally
set upon by the Pucapacures. The journey upstream required three months;
with the current they returned home in fifteen days.
Their place of meeting at the mouth of the Yanatili was a response to a
long strip of grassland that extends down the deep and dry Urubamba
Valley, as shown in Figs. 53-B and 55. The wet forests, in which the
Machigangas live, cover the hills back of the valley plantations; the
belt of dry grassland terminates far within the general limits of the
red man’s domain and only 2,000 feet above the sea. It is in this strip
of low grassland that on the one hand the highland and valley dwellers,
and on the other the Indians of the hot forested valleys and the
adjacent lowland found a convenient place for barter. The same
physiographic features are repeated in adjacent valleys of large size
that drain the eastern aspect of the Peruvian Andes, and in each case
they have given rise to the periodic excursions of the trader.
These annual journeys are no longer made. The planters have crept down
valley. The two best playas below Rosalina are now being cleared. Only a
little space remains between the lowest valley plantations and the
highest rubber stations. Furthermore, the Indians have been enslaved by
the rubber men from the Ucayali. The Machigangas, many of whom are
runaway peons, will no longer take cargoes down valley for fear of
recapture. They have the cautious spirit of fugitives except in their
remote valleys. There they are secure and now and then reassert their
old spirit when a lawless trader tries to browbeat them into an
unprofitable trade. Also, they are yielding to the alluring call of the
planter. At Santo Anato they are clearing a playa in exchange for
ammunition, machetes, brandy, and baubles. They no longer make annual
excursions to get these things. They have only to call at the nearest
plantation. There is always a wolf before the door of the planter--the
lack of labor. Yet, as on every frontier, he turns wolf himself when the
lambs come, and without shame takes a week’s work for a penny mirror,
or, worse still, supplies them with firewater, for that will surely
bring them back to him. Since this is expensive they return to their
tribal haunts with nothing except a debauched spirit and an appetite
from which they cannot run away as they did from their task masters in
the rubber forest. Hence the vicious circle: more brandy, more labor;
more labor, more cleared land; more cleared land, more brandy; more
brandy, less Indian. But by that time the planter has a large sugar
estate. Then he can begin to buy the more expensive plateau labor, and
in turn debauch it.
Nature as well as man works against the scattered tribes of Machigangas
and their forest kinsmen. Their country is exceedingly broken by
ramifying mountain spurs and valleys overhung with cliffs or bordered by
bold, wet, fern-clad slopes. It is useless to try to cut your way by a
direct route from one point to another. The country is mantled with
heavy forest. You must follow the valleys, the ancient trails of the
people. The larger valleys offer smooth sand-bars along the border of
which canoes may be towed upstream, and there are little cultivated
places for camps. But only a few of the tribes live along them, for they
are also more accessible to the rubbermen. The smaller valleys,
difficult of access, are more secure and there the tribal remnants live
today. While the broken country thus offers a refuge to fugitive bands
it is the broken country and its forest cover that combine to break up
the population into small groups and keep them in an isolated and
quarrelsome state. Chronic quarreling is not only the product of mere
lack of contact. It is due to many causes, among which is a union of the
habit of migration and divergent tribal speech. Every tribe has its own
peculiar words in addition to those common to the group of tribes to
which it belongs. Moreover each group of a tribe has its distinctive
words. I have seen and used carefully prepared vocabularies--no two of
which are alike throughout. They serve for communication with only a
limited number of families. These peculiarities increase as experiences
vary and new situations call for additions to or changes in their
vocabularies, and when migrating tribes meet their speech may be so
unlike as to make communication difficult. Thus arise suspicion,
misunderstanding, plunder, and chronic war. Had they been a united
people their defense of their rough country might have been successful.
The tribes have been divided and now and again, to get firearms and
ammunition with which to raid a neighbor, a tribe has joined its
fortunes to those of vagrant rubber pickers only to find in time that
its women were debased, its members decimated by strange and deadly
diseases, and its old morality undermined by an insatiable desire for
strong drink.[5] The Indian loses whether with the white or against him.
The forest Indian is held by his environment no less strongly than the
plateau Indian. We hear much about the restriction of the plateau
dweller to the cool zone in which the llama may live. As a matter of
fact he lives far below the cool zone, where he no longer depends upon
the llama but rather upon the mule for transport. The limits of his
range correspond to the limits of the grasslands in the dry valley
pockets already described (p. 42), or on the drier mountain slopes below
the zone of heaviest rainfall (Fig. 54). It is this distribution that
brought him into such intimate contact with the forest Indian. The old
and dilapidated coca terraces of the Quechuas above the Yanatili almost
overlook the forest patches where the Machigangas for centuries built
their rude huts. A good deal has been written about the attempts of the
Incas to extend their rule into this forest zone and about the failure
of these attempts on account of the tropical climate. But the forest
Indian was held by bonds equally secure. The cold climate of the plateau
repelled him as it does today. His haunts are the hot valleys where he
need wear only a wild-cotton shirt or where he may go naked altogether.
That he raided the lands of the plateau Indian is certain, but he could
never displace him. Only along the common borders of their domains,
where the climates of two zones merged into each other, could the forest
Indian and the plateau Indian seriously dispute each other’s claims to
the land. Here was endless conflict but only feeble trade and only the
most minute exchanges of cultural elements.
Even had they been as brothers they would have had little incentive to
borrow cultural elements from each other. The forest dweller requires
bow and arrow; the plateau dweller requires a hoe. There are fish in the
warm river shallows of the forested zone; llamas, vicuña, vizcachas,
etc., are a partial source of food supply on the plateau. Coca and
potatoes are the chief products of the grassy mountain slopes; yuca,
corn, bananas, are the chief vegetable foods grown on the tiny
cultivated patches in the forest. The plateau dweller builds a
thick-walled hut; the valley dweller a cane shack. So unlike are the two
environments that it would be strange if there had been a mixture of
racial types and cultures. The slight exchanges that were made seem
little more than accidental. Even today the Machigangas who live on the
highest slopes own a few pigs obtained from Quechuas, but they never eat
their flesh; they keep them for pets merely. I saw not a single woolen
article among the Indians along the Urubamba whereas Quechuas with
woolen clothing were going back and forth regularly. Their baubles were
of foreign make; likewise their few hoes, likewise their guns.
They clear the forest about a mid-cotton tree and spin and weave the
cotton fiber into sacks, cords for climbing trees when they wish to
chase a monkey, ropes for hauling their canoes, shirts for the married
men and women, colored head-bands, and fish nets. The slender strong
bamboo is gathered for arrows. The chunta palm, like bone for hardness,
supplies them with bows and arrow heads. The brilliant red and yellow
feathers of forest birds, also monkey bones and teeth, are their natural
ornaments. Their life is absolutely distinct from that of their Quechua
neighbors. Little wonder that for centuries forest and plateau Indians
have been enemies and that their cultures are so distinct, for their
environment everywhere calls for unlike modes of existence and distinct
cultural development.