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Puyo Runa Imagery and Power in Modern Amazonia

At 5:00 a.m., May 12, 2005, a shrill blast of a trumpet awakened the residents of Central Puyo. The military band from Shell then played the national anthem. Simultaneous musical announcements throughout the growing city proclaimed the official founding day of Puyo to be May 12, 1899. The history of the date comes from Dominican documents that erroneously claim that all of greater Puyo's indigenous people came here as an ecclesiastical delegation from the Dominican administrative center at Canelos in 1899. There, according to this official regional and national mythology, Friar Álvaro Valladares became the true civilizer and founder of Puyo, for, it is publicly and redundantly recited, he brought "half-civilized Indians" from Canelos with him to create a new order at the previously savage site in the rainy forested valley at the base of the Andes. Thus, it is claimed, began the inexorable march toward "acculturation" into a nation governed by "whites" who proclaimed the motherland to be "mestizo, Christian, and civilized" (Anonymous 1935; see also Monteros 1937; Yépes 1927).

The polarity of civilization and savagery is publicly celebrated every year on this day as the founding day of Puyo (N. Whitten 1976a; D. Whitten 1981). This year though, and in subsequent years, there was a new twist: the eleventh of May was declared "the day of the nationalities" (indigenous people) and given over to indigenous marches, thereby separating the urban citizenry into "Indian" and "non-Indian" in a modern replication of the colonial construction of the Republic of Indians and the Republic of Spaniards. Once again, indigenous historicity was silenced. While the polarity of savagery and civilization and the triumph of the latter over the former continues to be celebrated every twelfth of May in Puyo, and while this has become part of national myth, other versions of the founding and cultural makeup of the Puyo Runa exist.

Indigenous Mythohistories

Nayapi's Christian name was Javier Vargas. According to many indigenous people who "remember" their origins, this legendary leader came to Puyo from Shuar territory, south of the Pastaza River, and he was cradle bilingual in Quichua and Shuar. He may have spoken other languages and dialects too. A story seldom told, though, is that Nayapi was closely related to two Achuar men who came from Peru to settle the territory between the mouth of the Puyo River and the Llushín River, a region where Shuar and Achuar mingled, where tensions were constant, and where people spoke Quichua.

Nayapi belongs to the Times of the Grandparents. His parentage is buried in the Times of Destruction. Pierre (1983) and Valladares (1912:24-25), the early history writers, state with their own authority that the population of Puyo had been decimated around 1870 by a "Chirapa" attack led by the warrior Sharupe, and that at the time of the arrival of the group from Canelos in the late nineteenth century there were already fourteen native families, two families from Baños, and one from Macas. Nayapi was there at the arrival, and he was and continued to be a great leader.

In the 2000s older people remember the early families, especially those headed by shaman-warriors-yachaj runa and sicuanga runa as they were called over the last century, shamanes and guerreros as they are often called in the 1990s and the new millennium-who became the founders of the separated indigenous territories that go back past grandparental times, beyond the times of destruction, to callarirucuguna, the beginning times-places.

A founding Indigenous Myth

In today's nature, which emerged at beginning times-places, Nayapi is a swallow-tailed kite (Elanoides fortificatus). Mythically, Nayapi was a great fisherman, predator of riparian life. In the long and complicated myth of Nayapi there are many events as the great man travels from house to house. Others are traveling too, men and women, and the way these stories are told involve narrative spirals and songs intersecting with other narratives and sung spirals. Two women, Manduru Warmi (red woman) and Widuj Warmi (black woman), also trek from house to house in the Nayapi myth, sometimes with him, sometimes not. In some tellings of the myth Nayapi is accompanied by a hideous brother, Tsuna (puss person), who leads the women astray in multiple sexual adventures.

As the story we tell here proceeds it is punctuated by many events, interpretations, interruptions by listeners and pauses by tellers. Manduru and Widuj come to the house of a foreign person, Machin Runa. While the women are asleep in the center of Machin's great oval house, he-the Capuchin monkey in today's world-ties them up with chambira palm fiber. When they awaken at dawn they find that the fiber has turned into spiny bamboo. They are trapped in a cage of painful thorns that could impale them if they were to struggle. They cry out-"Who can help us?" Hearing their cries, the game birds of the forest arrive, one by one. First comes Paushi (helmeted currassow, Pauxi pauxi); he tries so hard to help; he cuts and he cuts and he dulls his beak trying. He just cannot cut the bonds; he is powerful, but he lacks the capacity to liberate. Then comes Pawa (Spix's guan, Penelope jaquacu) and the same thing happens. Yami (pale wing trumpeter, Psophia leucoptera) and many others try-still failure, still inability to accomplish the task of freeing the women. All of these birds were warriors, according to the knowledge of the Puyo Runa and of the other real people in their cultural territory.

Sicuanga Runa arrives with his great machete and he cuts and slashes and takes the spines out of the bamboo and he frees the two women. Then they blow their magical breath on Sicuanga, "suuuuuuuuu Sicuanga Runa," they say, "saquiringui!" ("Stay this way!"). Widuj paints him black with Genipa americana; then Manduru paints his beak, collar, and the area between his tail and his body red and yellow. She paints with her coloration, the Bixa orellana (annatto) paint. Together they give him white, fluffy cotton for his chest. He becomes, and he stays, Sicuanga. He flies with his beak pointing forward like a lance; he is the toucan bird, sicuanga; his spiritual force is humanoid, Sicuanga Runa. The two women then change other birds into their present, diverse avian forms, and they make game animals for humans to hunt and then to cook and eat. They blow on Machin and make him a monkey person, almost human, and he, too, stays that way. Then the two women ask, "What will we be?" One says, "I'll be manduru," and the other says, "I'll be widuj," and they transform themselves into the two trees whose seeds provide red and black dyes to the Runa.

When one listens to stories of Nayapi, whether told by Quichua, Shuar, or Achuar speakers, events such as the one just sketched are brought into memory. Sicuanga Runa appears in many of the spiraling and intersecting tales that punctuate the telling of pasts and understandings of presents. There is an enduring message to be conveyed. Anthropologists and others now call the message "indigenous historicity." By this we mean that one is listening to someone tell about an event or person that is salient in people's past times. The salience of liberation emerges very clearly in this tale. The modern representation of Sicuanga is crucial if we are to understand one of the root metaphors from which the branching stories radiate: Outsiders-foreigners-correspond to the mythical Machin Runa. Machin Runa is human, but the nature of his humanity is not known, nor is it clear whether he has a Runa-like soul, or whether spirit substances exist in his inner "will" (shungu), which defines much of the good and evil of the self. Foreign monkey-person is, however, part of the human universe and he will remain so.

In the beginnings Machin Runa, this foreign male person, tied up two women; Sicuanga Runa freed the women. They continued and continue their adventures from house to house, turning beings into their present forms by blowing upon them with their magical breath. Manduru and Widuj made animals for humans to eat. In the processes of such creation everything is clearly related: all animals, plants, inanimate objects, spirits, humans. They created the colors red and yellow on black and white to provide beauty to the world. Images, muscui, must be beautiful and rooted in knowledge. From knowledge comes the ability to understand the pasts and places of real people, and to "see" events of the present times and places. Sicuanga freed the two women so that they could continue their adventures, and so that the world would be as we can know it today. All this begins in the mythic tales of Nayapi, and modern history begins with Nayapi, the real person and ancestor of many contemporary Puyo Runa.

Puyo Runa Historicity

Nayapi was a real person in the Puyo area. He was sinchi curaga, a strong leader. As sinchi curaga Nayapi derived his authority from close relationships with the Dominican priests of Puyo and Canelos. From these curas Javier Vargas obtained and redistributed valued trade goods such as machetes, pots and pans, ax heads, powder, caps, and shot. He was also known as curaga because he could, when necessary, rally the dispersed, dissenting native people in the greater Puyo area against the threat of unacceptable encroachment. But just as he rallied people against the Church, from time to time, he also drew them together for the Church and for the state, which the Church represented.

Nayapi was a legendary power broker between Church-state centralized authority and dispersed indigenous dissidence. Today real people remember the resistance side of Nayapi's curagazgo. In Spanish-Quichua mix he was known as gobiernoshina, like a government. They see the swallowtail kites wheeling around and attacking the palm trees in search of small birds, eggs, and reptiles. They tell of Nayapi's legendary resistance, which is Sicuanga Runa's side of ongoing native life. Most don't usually remember, however, who the brothers of Javier Vargas were, what language they spoke, or where Nayapi lived and where he died. Memory of him now attaches to different ancestors, and while the force of indigenous historicity is transmitted generation to generation, its specifics lie with fewer and fewer people.

One such set of remembrances, which may be learned in different places with different variations, comes out of the region of Nayapi Llacta. They unfold in this way. Nayapi and his wife, Dila, and their children maintained a swidden garden near Puyo. They also maintained distant chagras six- to seven-hours' hard trek south of town in a rugged forest territory known by national and international explorers as a no-man's land. Nayapi acquired access to about two thousand hectares of land when, it is said, he confronted a Jurijuri spirit in a great but hidden opening in a formidable rain-forest hill near a rocky feeder stream of the Pazyacu River. There, at midday, alone, near the Jurijuri's secret cave, Nayapi prepared and drank the powerful hallucinogen Brugmansia suaveolens, called wanduj by the Runa and until recently called Datura in English. He then traveled in the spirit world with the forest spirit Amasanga, also known as Sacha Runa, forest person. Together, spirit and curaga drove the Jurijuri-overseer of rain-forest animals, especially monkeys, and other people-from his lair, and as the worlds of spirit and animals and humans again separated from one another three days later, Nayapi controlled the land while Amasanga controlled the forest and environing weather, upon which the fecundity of the land depends. In conquering this territory and making it his llacta, Nayapi created a bond between nature and supernature that developed and consolidated into his binding social space. A llacta is domesticated by male and female activity; its ecological dynamics are known and respected. People live there, hunt and fish there, and garden there. This space contrasted with Machin Runa allpa-foreigner's turf; it became Nayapi Llacta, his territory, and that of his consanguineal and affinal heirs.

Mamach, one of Nayapi's daughters, first expanded her chagra in Nayapi Llacta. Her husband, Lluwi, cleared the trees for her, and she brought hundreds of stems of manioc to plant. But before she planted she put one manioc stem in front and one on each flank of the pile; the main stick was the curaga and the two other sticks assistants. Then she painted the manioc curaga sticks and the two assistants with manduru and she painted her face with the same Bixa orellana paint. In stories of beginning times-places, the spirit master Nungüi emerges. This is a strictly feminine spirit who is very aggressive. Manioc sticks are her daughters and any perceived aggression or disrespect toward them incurs retaliation against one's human children.

Mamach, together with her older sister, wife of a powerful shaman from the Napo River region, and two unmarried daughters sang and danced to the garden spirit Nungüi. Manduru protected them and tamed the manioc stems so that they would not suck blood from humans-especially babies-or destroy the forest. When women paint manioc stems and themselves red they respect their spirit mother Nungüi and her root-crop children. By the mediation of Manduru, Nungüi refrains from sucking the blood from Runa children. Nungüi left stones, one red, one black, for Mamach to find. Once found they were quickly hidden in the garden region; only Mamach and Nungüi knew their locations. The stones were water polished, smooth, and pretty-sumaj. Each contained the soul (aya) of a spirit woman who could communicate between the spirit master and the master gardener.

The next day Mamach and her daughters began to plant in the cleared forest-garden domain while Nungüi worked in the undersoil-leaf litter forest-garden domain. Mamach and her female partners worked by day, and while they slept Nungüi worked by night, pushing the manioc sprouts up and helping other planted crops, including the poisonous barbasco, which is for fishing-and which is botanically closely related to manioc-to grow into something of a lattice of food-giving life. Just before dawn the planes of growth, one nourished by Nungüi and one nourished by the women gardeners, come close together. It is during this time that waking people can "see" the world of humans and spirits as overlapping, as existing on the same plane of vision and knowledge.

Mamach's husband, Lluwi, was a strong shaman (sinchi yachaj), "strong one who knows." Many people came to him when they were ill, some trekking there from the high Andes or deeper Amazonia. Together, patient and shaman would drink another hallucinogenic brew, called ayahuasca (soul vine). While the visionary world of darkness flickeringly interacted with the Runa world of the barely discernible night fire, shaman and client would discuss the illness and its possible sources. Then, while sitting on a bancu, a carved wooden stool in the shape of a water turtle, Lluwi would fly to distant lands, where he would ward off incoming darts, lances, and other missiles sent by hostile or jealous shamans. Then he would return, with greater shamanic capacity than before. He whistled, chanted, and sometimes played a Runa-style three-string violin (where the third string is a spirit-bringing drone), or readjusted it to a two-string Achuar-style violin, which has no drone.

Lluwi's passages into and out of the spirit world were facilitated by his growing and developing relationship with forest spirit-master Amasanga, through whom he communicated with the first shaman and spirit master of the water domain, Sungui, who is also known as Yacu Supai (water spirit). Through time he had acquired water-polished spirit stones from many regions, river banks, hills, rivulets, forests, and the stomachs of animals and fish. These served as the tangible media to his multiple communicative spirit networks.

After his displays of power, and after gaining the strength of universal forces, Lluwi would suck out magical darts sent by evildoers to the vulnerable people in the kinship network and household of another powerful person. If the evil were intentional Lluwi would retaliate by sending killing missiles of his own back at the odious, living shamanic source. Lluwi's power to heal and to inflict illness was drawn from the spirit domain of the encompassing water system, from Sungui, an ever-present spirit force that is kept under control by forest master spirit Amasanga. Amasanga in turn is controlled by feminine Nungüi forces. Lluwi, many people said, would one day become a dangerous and powerful bancu, a seat of power for the spirits, and then he would "see" beyond time. He might even acquire the transformational power of tsumi, which would allow him to return to this world after his death, as a great black jaguar.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Puyo Runa by NORMAN E. WHITTEN JR. DOROTHEA SCOTT WHITTEN Copyright © 2008 by Norman E. Whitten Jr. and Dorothea Scott Whitten. Excerpted by permission.
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