Waorani

In Ecuador's Yasuní rainforests and the lived history of the Waorani that live there, the commodification of first rubber and then oil shaped territorialization into particularly violent form. The formative role of rubber production in the 19th century involved local despots' imposition of a regime of violence. Reacting to this violent capitalist system, individual Waorani forged new socio‐spatial territories through violence with rubber slavers and cooperation with the Taromenane, a people who continue to live in isolation. Today, an oil complex exerts control to bring the end of Yasuní's commodity frontier, even while the Waorani Nation and Taromenane hold legal rights to parts of the forests. In this article, I analyse how rubber and oil exploitation has unfolded as capitalist territorial violence, spurring Waorani and Taromenane social expressions and political mobilizations that are at times violent, but primarily not.

Humanity's complex relationship with the natural environment presents extraordinary challenges for the future. Amongst these challenges we face, climate change has become a driving factor threatening life on earth as we know it. As this global phenomenon is closely interrelated with land use, this issue becomes ever more prominent in disciplines like landscape architecture. Indigenous people and their knowledge present an alternative form of control that works symbiotically with nature and present humans as land stewards. The use of fire in this context is explored through two case studies of Indigenous people from Australia and the Amazon Basin as a way to inform possible approaches to landscape architecture. What has been identified as a key outcome from this exploration of analysing Indigenous cultures is the understanding of perpetual change through dynamic means and its wide potential in creating socio-ecological betterment. The research is aimed at stimulating landscape architects to collaborate and learn from Indigenous communities and their relationship with land practices as a way to attain a guiding source of knowledge for future challenges.

Los indígenas latinoamericanos han sufrido cambios de identidad cultural, en especial a partir del contacto con culturas de Occidente. Para determinar el grado de cambio de identidad cultural es necesario disponer de un instrumento de medida. En la Amazonía, las dificultades para obtener datos de campo no han permitido establecer indicadores culturales. Este trabajo presenta un instrumento diseñado desde la óptica indígena que permite medir su identidad cultural. El estudio cualitativo enfocado en la Amazonía ecuatoriana dio como resultado un instrumento que aporta información de treinta subescalas y cinco escalas culturales, y fue sometido exitosamente a pruebas de validez y de fiabilidad. Por último, fue aplicado a tres poblaciones de diferente grado de contacto con la sociedad occidental para determinar sus diferencias.

In this paper, numerous Spanish and Quechua borrowings into the indigenous languages of Cofán, Siona, Cayapa, Colorado and Waorani are extensively presented in semantic and phonological terms, and regular, suggestive sound correspondences for all such borrowings into these languages are summarized. The Spanish borrowings are summarized in semantic categories pertaining to almost all possible categories including agriculture, nature, warfare, seafare, medicine, commerce, numerals, religion, law, time, and the household. The Quechuan borrowings are far fewer and pertain to nature, the household, religion and some basic verbs. A new somewhat surprising finding is Quechuan borrowings into the Siona and Waorani languages, respectively. For a semantic comparison, Spanish lexical borrowings into the Aguaruna language are presented at the end.

Resumen: Las prácticas agrícolas dan información que revelan la relación entre un grupo humano y el bosque. Este estudio describe y analiza el itinerario agrícola considerando que las acciones materializan las principales características socioculturales de los waorani de la Amazonia ecuatoriana: libertad de acción y autonomía personal. La observación participante y la identificación de las plantas cultivadas en dos aldeas waorani durante quince meses de investigación permitieron determinar los aspectos socioculturales y ecológicos del sistema de roza-tumba-pudre. La práctica de este sistema agrícola no es común en otras partes del mundo, siendo relativamente poco conocida y desvalorizada debido a su productividad. El presente artículo presenta un caso de estudio del sistema de roza-tumba-pudre inscrito en la cosmovisión cultural, prácticas agrícolas y representaciones que se mantienen a pesar del contacto con otros tipos de agriculturas. Los waorani continúan realizando estas prácticas agrícolas porque están en concordancia con su propia concepción de las dinámicas de transformación de los recursos naturales. Palabras-clave: Waorani. Amazonia. Prácticas agrícolas. Rasgos socioculturales. Sistema de roza-tumba-pudre. Abstract: Agricultural practices produce information that reveals the relationship between people and the environment. This study describes and analyzes the agricultural itinerary of the Waorani people of the Ecuadorian Amazon, through which major sociocultural characteristics are materialized: individual freedom and personal autonomy. During fifteen months of fieldwork in two Waorani villages, participant observation and field walks were undertaken to identify cultivated plants. With the collected information, socio-cultural and environmental aspects of slash-and-mulch were established. The practice of this agricultural system is not common in other parts of the world, it is relatively unknown and is undervalued because of its yield. This article presents a case study of slash-and-mulch agriculture as part of the Waorani cultural world view, agricultural practices and representations, which persist despite contact with other types of agriculture. The continuation of these agricultural practices can be explained by the very conceptualization the Waorani people have regarding the dynamics of transforming natural resources.

In this paper, some lexicon of the Cofán language, spoken in northeastern Ecuador and southern Colombia, is etymologized as Barbacoan loanwords. The suggestions are described in phonological and semantic terms. The correspondences do represent borrowings, rather than being remnants of any tentative genealogic affinity between the two, because a brief grammatical comparison shows practically no similarities whatsoever. Further (Pre-Colonial?) contacts appear to have produced some Colorado (Barbacoan) borrowings also into Siona, and, curiously, what appears to be specific Waorani borrowings into Cofán as well as Cofán borrowings limited only to the neighboring Barbacoan language of Awa Pit. Further, a few borrowings are also to be found limited only to pairs of the above languages (Cofán, Siona, Waorani or the Barbacoan languages, all spoken close to each other). Furthermore, one suggested rare phonological Sprachbund feature shared between Awa Pit and Cofán consists of the voiceless high vowels that both languages use.

[Draft paper version 4]

In this paper, a fair number of new Páez loanword etymologies are presented, as borrowings from Spanish, Quechuan, Cofán, Portuguese, Tucanoan and Barbacoan lexical sources. Páez, a language isolate spoken in southwestern Colombia, is previously known to have borrowings from some of these sources, and, apparently, several of them are from Pre-Colonial times, after which Spanish borrowings in almost all possible semantic domains permeated the language. Old loanword etymologies from some of the same sources are presented, as are Páez phonology and the phonological changes occurring with the borrowings, before the new suggestions are discussed.

The advances in the defense of Isolated Indigenous Peoples (IIP), which have been supported by the Ecuadorian State for the last 14 years, have not been translated into an effective protection within their territories. Even the acknowledgment of the existence of these peoples in article 57 of the 2008 Constitution ceased to exist every time the extraction of resources was prioritized. Over and over again, a “schizophrenic” State failed to keep the promises made to protect their rights.

By Eduardo Pichilingue Ramos for Debates Indígenas.