Achuars of the Pastaza River, Ecuador
Achuar hunter - airport
Flintlock or Blowgun?
Typical Home
The village school
Located at a 240 km from Quito, the Achuar Tribal Territory has 5,000 square kilometers and an approximate Achuar population of 4,500 indigenous people. European Missionaries discovered the Achuar in 1976 in an area otherwise overlooked by previous explorers and resource exploiters. The search for oil and gas brought many groups to the Pastaza, yet the discovery of Achuar people, essentially a Stone Age people, living within 200 miles of Quito, Ecuador’s capital, was astounding.
As the story goes, after a brief meeting between the missionaries’ guides and the Achuar, it was decided that the first goal was to stop Aschuar clan murders. To do so, the missionaries had the bright idea to make the murderer responsible for the family (wives and children) of the victim, feeling that the burden of more mouths to feed would slow the excessive murder rate. The Achuar leadership adopted this idea and the missionaries continued on with their exploration of the Pastaza watershed, vowing to return after getting re-supplied at one of the trading outposts on the eastern edge of the Andes. In 1978, the missionaries returned to the Achuar on the Pastaza and after a brief review of the social changes since their last visit, got the Aschuar leadership to adopt a new rule; a man could have no more than 9 wives. The figure nine was selected because it was the actual number of wives one of the elder men had accumulated over the two year period since the missionaries’ last visit; this dominant and violent elder murdered 8 married men.
The extended family unit is the key structural building block of Achuar society. The activities of daily life are determined, almost exclusively, by an early morning waking from a drug induced hallucinogenic stupor. The family usually beds down at sunset after ingesting a large portion of chicha, an herbal porridge made from the manioc plant. The manioc is also known as Cassava, Mandioca, Tapioca plant, Sweet potato tree and Yuca (not to be confused with Yucca). The large, tuberous roots are rich in starch and are the source of tapioca and arrowroot, a thickening agent. By early morning, say 3 a.m., the male and female rise and typically sit by the smoldering embers. They collect their children and proceed to discuss their dreams of the night before. Each person, takes a stab at interpreting the dreams in terms of the new day’s activity. The father and mother have the last say, but often the children's’ ideas are incorporated into the result. If a dominant dream has a vision of a child hiding in a tree throwing fruit onto the roof of the hut – the interpretation might be that the father would be hunting monkeys that day – and so he would. If the dream were about a great feast of some sort, the day may be spent hunting yams and other roots.
Dreams are also interpreted for other purposes like solving a crime or making a marriage match. If a family member gets ill, develop blisters from handling a hot cooking implement – a dream may tell of a member of a neighboring clan who took over the spirit of the fire and then, purposely, heated the handle of the tool in order to burn the hand of the specific individual. The father, who might of dreamed this notion during his drug-induced sleep would then seek retribution from the person controlling the fire-spirit. Retribution may range from burning down the house, possessions and killing the whole family to simply killing the one person possessing the fire-spirit. In either case, it would then be incumbent on the relatives of the murdered victim(s), based on hard evidence or another dream, to retaliate in like kind. Hard evidence, eye-witness accounts and dreams seem to carry equal weight in Achuar society. Typically, an illness, especially one that is fatal, leads to an avenging murder – which leads to a second avenging murder, which leads to third avenging murder and so on and so forth.
The Aschuar see spirits in most living things. There are spirits of the fish, insects, animals and birds. Often the spirit of a particular animal, fish, insect or bird is actually believed to be the spirit a specific ancestor or a personal friend who inhabits the wildlife. Sometimes wildlife is possessed by one’s own enemies. In most cases the spirit assigned to a particular animal is known to the person making the assignment, e.g., the monkey with the odd shrill cry is my wife’s dead brother. If, for example, my brother were short and powerful, I may embody his spirit in the tapir that was seen by the river. Or, maybe my mother’s spirit possesses the body of a pink porpoise that travels the river each day at twilight and that might be very comforting.
The notion of the fauna being spirits of family and friends was important for a number of reasons. First it diminished the loneliness of solitary hunting for days on end. Second, it embraced jungle fauna as co-conspirators in one’s survival. There is no wonder that the hunter will succeed with all his relatives and friends’ spirits embodied in the fauna surrounding him while he sits and waits, otherwise, all alone.
There is a nobleness in the idea that the hunter will not fail and his family will not starve, because even the hunter’s brother, embodied in the tapir will sacrifice his animal flesh for his former human family's nourishment. Then, there is the spiritual fulfillment as well. The dying spirit of the tapir, the spirit of my brother, transforms instantly into the spirit of a specific monkey that just happens to sitting overhead and nearby but out of range of the hunter’s blowgun dart, for obvious reasons. At the moment the tapir's last breath is exhaled, the instant transformation of the friend or relative into another living animal (spirit), one can imagine, is very comforting in a jungle that is dark and forbidding, where game is difficult to kill, and when the family is so stressed for food.
Hoatzin, the only member
of g. Opisthocomus
Leg 3 .
