The Wayfinders (10 page)

One inevitable consequence of this unusual
marriage rule — what anthropologists call linguistic exogamy — is a certain
tension in the lives of the people. With the quest for potential marriage
partners ongoing, and the distances between neighbouring language groups
considerable, cultural mechanisms must ensure that eligible young men and
women come together on a regular basis. Thus the importance,
Reichel-Dolmatoff wrote, of the gatherings and great festivals that mark the
seasons of the year. Through sacred dance, the recitation of myth, and the
sharing of coca and yagé, these celebrations promote the spirit of
reciprocity and exchange on which the entire social system depends, even as
they link, through ritual, the living with their mythical ancestors and the
beginning of time.

Intrigued by what I had read, I arranged passage
the following morning on a military cargo flight to Mitú, a small settlement
without road access perched on a bend of the Río Vaupés three hours by air
from Villavicencio. There was no door on the plane, and I felt as if I were
riding the back of a pickup truck through the sky. I spent the better part
of a month in Mitú, botanizing with the local Indians — Cubeos and Tucanos
for the most part — but never came close to the heart of their world,
spiritually, culturally, or literally. The forests were so vast, the
distances too great, the rivers black and stunningly beautiful but broken by
an endless succession of cataracts and waterfalls.

Two years later I returned and persuaded a
missionary pilot to drop me at the Catholic Mission of San Miguel on the Río
Piraparaná in the homeland of the Barasana, an hour farther into the forest
from Mitú. It was about as remote a destination as one could devise in the
Northwest Amazon. But this too was a fleeting visit, and barriers of
language and protocol — I literally dropped in from the sky unannounced, and
many of the Barasana spoke little Spanish — left me with only a superficial
sense of the place, and a sad feeling that with the influence of the
missionaries, an extraordinary culture was destined to be lost. This was the
familiar lament of anthropologists of the day. Wherever we went, we
encountered what we assumed to be disappearing worlds.

But then, long after my first fumbling visits to
the Northwest Amazon, something remarkable occurred. In 1986, newly elected
Colombian president Virgilio Barco Vargas appointed Martin Von Hildebrand,
an anthropologist and protege of Reichel-Dolmatoff, as Head of Indigenous
Affairs, and told him to do something for the Indian peoples of Colombia.
Martin, who had lived for years among the Tanimukas and first paddled the
length of the Río Piraparaná as a young graduate student, did more than
something. In five extraordinary years he secured for the Indians of the
Colombian Amazon legal land rights to an area of some 250,000 square
kilometres, roughly the size of the United Kingdom, establishing 162
Resguardos
altogether — titled lands that were encoded by
law in the 1991 Political Constitution of the country. Nothing like this had
ever been done by a nation-state. In the years that followed, as Colombia
endured the ravages of war throughout the 1990s and early days of the new
century, a veil of isolation fell upon the Northwest Amazon. And behind this
veil, as Martin explained when he invited me in 2006 to return with him to
the Río Piraparaná, an old dream of the earth was reborn.

The night before flying out of Mitú, Martin and I
huddled on the cement floor of our modest lodgings, taking coca and tobacco,
as Ricardo Marin, a Barasana shaman, identified on a large map the sacred
sites we were about to see from the air and visit by river and trail. Martin
and his colleagues at Fundación Gaia Amazonas, a grassroots NGO working with
the fifty or more ethnicities of the Colombian Amazon, had codified in two
dimensions what Ricardo knew to exist in multidimensional space. In Barasana
there is no word for time, and the sacred sites are not memorials or symbols
of distant mythic events. They are living places, as Ricardo explained, that
eternally inform the present. For his people, the past is the present, and
the sacred sites are to this day inhabited by mythic beings.

The following morning our small plane rose into
the clouds and then burst over the canopy like a wasp, minuscule and
insignificant. The forest stretched to the horizon, with little initially to
betray that people had ever set foot on the land. Ricardo sat in front of
me, and I watched him intently as he took in the vista, wanting to see what
he saw. We flew that morning for four hours, circumnavigating the entire
world of the Peoples of the Anaconda, heading east from Mitú over the Río
Papuri and then south along the Taraira and the ancient ridges that separate
Colombia from Brazil. Reaching the confluence of the Río Caquetá and the
Apaporis, we turned west over the great cataracts of Yuisi and Jirijirimo to
the mouth of the Kananari, which we followed north across sandstone
escarpments that predate the birth of the Andes. To the west I could see the
distant silhouette of Cerró Campaña, small on the horizon, and the immense
flat-topped ridges of Sierra de Chiribiquete, uplifted tablelands massive
and impossibly remote. Clouds swept over the canopy, and at one point a
perfect rainbow arched across the sky, touching the forest on both sides of
the Río Apaporis, which flowed beneath it like a serpent through a silent
and unchanging forest.

We landed late in the day at the dirt airstrip at
San Miguel, the Catholic mission I had visited in 1977. I recognized the
fields, the setting of the great longhouse, or
maloca
, and the
white sands along the river where children and women bathed in the black
waters of the Piraparaná. But otherwise, things seemed very different. A
mission I recalled as a rather sad place of desuetude was gone. On our first
night a hundred or more people gathered in the maloca, men in feather
regalia, to dance, chant, and take sacred medicines, coca and tobacco,
chicha and yagé. Shaman huddled over calabashes of spirit food, whispering
and softly singing spells. For the first time I heard the haunting sound of
the sacred yurupari trumpets, created by the ancestors at the dawn of time.
Long condemned by Catholic priests as symbols of the devil, these mythic
instruments had been crushed and burned during the years of the mission.
That their sound was still here, inspiring new generations of Barasana,
Makuna, Tatuyos, and other peoples of the river, suggested powerfully that
the culture was very much alive. In the thirty years or more since my first
visit, the only thing that had disappeared on the Río Piraparaná, as Martin
said, were the missionaries.

Over the course of nearly a month, guided by
Martin and Ricardo and other Barasana and Makuna leaders such as Maximiliano
García and Reinel Ortega García, we travelled the rivers, attended
ceremonies, and visited sacred sites, cataracts where culture heroes had
done battle with the forces of darkness and brought order into the world,
domes of black stone that held up the sky, waterfalls that ran red with the
menstrual blood of Romi Kumu, the Great Mother and progenitor of the earth.
Flying in to join us midway through our sojourn was Stephen Hugh-Jones,
former head of anthropology at Cambridge, who with his wife Christine first
lived among the Barasana in the late 1960s. He returned now as a respected
elder, the only academic scholar fluent in the language. A humanist and
profoundly insightful ethnographer, Stephen had dedicated much of his
professional life to understanding the cosmology of the Barasana and their
neighbours. His presence turned the journey into an ongoing tutorial of
spirit and culture, an endless series of revelations that each day brought a
deeper understanding of a subtle philosophy that was dazzling in its
sophistication and profoundly hopeful in its implications.

There is no beginning and end in Barasana
thought, no sense of a linear progression of time, destiny, or fate. Theirs
is a fractal world in which no event has a life of its own, and any number
of ideas can coexist in parallel levels of perception and meaning. Scale
succumbs to intention. Every object must be understood, as Stephen told me,
at various levels of analysis. A rapid is an impediment to travel but also a
house of the ancestors, with both a front and a back door. A stool is not a
symbol of a mountain; it is in every sense an actual mountain, upon the
summit of which sits the shaman. A row of stools is the ancestral anaconda,
and the patterns painted onto the wood of the stools depict both the journey
of the ancestors and the striations that decorate the serpent’s skin. A
corona of oropendola feathers really
is
the sun, each yellow plume a ray. The infinite
elements of the Barasana world spin like a carousel in the mind, and there
is no one obvious point of departure for even a modest attempt to explain
the profundity of the peoples’ intuitions about the meaning of being alive —
save perhaps the maloca, the longhouse, which is both a physical space in
which the people live and a cosmic model of the entire universe.

If civilizations are measured, however crudely,
by the scale of their monumental architecture — just as we measure the
stonework of the Inca, the temples of the Maya — then the maloca is proof of
the stunning achievements of the ancient peoples of the Amazon. These
structures are enormous, their internal dimensions all-encompassing. Forty
metres in length, perhaps 20 abreast, with vaulted ceilings rising to 10
metres above a dirt floor hardened by ten thousand thunderous dance steps as
well as the quiet passage of children at dawn, the maloca is the womb of the
kindred, the dark and cool shelter of the clan, the communal space in which
occurs, and out of which emerges, every societal gesture of the spirit.

The symmetry of the structure is exquisite: eight
vertical posts spaced evenly in two rows, with two smaller pairs near the
doors, crossbeams, and pleated rows of thatch woven over a grid of rafters.
The house posts are named for the clan ancestors. The painted designs on the
front facade depict the spirit beings and the patterns of colour and visions
unleashed in the mind by yagé, the sacred preparation. On a mundane level,
the space is divided between the genders, with the front of longhouse being
reserved for visitors and men. This is the social axis where, in the flare
of resin and beeswax torches, coca is prepared at night and tobacco taken in
such concentrations that sweat comes to the fingertips and the world spins
wildly, yet always in harmonic resonance. The women control the opposite end
of the space, where the clay griddle rests on the four corner posts of the
world, and cassava, a deadly poisonous plant, is each day transformed by the
mothers into food, the daily bread of the people. The sustenance emerges at
one stage of its preparation from a carefully woven sieve that is itself the
mouth of the anaconda.

The roof of the maloca is the sky, the house
posts the stone pillars and mountains that support it. The mountains, in
turn, are the petrified remains of ancestral beings, the culture heroes who
created the world. The smaller posts represent the descendants of the
original serpent. The ridgepole is simultaneously the path of the sun, the
river of the sky, the Milky Way, the artery that separates the living from
the limits of the universe. The floor is the earth, and beneath it runs the
River of the Underworld, the stream of death and sorrow. Thus a celestial
river crosses the sky as its inverse, a chthonic path of death, traverses
the underworld. Each day the sun travels the sky from east to west, and each
night it returns from west to east following the river of the underworld,
which is the place of the dead. The Barasana bury their elders in the floor
of the maloca, in coffins made of broken canoes. As they go about their
daily lives, living within a space literally perceived as the womb of their
lineage, the Indians walk above the physical remains of their ancestors. Yet
inevitably, the spirits of the dead drift away, and to facilitate their
departure the maloca is always built close to water. And since all rivers,
including the River of the Underworld, are believed to run east, each maloca
must be oriented along an east–west axis, with a door at each end, one for
the men and one for the women. Thus the placement of the malocas adjacent to
running streams is not just a matter of convenience. It is a way of
acknowledging the cycle of life and death. The water both recalls the
primordial act of creation, the river journey of the Anaconda and Mythical
Heroes, and foreshadows the inevitable moment of decay and rebirth.

If the longhouse envelops the community, securing
its eternal presence, celebrating its mythical origins, the earth itself is
protected by a universal maloca that hovers over the land, anchored by the
sacred sites. The world of the Barasana and their neighbours is as flat and
round as the clay griddle the women use to make manioc bread. As clay blocks
prop up the griddle, so the actual sky, the roof of the cosmic maloca, is
supported by a distant ring of hills, through which pass four sacred
gateways. The doors of the North and South are the Rib Doors that link the
body of humanity to the cosmos. The gateway to the West is the Door of
Suffering, the destiny of the dead, and the axis through which destructive
forces enter and stain the world. The Water Door to the east leads to the
mouth of the Milk River, the point of origin where earth fuses with sky and
the sun is born. For the Barasana and Makuna, these gateways are actual
places, and travelling with Ricardo Marin we saw them from the air. The
world begins at the falls of Yuisi and ends at the cataract of Jirijirimo on
the Río Apaporis. The hills along the Taraira, and the falls of Yurupari on
the Río Vaupés and Araracuara on the Río Caquetá, the mountain escarpments
beyond the Kanamari — these are all physical points of origin, a mythic
geography written upon the land.