Indigenous Amazonian Survival Strategies in Response to Colonialism

 There are various existing theories within anthropology that are used to explain the cultural practices of the indigenous peoples of the Neotropical lowlands of South America. These groups are typically practitioners of slash and burn horticulture, living in small isolated nomadic groups throughout the tropical forests. Traditionally, within anthropology more of a functionalist approach has been taken in explaining their cultural practices, focusing on historical and environmental determinism as the reason behind adaptation and change. However, a more recent perspective within the discipline stresses the historical interactions between indigenous peoples in this area and arriving European colonizers as the root of cultural change. This theory sees the nature of indigenous cultures today as the result of indigenous reaction to various historical processes.

 As a means of survival, indigenous peoples of the lowland tropics were forced to adopt various strategies in the wake of European conquest of the Americas. With a focus on the newer ‘historical turn’ model which emphasises the long term effects of historical interactions between indigenous peoples and western socio-political structures after the onset of European colonization, indigenous peoples are seen neither unchanging primitives of pristine natural environments nor as hopeless victims of an inevitable historical course. Thus its sees contemporary cultural behaviour practices as a result of historical reactions to this new threat.

 In the decades and centuries following Spanish conquest vast numbers of indigenous cultures simply vanished. It is difficult to asses the scale of the death toll, but various recent theories suggest that the perhaps as many as 90% of the original indigenous inhabitants of the Americas died, directly or indirectly, as result of colonialism. Yet, others survived against the odds, in the sense that they have become neither ‘extinct’ nor have they been completely assimilated into western society. Indigenous people in the Amazon area today are the descendents of these survivors. In certain, often remote places, indigenous cultures have not only survived but flourished. It is certainly no coincidence that the most vibrant cultures are found in remote and isolated forest habitats, the people there today either survived in their ancestral homes due to their remoteness, or survived there because they fled to the remotest areas to escape the colonial regime. Anthropologist William Balée of Tulane University in Louisiana outlines five possible survival strategies that may have been adopted as a response to the colonial regime. He states that indigenous peoples could choose to;

 1) Resist colonization at the risk of extermination, usually through disease or outright warfare.

 2) Submit to colonial forces in order to survive and serve as mercenaries for them.

3) Flee to the forest, as far away from colonial society as possible and revert to nomadic hunter-gathering as a form of subsistence.

4) Flee to the forest maintaining a ‘trekking’ lifestyle; depending on fast growing crops and then leaving after the annual cycle is completed.

5) Flee to remotest forests to establish a village and depend on slow growing crops far from the reach of colonial society.

 

Balée’s first suggestion that indigenous groups could choose to resist colonization would more than likely result in the extermination of the group, either indirectly through disease or through outright warfare against them. If they choose to resist and stay on their lands they would most likely still attempt to practice their traditional form of subsistence; an ancient and ecologically adaptive method of cultivation known as swidden or slash and burn horticulture. Slash and burn horticulture refers to small plots of land that are cleared within a forest, through slashing down vegetation (the ‘slash’ part) and then fully cleared using carefully managed fires to remove the remaining shrubbery (the ‘burn’). The remnants of the fire will be left and constitute highly valuable fertilizer, adding greatly needed minerals to the agriculturally poor soils.

 An important aspect of these garden plots is the use of shifting cultivation, meaning there is a shift in focus on different types of vegetation throughout the process; the gardens pass through various stages throughout their life cycle. When the garden is first cleared, farmers plant high nutrient demanding crops such as corn, whereas in the later stages of the garden they transition to crops like manioc which survive well in the lesser quality soils. Since tropical rainforest systems are so fragile and the vegetation relies on a very thin and poor soil base, this method of subsistence means that the already existing natural ecosystem is not destroyed but instead crops and valuable wild resources are all carefully maintained. Additionally, the use of long fallow periods means that the fragile soils are never depleted over their nutrients and are given time to recover, a practice that is highly sustainable in the long term. This type of horticulture has been practiced in Amazonia for more than 5,000 years. Prior to European contact it seems that this way of life was perfectly adapted to the unique and limiting conditions of the neotropics. However, this has all begun to change, particularly in recent years due to resource extraction on traditional indigenous land with oil drilling, coal mining and logging as well as an influx of colonists, settlers and ranchers who clear large tracts of land to create pasture for cattle ranching. These practices all inflict irreversible and detrimental damage to the fragile forest ecosystem, impeding the ‘traditional’ indigenous way of life.

 Even if indigenous groups did manage to resist certain colonial pressures an unfortunate but likely scenario would be an immense loss of life to Old World diseases. Historical documents and cotemporary studies indicate that western diseases, which arrived in the New World with the arrival of the first European explorers, absolutely devastated indigenous populations all over the Americas. They created major epidemics due to the lack of resistance to common European infections amongst indigenous populations to diseases such as measles, whooping cough, influenza and even the common cold. These diseases not only followed early routes of European exploration, but were also carried unknowingly along indigenous trade roots, wiping out early populations even years before any European ever set foot in an area. Evidence for this can perhaps be seen in the western lowlands of the Amazon Basin. Early historical sources as well as archaeological evidence seem to suggest that this area was highly populated prior to European arrival, however when the first Spanish settlers arrived they described it as a ‘no man’s land’; void of people. This would suggest that most of the original inhabitants had either died or fled the area.

 

Additionally, the indigenous groups would have been subjected to attacks by Spanish soldiers as well as military invasions resulting in the forcible removal of tribes from their land. However, warfare would not have been just limited to European-Indian conflicts, Spanish presence and colonial factors such as slavery, forced labour and missionization would have undoubtedly changed the nature of indigenous warfare as well. As the colonizers spread and indigenous groups either fled or were removed from their homes, people pushed from their land were trying to find new homes and other tribes sought to protect their territory. Colonial pressures created endemic conflict between indigenous groups over land and resources an example of which can be seen among the Yanomamö of Brazil. The now infamous anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, who became well known for his highly questionable unethical work among the Yanomamö, documented a ritual feast known as the ‘Nomohoni’ or treacherous feast. It was initiated with gossiping and accusations of cowardice, stinginess and fights over women and then which progressed into chest pounding, slapping and even spear fights. The fights were usually over women and often resulted in raids to obtain women from neighbouring groups. Chagnon’s work lead to the Yanomamö gaining a reputation as iconic indigenous warriors obsessed with violence. It was later revealed that this practice was not as traditional and ancient as Changnon had previously suggested but instead a direct result of European contact. The Yanomamö have had a long history of contact and involvement with Europeans and this abnormal state of warfare came about as a result of the high value they placed on European steel trade goods. Due to this the group began to move their villages closer to trading outposts in order to gain monopoly over imported goods but this required the need to keep male relatives around to maintain the control. This marked a shift in their traditional residence patterns; since the Yanomamö were traditionally matrilocal, the focus on men to maintain the monopoly meant that villages became patrilocal instead resulting in not enough women for the men. The solution was to raid for women.

 

William Balée’s second suggestion was that groups could choose to submit to, as oppose to resist colonial forces, as a means of survival and frequently opted to serve as mercenaries for them. As mercenaries for the colonial regime indigenous Amazonians worked on behalf of Europeans assisting them in local armed conflicts against other tribes and furthered colonial interests. The main motivation for their involvement would presumably have been both monetary as well as the protection of and freedom from colonial forces. The Mindurucú tribe of the Brazilian Amazon are one such group that took on this role during the colonial era. They were feared throughout the area as fierce and powerful warriors and are infamous for their taking of trophy heads. Although the ethical issues of their involvement in European conquests has been raised, it was certainly this role that allowed for their survival as a group and the reason they remain culturally strong today.

 

If indigenous people choose to submit to colonial forces presumably they would either have stayed in their traditional villages or would instead perhaps have been moved onto church reserves under the guise of missionization. Here they would have had the somewhat dubious protection of Jesuit missionaries, however these missionaries also often used indigenous people as labourers for their own gains. Furthermore, indigenous people were often coerced into forced labour as indebted labourers or opted to involve themselves in the commercial endeavours of early Europeans, often collect items from the forest or working as wage labourers during the rubber boom.

 Balée suggests thirdly that indigenous peoples could opt to flee to the forest, as far away from colonial society as they could possibly get and revert to nomadic hunter-gathering as a form of subsistence. Contemporary nomadic tribes in the Amazon have not always practiced this way of life; instead it is a method of subsistence that occurred as a direct repose to colonial pressures. Nomadic people in this area today are regressed agriculturalists; they were once sedentary farmers. Agricultural regression refers to the process of loss of the ability to practice farming resulting in eventually resorting to hunting and gathering. These groups must then rely on wild products or the domesticated remnants of agroforestry left behind by their predecessors. Evidence for this can be seen in the fact that most nomadic peoples have an in-depth knowledge of numerous crops and the ability to cultivate them should the circumstances require it. Furthermore, these cultures have their own array of detailed terms for these crops within their local indigenous language.

 Another indigenous response to colonial pressures that suggested by Balée is that groups could flee to the forest and depend on fast growing crops while maintaining a ‘trekking’ lifestyle. Trekking refers to groups that split up for extended periods of time throughout year, abandon their villages and embark on extended gathering excursions into the forest. These groups tend to live primarily in the savannas of Amazonia and spend long periods on trekking and hunting expeditions in the immense and remote gallery forests that boarder the banks of the Amazon. The savannas of the Amazon region in terms of geography lie between the equator and equatorial forests; they are characterized by great seasonality and extended dry seasons, frequently lasting over seven months and resulting in dry desert like conditions. Any vegetation that does exist is often fire and drought tolerant, but agriculturally quite poor. The great seasonality tends to result in there either being too much or too little water at any given time, these harsh environmental conditions create agriculturally poor lateralized soils. There are numerous savannas that exit across the Amazonian basin from the Llanos of Colombia and Venezuela, to the Rupununi savannas of Guyana and Brazil and the Llanos de Mojos in Bolivia.

 The trekking lifestyle that is utilized by people in these areas consists of a mixed subsistence pattern; part agriculture, part hunting and gathering. Groups who use this practice first will plant high yield fast growing crops, various seed and cuttings in small cleared plots before the onset of the rainy season. They then abandon their villages and gardens after the annual cycle is completed to embark on long trekking trips into the forest to hunt and to gather plants. An example of contemporary inhabitants of savannas and practitioners of this lifestyle are the Kayapo of the Brazilian Cerrado. This group of indigenous Gê speakers is known to use more than 98% of the indigenous gallery forest vegetation, suggesting perhaps that these environments are more anthropogenic than originally thought.

 The final indigenous response that Baleé suggests in that groups could flee to most remote and isolated forests and establish a village in undesirable areas. Here they could establish traditional gardens, rely on slow growing crops and practice slash and burn agriculture far from the reach of colonial society. Groups which employed this strategy of survival found that by fleeing to isolated and undesirable areas they could, to some extent, maintain their traditional lifestyles. The most vibrant and numerous indigenous cultures can be found today in the remote and agriculturally poor areas around Blackwater Ecosystems, this is because the soils are so lateralized and poor they are of little interest to national governments in terms of development and agriculture programs. These river systems drain ecologically poor areas that are characterised by closed nutrient cycling vegetation, plants with anti-predator mechanisms (poisons and toxins) and highly acidic soils none of which is conducive to agriculture. The Rio Negro is the largest Blackwater ecosystem and home to many vibrant indigenous communities. Here communities had to adapt to the poor soils by relying heavily on shifting cultivation and having extended fallow periods for gardens, sometimes upwards of thirty years. It is also here that the greatest reliance on bitter manioc and the greatest elaboration in preparation of this potentially poisonous plant can be found since this crop does remarkably well in the poor soils.

 Evidence supporting the theory that these groups fled to this area to escape colonial pressures comes in various forms. Firstly, many communities have origin myths that stress their origins outside the areas they currently inhabit. The Tukanoan tribe of the Vaupes Blackwater ecosystems stresses their ancestral home and place of origin as the ‘milk river’, a reference to the silted Whitewater river system of the Amazon. Numerous other groups also know they came from somewhere else and this is reflected in their origin myths. The Chaci of the pacific lowlands claim to have left their Andean homeland during the 1530s, after the Inca were defeated. Additionally, within the Tsátchela tribe, also of the pacific lowlands, volcanoes play an important role in their religion and the group has an in-depth knowledge of mountains despite there being no mountains anywhere nearby. They too seem to trace origins back to Andes. It seems then that at a time of immense violent and oppressive European presence in the Andean highlands that created upheaval and change, completely desecrating the Incan Empire certain groups did flee, supporting Baleé’s original theory. A further line of evidence supporting the presence and nature of these contemporary communities in this area as a direct response to colonial pressures can be seen with the high levels of multilingualism found amongst groups  in the Vaupes blackwater ecosystem. There are suggestions that this is not a traditional, pre-Columbian pattern, but instead a result of historical factors and the fissioning of various groups that fled to the area after colonial era.

 These types of interactions between indigenous cultures and western socio-political structures are not a thing of the past, but continue in various forms today. In this neo-colonial, rather than post colonial era we inhabit these types of interactions, power struggles over resources and the subjugating of non-European peoples continues to happen, not as explicitly perhaps as in the past, but subtle forms of colonialism remain. This is exemplified in the current conflicts over oil drilling on indigenous land in the Ecuadorian Amazon region, as documented in the short film “Trinkets and Beads”. This documentary followed the Huaorani indigenous group as they fought to remove oil companies from their ancestral land. It showed the immense destruction that oil extraction had inflicted on the environment, including massive deforestation, pollution of the air, and contamination of the streams and rivers which in turn had killed off much of the wildlife. Additionally, the toxins released into the air and water supplies created severe and long lasting range health complications for the indigenous population.

 A long list of questionable and unethical practices can be chalked up against the various oil companies that operated on Huaorani land. Firstly, it seems they were closely involved with missionaries who came to “civilize” the Huaorani, which ultimately meant removing them from their remote villages onto church ran reserves. With the indigenous inhabitants gone, the desirable land was free for development. Many of the indigenous groups were never consulted and did not give permission for oil companies to start prospecting on their land. The Huaorani did not want any drilling on their land as they had seen the lasting damage and destruction to the environment that years of oil extraction had done on neighbouring tribes land. Those that did give some form of permission were not fairly compensated for the true value of the resources that had been extracted. Additionally, extraction and development pushed indigenous people off their land and out of their homes, which they were also never compensated for. Most shockingly perhaps is that rather than creating deep underground wells, as is customary practice when drilling in North America, the oil companies pumped the waste crude oil and water mixture into large lagoons, which contaminated the water supply. They then separated the oil from the mixture and disposed of it by spreading the toxious mixture on the roads causing vast environmental damage and made living off the land almost impossible. Together these factors threatened the Huaorani’s traditional way of life through loss of land, resources, subsistence and culture.

 In response, various indigenous groups lobbied against the oil companies with the help of lawyers. They staged protests and picketed outside the main offices, all with little or no effect. The oil companies did not compensate them either for the resources or the damage that had been caused; instead they ignored demands, manipulated the situation and offered bribes to appease groups.

The language used, particularly by the American missionaries and oil executives alike had very ethnocentric undertones and frequent explicit statements that mirrored outdated colonial ideas about “civilisation” and “progress”. The Huaorani were referred to as godless heathens living in sin and that the only way forward for them was to accept western culture. In reality the practices and attitudes of the oil companies in particular almost exactly mirrored those of the colonial regime.

 

Self-determination can be outlined as the innate right and ability of a person to make choices regarding their own life without any influence from external sources. In regards to indigenous peoples it is a process initiated within indigenous communities by which they take control of their future and decide how to will address any issues and challenges facing them. Considering this various key issues need to be met to insure indigenous self-determination. Primarily ideas, initiatives and solutions should come from within the community. They should asses their own needs and goals should be set by the community and carried out by indigenous peoples, in some cases with outside assistance and support but in a collaborative way which does perpetuate dependency. This belief is mirrored by The United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples which emphasizes “the rights of indigenous peoples to maintain and strengthen their own institutions, cultures and traditions, and to pursue their development in keeping with their own needs and aspirations” (United Nations : 2007)

  Additionally, indigenous peoples must be allowed to maintain a distinct sense of ethnicity, culture and language and be able to continue important cultural practices which hold the communities together. In instances where a long history of colonialism, European contact and oppressive government policies have threatened cultural practices, cultural identity and resulted in loss of language, groups should be assisted with cultural and linguistic restoration, revitalization and growth programs spurred by communities. Furthermore, indigenous groups must have recognised land titles to ancestral and traditional indigenous lands, which would imply some sort of acknowledgment that the land provides a cultural and spiritual base for many indigenous communities. This would also include having enough land to practice traditional subsistence patterns should they so desire, having a say in the use resources on their land and being compensated in for any resources extracted from indigenous land. In order to insure this, indigenous groups would probably have to attempt to gain legal rights to their lands.

 All in all it shows the importance of community members being able to navigate political and social institutions outside of their own in order to maintain a degree of self-determinism. Since they are not “isolated”, but find themselves with in contemporary nation states, whose policies affect their lives it is vital that indigenous groups have a knowledge of and participation in the political sphere so that they might pursue their own visions of economic and social development. Such a situation is exemplified with the case of various indigenous groups of western Amazonia, namely the Shuar and Runa tribes of Ecuador. In response to various pressures and the threat of colonisation and oil extraction the Runa, like the Shuar before them, banded together to create a strong indigenous self governed political organisation to represent the interests of indigenous peoples.

Their organisation, the Federation of Indian Organisations (FOIN), like many other Pan-Indian groups in South America lobbied for legal titles to traditional land, petitioned for compensation for extracted resources and environmental damage and initiated legal action and law suits against major international oil companies that had occupied their land. Maintaining a strong and visible presence on the political scene allowed them to gain support of international groups and NGOs which legitimised their cause and later led to the Ecuadorian government acknowledging some of their requests. Thus demonstrating that with knowledge of the political system and an ability to navigate it, indigenous people can be self-determinate and gain control over their own futures. 

Shannon Turner-Riley

ANTH 391: Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon

Instructor: Dr Peter Stahl
Midterm 2

Friday 2^nd November, 2011

References Cited

The United Nations.
2007 Decleration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, U.N General Assembly.
http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/en/declaration.html, accessed 29^th November, 2011