Introduction
The following exploration is based on several interviews with the two Ayoreo leaders Mateo Sobode Chiquenoi and Aquino Aquiraoi Picanerai. The interviews[1] took place between January 2008 and October 2009.
Mateo is between fifty-five and sixty years old and today lives in a settlement called Campo Loro, a former mission station. He was born in the forests. At the age of about nine, he and his group were forced by missionaries to leave the forests and their territory. The missionaries said it was no longer their territory and they were all going to be killed if they stayed where they had always lived. This was in 1959. Mateo and his mother, along with other members of the group, were deported to the mission station. His mother literally lost her mind on the way, as they were transported on the back of a truck and were exposed to the frightening experience of the tree crowns flying past at unaccustomed speed high above them, for hours on end. She was never to recover her true self and died some time later. Meanwhile, Mateo’s father, who had decided, along with other members of the group, to remain in the forests, died of measles within a matter of days, as a consequence of the short encounter with the missionaries. This is the beginning of Mateo’s contact story. It is very similar to many others in the recent past within the Ayoreo realm. During his life since, Mateo has gone through the different stages of relationship with and dependence on the missionaries but eventually, like many others, has come to realize that the mission’s proposals have never been and will never be compatible with being an Ayoreo. Between 2007 and 2009, he was president of UNAP – Unión de Nativos Ayoreo de Paraguay[2] – and particularly active in protecting the Ayoreo groups living in voluntary isolation. The other main field of action of UNAP is the recovery of the territories lost after the ‘ethnic cleansing’ by the missionaries. Mateo is also something like a spontaneous historian of the Ayoreo, and has also developed a capacity to oversee the collective past of his people, having reached a state of understanding and awareness of the collective past and present which enables him to communicate about it in the form of meta-reflections and discourse.
Aquino is forty-three years old. He was president of UNAP (2003–07). He was also born in the forests, in a different region from Mateo and in a different local group. He was contacted when he was three years old and deported to the mission station. He often refers to tales and memories his mother, an exceptionally knowledgeable and far-sighted woman, had shared with him during his life. Like Mateo, Aquino is a militant defender of indigenous self-determination. He is well known for his clear opinions and his capacity to express them.
The Ayoreo, nomadic hunters and gatherers, became known to the external, non-indigenous world only sixty years ago. Then, white people (settlers, oil companies, farmers, etc.) found that their vast territory of some thirty-one million hectares,[3] spreading across the Gran Chaco in northern Paraguay and eastern Bolivia, had to be made ‘safe’; thus, missionaries were brought and sent into the forests to make them free of ‘the savages’ – at that moment, non-indigenous society did not even know exactly with what indigenous people it was dealing. The ‘ethnic cleansing’ concluded with the deportation and imposed sedentarization of almost all Ayoreo local groups, with the exception of some six or seven groups (totalling 100–150 persons) presently living in voluntary isolation.
Methodology
The methodology applied to the present inquiry into indigeneity is one of the results of almost twenty years of my being near the Ayoreo, and of thousands of conversations whose experience is condensed in the clear conclusion that, in order to grasp and to start understanding the Ayoreo, it is far better just to be listening and waiting for knowledge, understanding and eventually meaning to appear, much as a hunter waits patiently for his prey, than to ask direct questions. If questions are asked at all, they serve to tentatively start, to motivate, to direct or redirect a conversation. Open, wide-ranging questions are better than precise ones, which leave only a narrow scope for answers.
The reason for this lies in a fact which is not new, but is not usually taken sufficiently into account: when talking to indigenous people, we communicate with a radically diverse realm, and one of its chief characteristics is its wholeness, its indivisibility. In the communication with this realm, two very different ‘awarenesses’ come to speak with each other, each from within its own paradigm. Paradigms are essentially incommensurable. The difficulties in the communication between these two specific paradigms arise, if we formulate it from the point of view of the characteristics of the non-indigenous realm, from the fact that our knowledge is fragmented, representing a fragmented world-view, and that we use abstractions in a way that reduces what is being talked about to an object. The Ayoreo discourse, in turn, always refers to an entire reality in its wholeness, and speaks about individual, concrete events, people, phenomena, very often using images which have a sensual quality that abstractions don’t have.
Within such a frame, standard interview questions cannot reach across adequately: either they miss their aim and fall into empty space, or they hit but only create confusion. Frequently, they then prompt responses that try to adapt somehow to what was asked about and to what is intuitively perceived as the interviewer’s own vision of things, inducing her/him to confirm what she/he had already believed in the first place. We often don’t even realize that this happens, unless we remain sharply aware of the radical, paradigmatic diversity.
We need a methodology of listening without asking questions. In my personal experience, the initial mention of the subject matter, or else the posing of a highly open-scope question, prompts the surging, on the indigenous side, of associations.[4] They often appear without visible order, quite irrationally for us, and they can take the form of tales, images, anecdotes, jokes, sometimes myths. Sometimes there is no visible connection between them and the topic we had mentioned or asked about. As a consequence, very often there remains only our intuition as a cognitive device to link elements to each other in order to detect the meaning they convey once they are linked up, while the tools of our own non-indigenous rationality[5] fail.
Trusting our intuition is often difficult for us non-indigenous people; our life culture does not usually train us to do it or even discourages its use as a cognitive tool. Thus, using it can give us a sensation of walking on ice that may prove to be too thin for our weight. There is no guarantee. But indeed, through the use of intuition, the images appearing in an indigenous person’s discourse can gradually facilitate our access to the knowledge we seek; they contain leads to an answer, and intuition can find these leads. A meaning starts to ‘compose itself’, and, in the Ayoreo realm, it is always a complete idea, a whole complete image, not an abstracted and marginalized fragment. This method, which is something like reading between lines and which obviously requires training and experience, goes beyond the scientific procedures commonly accepted by non-indigenous science. Its results, in our non-indigenous understanding, remain subjective, and as such could easily be disqualified. While writing this contribution, I have fought to be able to present a result acceptable also in non-indigenous, scientific methodological terms, until I recognized that this was an absurd pretension, precisely because the communication here occurs between the mentioned two radically, paradigmatically different realms. We discover that speaking to indigenous peoples forces us to abandon our own method, to abandon the safety of our own world, and it forces us specifically to reintroduce cognitive tools our life culture has long discarded: intuition, sensual qualities, ‘the heart’. We also discover, or reconfirm, that even a method carries the genetic code of the life culture that generates it, and, if applied without awareness, will transform into a colonial tool and end up colonizing the world.
It is interesting to note that these methodological difficulties and considerations themselves also provide information about the concept we are investigating. As a consequence, and to share this highly demanding communication process, I have chosen the form of an alternation between interview quotes and short paragraphs of commentary/interpretation which render the results of my own cognitive process based on the conversation. This allows for the reader to ‘listen’ directly to, and to ‘read into’, what the Ayoreo say, with the additional possibility of comparing it to, and following, my own reading and its conductive thread.
Before ending this methodological part, two concepts need to be explained, as they play a prominent, even structuring, role in the content of what follows. On the one hand, there is a timeline that is implicitly present in the discourse of the two Ayoreo leaders; it goes from a time dating some 250 years ago to the present; associations, like images, tales, etc., jump back and forth between the various time stages as if it all were present time or happening simultaneously. The other concept needing explanation is explicit: it is the concept of ‘contact’ – already mentioned in the short life descriptions above – and it appears on the mentioned timeline, dividing it into a segment ‘before contact’ and a segment ‘after contact’; the concept also appears in contact history. In all cases, it refers to a specific moment in a contact process beginning in the case of the Ayoreo shortly before 1960, when they started to be physically contacted by contact agents, usually missionaries, and subsequently were coerced to leave their territory and deported. It is the specific moment when their coherent cosmovision[6] collapses, as nothing makes sense any more. A change of paradigm occurs. When referring to indigenous peoples before this contact moment we speak about ‘indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation’.[7] All other indigenous peoples underwent in one or the other way such a process. The fact that the Ayoreo went through it very, very recently – and in fact are still going through it – may give them, as informants for our inquiry, a somewhat special quality related to their close proximity to their original life in a different life paradigm, and to the fact that they still and explicitly struggle with trying to understand what has happened to them, and to come to terms with the non-indigenous world and life paradigm imposed on them.
The interview
Benno: I am writing an article about what being indigenous means … What does ‘indigenous’ mean to you?
Mateo: We heard about that word, ‘indigenous’, for the first time in 1964. The white people used this word for the indigenous. It is a white people’s word. Only much later I started to grasp its meaning, but not even today do I know exactly what it means …
If somebody says [to me] ‘you are indigenous’, [then it] has little meaning to me. If I am asked [directly like that], I say ‘yes’ … but the person asking does not know what indigenous I am. If he says: ‘you are indigenous’, well, I cannot deny, or say that I am a Paraguayan, or that I am a German, I have to say ‘yes, I am indigenous’ … because I more or less know what he means [by that term], but in fact, I do have an origin, a name … it is ‘Ayoreo’.
[Mateo identifies the term as an external denomination, does not identify with it, and its exact meaning is not important to him. It is not a meaningful concept in the Ayoreo realm. It is a relational term given and defined by others. It does not even have a clear meaning for the Ayoreo. Mateo’s collective identity has a name: Ayoreo.
Thus, the initial question leads back to the external people or non- indigenous who have created and started to use the term. Mateo’s answer offers the non-indigenous interviewer a mirror: it is him/herself who has to answer the question about the meaning of ‘indigenous’, as well as possible further questions, such as ‘What is the utility or function of the term for us?’ and ‘What are the possible consequences of the use of this term and concept for the Ayoreo – or in general for the people we call “indigenous” – themselves?’ Before starting to answer such questions, however, and indeed also relate the answers to the very subject matter of the present publication and why its editors and contributors considered it relevant and important, the interviewer needs to continue listening to the Ayoreo as they emphatically state that, rather than indigenous, they are Ayoreo. What, then, is the meaning of ‘Ayoreo’? And what about other peoples the non-indigenous call ‘indigenous’ but who are not Ayoreo?]
Benno: You say you are Ayoreo, but the cojñone[8] call you ‘indigenous’, and they use the same word for other ethnic groups as well, like the Nivaklé, the Manjui, each one of these groups being entirely different … does this make you feel bad, as if you were not recognized in your own right …?
Mateo: No, it is not a problem. It even helps. I shall explain: [Normally] I prefer not to say too quickly that we are Ayoreo … Because if the person said ‘Are you an Ayoreo indigenous person?’ … well, then yes, if the person knows about [us] being Ayoreo, that can be a problem … But it can also be a problem if he knows we are indigenous …
Benno: How come?
Aquino: Because … once, some time ago, I accompanied a big group of elders to get their identity cards, and I said to them, my people: ‘There are a lot of strange people here in Asunción … please, nobody of you say that we are indigenous … because if we say we are, then the other people in their minds say: “the indigenous are ignorant! Do what you want, but any of you will be denied what he wants” … But if somebody [already] knows, then one should answer “yes”’.
It would be better for that person to say ‘people’, it is better not to use ‘indigenous’ [but ‘people’ instead] … it is then better to use softer terms, like ‘people’ … because ‘people’ includes everybody, Americans, black people, red, brown, black …
[For the Ayoreo, being identified as indigenous or as Ayoreo can have negative consequences: ‘indigenous’ is associated with ignorant; on the other hand, it may be added, many Paraguayans still regard the Ayoreo as being aggressive, belligerent, wild and violent warriors, referring to the time before contact (before 1960) when they were simply known as ‘savages’. In both cases, ‘indigenous’ and ‘Ayoreo’, it is better for them to hide, if they can.]
Benno: So, to say ‘people’ instead of ‘indigenous’ is a little bit like hiding …?
Aquino: Yes, yes. [It is] better to use a softer word … Benno: I understand. But all the same you are proud to be Ayoreo … Aquino: If anybody wants to know how we are, and …
[It is to be noted that Aquino says ‘… wants to know how we are’ … It means that for him identity is not being something – responding to the question ‘who’ – but being in a particular way – responding to the question ‘how’. We have here a distinctively specific and different way to conceive identity and to ‘be in the world’ … The concept of identity here appears as a ‘way of being’; likewise, the Guaraní use the term ‘ore tekó’ (our [exclusive] way of being), nowadays translated as ‘Guaraní culture’, to refer to a collective identity.]
Mateo: … what ethnic group we belong to … Aquino: … so we can say … ‘we are Ayoreo’ … and then the person can say: ‘And what is your language’ … and we have a language … and if the person wants to know more, then we tell more … how many we are, what language, what culture. So we feel good being Ayoreo, but if there are many other people, one has to be very, very careful … But there are cases when one has to say everything, in a meeting, in a meeting with people from other countries, or in a state institution …
Benno: A friend of mine recently took part in a parliamentary hearing on the new national law on languages which is in preparation. He went to testify that there are more than the prevalent languages Spanish and Guaraní, that there are others like an Enxet language, an Ayoreo language, and so forth … and then, there are again the dialects in each language, the Ayoreo have the same language as the Chamacoco but they speak differently … There is a tendency among non-indigenous people to overlook diversity and also to conceive all indigenous peoples as if they were all the same. As diversity is not being seen, neither is the wealth represented by diversity …
Aquino: It seems that the white people believe that we are an object … Because, as an example … if we see some thermos flasks, we say ‘thermos flasks’, but there are many … there are thermos flasks of different brands, sizes … So, the white people think that we are the same [as if we were thermos flasks[9]] …
Benno: An object?
Aquino: Yes, an object. This is so, [it is] like [when] we speak of receptacle, but there are many receptacles, plastic, glass, even metal and so on … So, they put a name on us, like an object …
Or they think that we also are an animal … For instance they say: ‘we are going to hunt wild animals’ … there are many species of animals, but they just put a [common] name to all of them … just as they say ‘the indigenous peoples of Paraguay’, they just put one name, instead of various, different names.
Mateo: The cojñone treat the Ayoreo like the chicoi plant[10] … we are like the chicoi which grows in our territory. As long as it is there, it is a root full of water, even in the dry season. Then somebody takes it away and carries it somewhere else, and it will no longer live … The cojñone treat the Ayoreo as if they were playing about with us, putting us here and there …
[Both leaders here react not only to the white or non-indigenous people’s tendency to mix any indigenous ethnic groups – or indeed ‘nations’, a term not yet accepted in Paraguay – together into an un- differentiated bunch. What they say goes farther: they share a perception which comes from their everyday experiences and feelings about the way they are being treated. The perception is that they are being treated like (abstract) objects, whose identities and characteristics can be generalized and, by way of generalization and abstraction, moved about, renamed, handled – ‘manipulated’ – with ease. It is an attitude which also extends to the discourse: ‘being spoken of without care’ … What the leaders say points to the fact that the Ayoreo have been an object of non-indigenous (white) people’s intentions and actions ever since being contacted (indeed, the contact initiative was always on the side of the non-indigenous, a fact which evoked an attitude of passivity on the Ayoreo side). In this way, not being recognized, seen and named as how they are is a problem – for instance, when government programmes do not care to respond to specific habits and needs. In general terms, ever since being contacted and forced into sedentarization and passivity, the Ayoreo have been subject to countless attempts and experiments by external groups (the contacting missionaries in the first place, later NGOs, government agencies, multilateral international projects) to provide them with an income and subsistence base, which have always failed because either they did not correspond to the Ayoreo culture and way of being, or the market changed. When a new attempt failed, the Ayoreo were often left to themselves without even being notified … This is the background to Mateo’s saying above that ‘non-indigenous play with us as they please’.
Beyond, what the leaders say also expresses one of the already mentioned main differences between non-indigenous and indigenous perception and discourse: using abstraction and generalization versus using concrete, individualized and specific terms. Abstraction and generalization are ‘diversity killers’ in ways that well deserve to be elucidated.[11]
Thus, the mentioned differences have deep, and also political, consequences for the handling, whether protective or not, of diversity, and relate directly to the environmental problems of today, as well as the lack of balance between genders in the non-indigenous world.]
Benno: Could you cease to be Ayoreo and become like somebody else? Aquino: On a recent journey up north to and within my ancestors’ [and our group’s] territory, we discovered and visited a region recently deforested by a Brazilian landowner in order to set up a large farm with thousands of cows. We spoke to him and told him that he and his farm were in our territory. He said as [an] answer that the time had come for us to have a different life and to become like white people … because he thinks that we have to abandon our culture … But: how could we possibly change? [becomes excited and angry] … and how could we possibly enter [into] another culture? This is impossible, this is impossible … we [are] like a plant, a plant of Palo Santo[12] cannot enter and convert into a white quebracho[13] … this cannot be like that then … Take an example: the Brazilians have their culture … their habits … and their traditions, I think they have them too … [it is the] same with the Paraguayans … [the] Paraguayans have their own language … their own way of singing, their own culture … and the same [is the case] with us … the indigenous peoples, those who live in voluntary isolation … [they] have their own tools, their own medications, their own singing, their own food … all that traditional, natural food, let’s say … and one cannot say, gee, people in voluntary isolation, [they] must abandon this food … this is very, very serious, if anybody says [you] must abandon this or enter into that … so, I really did not like [his] speaking [like that], when somebody says no! The indigenous peoples have to abandon their culture … because our culture is a traditional way of being … from there we are born … from there we commence our habit, culture, language, singing, [all] that we develop during our life … this is our culture …
[Aquino compares being Ayoreo to being a tree. It cannot change its particular, diverse way of being, its genetic code of growth, or its life plan. With this, he implicitly makes several statements. In the first place, ‘being Ayoreo’ refers to a collective individuality, and points to the fact that, for the Ayoreo, ‘peoples’ or ‘nation’ is not an abstract expression, but an indivisible entity instead; this is usually different for occidental, modern, non-indigenous societies, whose members tend to perceive themselves exclusively as individuals and as individual members of an abstract entity (state, country, nation). In the second place, there is a statement about cultural change or cultural transformation: it is not possible to become somebody else, neither as a person nor as an indigenous nation such as the Ayoreo (one can change, but only within the boundaries of one’s own identity – on an individual or collective level). Finally, there is a critical statement directed at those who want to eliminate divergent ways of being in order to bring them into line with the rest and with their respective intentions and domination plans.
This raises the possibility of viewing being an Ayoreo – and maybe also being indigenous – as an expression in itself, an implicit denial of the tendency towards ‘making everything the same’ and the destruction of specificity, natural and cultural diversity and locality, nowadays linked to the globalization processes. Thus, ‘being Ayoreo’ potentially becomes a political standpoint and statement in our present world.]
Benno: Many people think there is only one culture which is correct; they look down on other cultures and think that they should change … what do you think of that?
Aquino: No … Everyone has their own culture and their own living … and their own [way of] developing their culture and habits … for instance, if you were a white [person], [you] cannot enter, convert into a black [person] … it already is your blood, your life, your [particular] way of living … So, the white [people] have to understand this at least … for example, a sun cannot convert into a moon … there is a very big difference … or a star [cannot] convert into a sun …
[Occidental, modern life culture preaches and proposes something like a capacity of maximum ‘convertibility’: the possibility that we can become almost whatever we want (and should follow what advertisements and propaganda suggest) … In contrast, the Ayoreo leaders stand here for a denial of such interchangeability and ‘cultural mobility’ …]
Benno: What about the campesinos?[14] What do you think of the campesinos? … Are they indigenous?[15]
Mateo: No, they are white people.
Aquino: They are well educated, as well. They have a good formation. That is noticeable in each person, they are well formed … their leaders, their leadership … So, [they] seem more powerful than all of us … Yes! Because their ally sits in parliament. [It is] their ally more than ours. There is their ally … [gives the name of a senator] … Even the president himself, Lugo, is their ally.
[Aquino rejects the possibility of a closer association with the camp- esinos, but expresses admiration for what he conceives as their way of being powerful in modern non-indigenous society: to have a good education (‘formation’) … and to have political allies in the state structure …]
Benno: For the campesinos, the notion of community is important, as well as that of ‘ore valle’, a way of defining the physical, geographical place one belongs to most, although I don’t know whether it means anything comparable to what you call your territory. Campesinos long for, and belong to, the ‘valle’. What about you, Mateo? Remember the time you sat in the bus terminal in Asunción, waiting, and how you rang me to say that you felt alone? Yet you were surrounded by crowds of people … Was this also because you were far away from your territory …?
Mateo: I feel good when I am in [my community] Campo Loro, because all my people are there. In the bus terminal I felt bad even though I was surrounded by crowds. They were not my people. [When being among white people] I still feel that I am an Ayoreo. But I also feel ill at ease, as I am from somewhere else, and surrounded by people who are not Ayoreo. [In those situations] I feel better when there are several of us, when it is possible to meet another Ayoreo and to speak together … but still, I feel something which is not good at all … I always think of [my people, my family] when I leave my community, it is impossible to forget my community and my people. When I’m far away, I always tell my son or any of my people, when I call them: ‘My mind is with you, but you cannot see my mind.’ My body is in Asunción, but my mind is in my community … my mind is there.
I feel better when I am in our settlement, even when there are cojñone coming to visit us. I feel better then because the other Ayoreo are there too. It has to do with them, and [also] with the [physical] place.
Benno: With being close to your territory?
Mateo: Yes. [When I am] in Campo Loro … my mind is in Cerro León[16] … When I travel in our territories I feel good, even better, because there is something … something strong, something we feel when we are with our territories. Even if an Ayoreo is alone there, completely by himself, he still feels good. When I am farther north, inside our territory, I definitely feel a lot stronger.
Where we are today is a problem. They came and took our territory for themselves and today the Ayoreo territory is private property of the cojñone, as the cojñone say. The state says this as well. Now we are up against each other and confronted with the cojñone. On the other hand, there are the Ayoreo with all their life, force and way of being, which has to be as it is, because that is how it is. This is like a confrontation.
They lied to us when we were still in our territory and they came to speak about the evangelicals. They took us away. And we had no idea about the cojñone, and we had no idea how much one can suffer when living with evangelization … Today, we Ayoreo eat pasta, sugar, bread, but this is not Ayoreo food, and one cannot be satisfied by it. This is why, nowadays, the Ayoreo elders say: ‘Where are we going to buy our own food?’ And: ‘Here [where we are] one cannot find any of our food any more.’ And then their bodies start becoming weak, and very quickly they turn into old people, men and women, because the food which is natural to them is missing.
[Having identified being with one’s (Ayoreo) people as a necessary condition of Ayoreo well-being and ‘being an Ayoreo’, Mateo expresses the importance of being close to, and having physical presence, in one’s (the Ayoreo) territory. He describes a feeling of strength conveyed by the territory, even if there are no other (Ayoreo) people around. Then he speaks about food, which is no surprise in the context of Ayoreo culture: I have often observed how the relation with the territory – once back there – immediately seemed to need to express itself by active communication; when travelling to their (lost, stolen) territories, the first thing Ayoreo do on arrival is disappear to hunt. Hunting and gathering seem like interacting and communicating, like saying ‘are you still there?’ and ‘show me!’ (with an animal, or a fruit). Eating the fruit of the territories is also an act of communication (the essence of the hunted animal or fruit passes to the person who eats it). The act of communication becomes a social act when observing the distribution rules for what has been hunted or recollected (see also Fischermann, forthcoming). Finally, let’s remember also that parallel to their political organization, the Ayoreo peoples are divided into seven clans, the respective clan name being the surname (family name) of each and every existing Ayoreo anywhere. The members of each one of the seven clans share a common mythological origin as well as kinship ties, which comprise, for each clan, a series of animals, plants and natural phenomena in general, including, for example, meteorological conditions, as well as utilitarian objects and all man- made objects. In this way, the totality of the seven clans as a whole includes everything that exists and, in turn, everything that exists is a relative of the Ayoreo. Thus, for the Ayoreo, the fact of belonging to a clan, together with other beings of the world, provides a sense of strong union and solidarity. Being Ayoreo means being inserted in social relations which include everything existing in nature too. This becomes even clearer when Mateo adds:]
Mateo: We have a word, ‘chomai’, it means ‘one’ … there is one language we speak, all the Ayoreo, the same language. There is one [specific] clan [for] everyone [to] belong to. The territory is not the same for everyone, every local group [of Ayoreo] belongs to their mother’s territory, but the word ‘pachaminone’ stands for all the Ayoreo local group territories taken together as one …
Therefore … if I say ‘Yes, I am indigenous’ [it is as] if somebody asks ‘have you got a culture [you belong to]’ … so I can answer ‘yes, I have [a culture], I belong to a culture’ … because I am indigenous, I know my culture. I know my language, I know our clans. I know where my grandfather lived …
[We have here some essential qualities which define ‘being Ayoreo’. They can possibly be extrapolated also to ‘being indigenous’:
- having a territory, knowing it and needing it … ‘knowing where my grandfather lived’ (‘grandfather’ means ancestors);
- having a life culture, belonging to a specific cultural way of being (like a tree in comparison to another tree of another species), and knowing one’s culture;
- knowing one’s language. What draws the attention is the fact that ‘knowing’ (about one’s territory, ancestors, life culture) seems essential to ‘being Ayoreo’. On the other hand, ‘knowing’ does not necessarily refer to an explicit body of knowledge expressed in language; it also simply means something like ‘internal, silent knowledge’, or ‘unaware’ awareness.
Finally, the comparatively very strong relevance of the notion of territory seems to point to a quality which came up earlier: being attached to a ‘place’, which is defined both by physical and spiritual, intangible elements, puts a limitation on the scope of moving, or being moved about (like an object), and emphasizes on the other hand the concept of locality, or being local.]
Aquino: Life is so complicated, difficult[17] for us [since] having been contacted by civilization. On the other hand, the uncontacted [Ayoreo] groups still living in voluntary isolation in the forests, they must be worrying a lot because of the destruction of the forests of their territory, but apart from that they must be quite happy as they keep having their life which permits them to be Ayoreo. In their life in the forests there is nothing they lack, they have all they need.
In turn, ourselves, who live with the white, there are many things we lack. The white people have destroyed all our powers, among them the power of our religion and the power of our shamans, who are our priests. With their prohibitions, the missionaries also broke the balance we had in the relationship between men and women.
[Another concept of power arises, contrasting with the concept of power associated with the campesinos in the non-indigenous realm and the possibility of succeeding in modern, non-indigenous society. In the Ayoreo realm, it is associated with religion, active spirituality embedded in everyday life, and the active presence of the shamans.
Deforestation, on the other hand, mentioned as presumably the chief factor of concern for the uncontacted Ayoreo groups in voluntary isolation, stands for more than what the non-indigenous view as loss of biodiversity and as risk factors for the planetary climate: the destruction and disappearance of the forest is the loss of an absolutely essential part of oneself.]
Mateo: First, they have taken us away from our lands, and then they have taken [from] us everything that makes us Ayoreo. The people in the forests, the uncontacted ones, they still have a lot of power. But we think it is the progressive deforestation which must worry them most.
Benno: Now, I would like to go back to the word cojñón you have used several times. You use it for a white, non-indigenous person. You call them cojñone. What does cojñone exactly mean?
Mateo: There is this story, the story of Namochai. It tells how the first cojñone were made.
They took the bones of a dead person. [Apparently,] this person had been a white person. They put the bone in a mortar, and converted it into [like] powder. Then Namochai made a sculpture out of it again, and then, with a fan, he blew air on it in order to give it [life] breath … then it started to move. But it was not an original white person any more, it was a mere copy, because it was made from another person.
So, being only a copy, it only had a little [bit of] brain, and very quickly forgets everything … this is why today we say that the white people forget the thing they try to think and say. This is why they always put everything in writing, so they won’t forget … and thus they see something [written] and it comes back to their thinking …
This story was told to me by one of our elders in Bolivia … After that, when I came back here [to Paraguay], I started remembering this with our elders here, like Gahade and others.
The person who did this has the name Namochai … Namochai had several persons helping him … it is a plant here, near by here too, the name is … a cat, like a cat climbing … its eyes were like the eyes of a German …
Aquino: Blue eyes!
Mateo: Yes! Blue. For this reason he had to pass the bones through a colander … in order to clean them … For that reason his eye is very … like blue … the powder of the bones had touched his eyes …
Benno: And who was Namochai? Was he an Ayoreo?
Mateo: It is not known whether he was an Ayoreo or some other animal … Because before [our present time], all animals were still Ayoreo persons … But nowadays, we don’t use this [tale, myth] any more as before[18] … nowadays, younger generations now … do not use it as our ancestors did … Namochai maybe was some sort of lizard, who climbs the plants … a lizard who does not walk on the ground …
And this lizard is he who took the bones, ground it and made a cojñón with it. [Says something in the Ayoreo language to Aquino and both laugh] … All the young boys and girls who had listened to that elder [in Bolivia] telling this, said: ‘Maybe yourself, you don’t have too much wisdom, maybe yourself you only have half a brain!’
Benno: Well, they say that because they already are from another generation …
Mateo: Yes, yes …
All this happened, because they liked the dead person – whose bone they ground and then used – a lot [and did not want to lose him]. That is why Namochai said: ‘No, no, don’t worry. I shall make an image, like a sculpture, a statue of the dead person … then he will be alive again’ … So Namochai resurrected the dead cojñón again … And as they say, he recovered the life but his mind was not good any more …
The resurrected was called ‘cojñón’ … he became the first to be called cojñón.
[Namochai today is a mythical being and as such only described in myths. The Namochai story apparently is not told very often. It can be understood as follows: in the previous – mythical or prehistoric – time of the Ayoreo collective memory, Namochai, like all other phenomena of nature, was an Ayoreo, but his creating the first cojñón did not happen until later, in historic time; then Namochai no longer was an Ayoreo, but a blue eyed lizard instead, with the habit of climbing a plant whose name Mateo cannot remember at the moment. Was the person whom Namochai tried to recreate and bring back to life by using his bones, a blue-eyed person? Mateo says that Namochai himself has blue eyes like a German; frequently, in Ayoreo discourse, the qualities of one person or object appear associated with another person and object of the same context.[19] Apparently, Namochai’s eye colour is related to the task he performs, in contact with the blue-eyed dead person, and in the attempt to re-create him he tries to free it from the blue-eyed quality or influence, which here may be associated with non-indigenous northern cultures and people.
According to this myth, the origin of white, non-indigenous people goes back to the time when a first group of them, who went to live with the Ayoreo, died. In our non-indigenous historiography, this happened in the eighteenth century, with the Jesuit mission San Ignacio Zamuco, which was installed in the northern Chaco and lasted for a little over twenty years, before being destroyed around 1740.[20] If we put the Namochai story or myth into that specific context, then we grasp that the white men living for a while with the Ayoreo seem to have been well liked, or at least considered a useful presence. They possibly brought advantages to the Ayoreo. In any case, Namochai became active on behalf of the Ayoreo, reshaping the bones of the dead into a new form which then receives the life breath, Christian themes related to creation – Eve from the bone of Adam, inspiration of life breath – and resurrection, seem to appear in the background, as if they were lending their images and conceptual vocabulary to the expression of present- day retelling of the myth. The result is a re-created white person, but one who is deficient.]
Benno: So the white person who had died, and whom the Ayoreo liked and did not want to lose, was not called cojñón yet?
Mateo: No, no. For that person, and until then, they did not say: ‘he was a cojñón’, they had another word: they called him ‘amuama codedié’. They did not say ‘cojñón’ yet, that time, when that white person – whose bone they ground afterwards – had not died yet. The Ayoreo in that century called him ‘amuama codedié’ … Only afterwards, when he had died, they started using the word ‘cojñón’ instead … [It was only] from then on [that] we used the words that way … saying of the white people ‘they are cojñone’ …
Benno: What does ‘amuama codedié’ mean?
Mateo: It means a white person which is a little big, but not big like an authority, but his belly, like that [demonstrates], was very big … fat, maybe like a giant …
Benno: So ‘amuama codedié’ lived in that time centuries ago?
Mateo: Yes, and cojñón they only used for the person which was made as an image of the amuama codedié by Namochai … Namochai knows those white persons, the amuama codedié, well … They were per- sons, but not Ayoreo … They were called ‘dacode’ … very big … Nowadays we use the term dacode for a big grandmother … who has a lot of life and who was born a long time ago and whose life never ends …
Namochai did not manufacture the amuama codedié, he manufactured only their copy, which then the Ayoreo called cojñón … I don’t know how many years the amuama codedié had been dead when Namochai made their copy, using their bones in order for them not to be terminated, to recover and continue being there with the Ayoreo … Thus, the amuama codedié were the cojñone of that time [centuries ago] …
Another story about the first cojñone is from much later … This was when the Ayoreo were still living in the forests … there were missionaries who went to contact them in the very forests … Indeed there was one missionary the Ayoreo had decided that they were going to kill … and they wounded him … and then they thought they had killed him … but he had not died but came back …
Because he fell into a ditch, and the Ayoreo [when they saw him falling] thought that they had killed him, because they had thrown the spear at him … one of the Ayoreo men had thrown a spear at him, and also hit him with the mallet … then the Salesian threw himself to the floor and the Ayoreo thought that they had already killed him. They did not go and check, because they were very frightened of him.
Then later, they said, he came back … he was back in the mission station, and an Ayoreo spying on the mission station saw him … And the wound he had had on the side of his chest, it was now on his arm, here [demonstrates] on the left arm … they thought they had wounded him in the chest, here [demonstrates] … So, among the Ayoreo, when hearing the spy’s story, they said: ‘No, it is him, he is the same person, but … it can be that he changed his wound to another place …’
After this happened, the Ayoreo were afraid of the cojñone, because … [with Namochai] a cojñón had been made from another person, he had already been a dead person, and it is impossible to know about his origins. He has a different origin [from ours]. They resemble people but in fact are not. Like a ghost, a spectre. They ceased to be original persons, because they were made from another person.
Also, because of [what happened] that time [with the Salesian missionary], the Ayoreo thought that all cojñone were tricksters, like shamans, and that [therefore] they were able to cure an injury anywhere and [also] move it to some other place … [They came to think] that they did not die easily.
Conclusions
The present material gives leads to possible interpretations and allows conclusions on different levels. One of the first facts drawing my attention is my ending up in front of a mirror when the inquiry into the concept of ‘indigeneity’ leads back to my own realm, that of a non-indigenous person. The concept of ‘indigeneity’ has to be explored in the first place with the non-indigenous who created and who use it – independently of the fact that some indigenous peoples may now have adopted it for their own discourse.
Having left ‘indigeneity’ aside, I then try to explore something which is real and which I have in front of me, with the presence and testimony of the two interviewed leaders, something for which I have no other name than ‘being Ayoreo’. Here, I receive images with a high charge of implicit information (‘the Ayoreo are like Palo Santo trees which cannot possibly be or convert into Quebracho trees …’).
What can be inferred and concluded from such images is that being Ayoreo is comparable to collectively being a tree species. Like a tree species, the Ayoreo collectively have their ‘genetic code’ and (implicit) ‘growth plan’, which, like any growth plan, has its scope but also its limits, which cannot be exceeded. This puts a limit on the potential of social and cultural change and also provides a potential for resistance to such change, as well as a positive potential for staying diverse, or, in other words, for keeping up diversity. Further, identity is a way of being (responding to the question how, rather than who). And being Ayoreo appears as something indivisible.
Other characteristics which come with being Ayoreo, which appear in the interview, are: feeling a strong communication with the territory; being at one with the territory (implicit: relatedness; being related to everything, wholeness); knowing about it (in the sense of ‘silent, internal knowledge’ or ‘unaware awareness’); having and using the (Ayoreo) powers: spiritual vitality and shamanism.
In another part of the interview, the definition of ‘cojñón’ provides also an alternative definition of ‘Ayoreo’; if a cojñón has only half a brain, then the Ayoreo have an entire brain. This indicates also that Ayoreo implicitly feel superior to non-indigenous people, even though present- day Ayoreo living precariously on the margins of non-indigenous society may actually internalize and express in their explicit attitude a feeling of inferiority … but there is, farther down, a basic superiority. On the other hand, the definition of cojñón, as a side product of this inquiry, may be more than just a strange collection of concepts. We witness the genesis of an explicative myth which conveys to us elements about ourselves, the non-indigenous, and the characteristics attributed to us. If we are interested and take it seriously, it may allow for a glimpse of the cultural characteristics and history of non-indigenous people, viewed through the eyes of a collective ‘other’ who has a privileged quality of perception from the outside and from a different position within the history of humanity.
Finally, I would like to draw conclusions from yet another level of this interview: the level of the implicit attitude or standpoint of the two leaders, which may not be on the level of their awareness, but which communicates implicitly through what they say and also how they say it. Something like the answer to the question: what do I perceive and feel if I close my eyes and just listen to them? Indeed, in Mateo’s and Aquino’s answers and associations, an acting Ayoreo subject becomes visible, and it is worthwhile finding out what it is like and how it is.
In the leaders’ answers, an Ayoreo ‘observer’ and ‘commentator’ comes through, a person who seems to be well centred in his/her realm and who seems to act with sovereignty and an already mentioned sense of superiority. It is somebody driven by curiosity and at the same time somebody who feels free enough to make conjectures and in the end to reach conclusions codified in myths about what becomes visible when inquiring into the conditions and powers of diverse beings belonging to other than the Ayoreo realm. The Ayoreo observer does not even shy away from experimenting with such beings (using as allies the powers of nature in the attempt to bring back to life the dead amuama codedié).
The Ayoreo observing the non-indigenous, although inspiring a sense of superiority which comes from the freedom and ease of his/ her traditional unconditioned ways of observation,[21] is not driven by an intention to dominate the other, diverse being. This gives him/her a great advantage as an observer: he/she is free in his/her curiosity to grasp what is there and also to admit defeat when their own capacity of understanding reaches its limits. The curiosity we find here when faced with ‘the stranger’ is severe, sober and pitiless in its characterization, beyond compassion. The non-indigenous, in contrast, as he comes as invader and seeks domination, submits the ‘diverse other’ with the help of the terms and concepts of his/her own realm and can therefore not reach any clear perception; he/she remains at the level of a prejudice. This is why we, the inquiring non-indigenous, bounce back on to ourselves.
Acknowledgments I wish to thank the Ayoreo leaders Mateo and Aquino for this conversation and for many others held along the way of our shared endeavours. They have helped to grasp, each from within his own world, and to express and contribute to the understanding of the fabric that unites all worlds.
Note by the author, and an additional comment The present interview was published alongside other contributions from different parts of the planet in the reader “The politics of Indigeneity – dialogues and reflections on indigenous activism”, edited by Sita Venkateswar and Emma Hughes (Zed Books, London/ New York, 2011 – ISBN 978 1 78032 121 9 hb and 978 1 78032 120 2 pb). The reader’s editors, for each article, have asked one other contributor to the volume to write a comment/ reaction, and have given the author in turn the opportunity to reply to that comment. The commentator chosen in this case was Simron Jit Singh. The editors chose Simron Jit Singh because of the similarities they saw in the relationships between Simron and Chupon (the indigenous leader from the Nicobar Islands introduced by Simron) and between Benno and Mateo and Aquino, as well as in the roles that those leaders play within their communities.
Comment by Simron Jit Singh
The text by Benno Glauser on his dialogue with two Ayoreo leaders raises a number of issues relevant to the discussion on ‘indigeneity’ and anthropological research in general. At the outset he reflects on the challenges of communication with his research subjects that emerge from the interaction of two differing ‘paradigms’ that are incommensurable. The Western paradigm is fragmented and abstracted; the other, that of the Ayoreo, signifies wholeness in a lived reality. In presenting his dialogue to a non-indigenous audience, Benno inserts at intervals his own interpretations of what the two leaders are saying, which further reveal the inherent contradictions in the two logics of communication. In some ways, the approach is rather similar to my own in the chapter ‘Chupon’s dilemma’, where I use in-between narratives to reflect on my own feelings and interpretations of the ongoing dialogue with Chupon. Another similarity is that of a long, trustful relationship that the author has developed with the Ayoreo leaders which allows this open communication. While the two dialogues are initiated around different themes, they both indicate strongly what has been lost, whether it is the indigenous identity, as in the case of the Ayoreo, or livelihood and social stability, as in the case of the Nicobarese. These two aspects, I believe, are inseparable in the indigenous consciousness.
The reference to the ‘contact’ in the Ayoreo sequence of time is very similar to the ‘tsunami’ in the Nicobarese awareness. These events transformed their entire world, and with it a loss of meaning and of the capacities to deal with the new context. We find a feeling of helpless- ness with outsiders ruthlessly taking over their world and attempting to transform them with a power that is beyond theirs. In both instances, there is an inherent critique of not being understood by outsiders in terms of ‘how’ they live their life and express their culture and world of meaning, and being treated as ‘objects’ to further their own interests. Mateo and Aquino express their anger at the fact that they were forced to leave their lands, consume food that weakens their bodies and live a life alien to them. Chupon criticizes how the tsunami aid transformed Nicobarese society, corrupting leaders, creating internal conflicts and the introduction of agriculture without an understanding of the indigenous system of cultivation. In the Ayoreo case, the change was forced, unacceptable and challenged their sense of being in the world. However, with the Nicobarese, it is not so. Chupon bemoans the internal changes and how some Nicobarese even benefited from the situation to gain wealth and power. Hence, one wonders whether the ‘collective identity’ and ‘genetic code’ so emphasized by the Ayoreo leaders actually exist.
In terms of the discourse on indigeneity, the Ayoreo leaders do not actually associate themselves so passionately with the term ‘indigenous’ as with their being Ayoreo. However, they also do not deny the power it holds over them; whether it is a term to be avoided in public (since it evokes negative connotations of savagery and ignorance), or to be used to gain attention in their political and social struggle. They are aware that the term has been created by outsiders to label certain types of ‘exotic’ communities to justify imposing punitive or welfare measures on them, but that in present times the term has also become a tool to facilitate being heard since it is loaded with political meaning and the wrongs of a colonial past.
Reply by Benno Glauser
Simron’s empathetic comment makes me feel that the worlds we interact with, the Ayoreo world, and the world of the Nicobarese, might be very different and very far away from each other, yet they have a lot to share and to exchange.
I imagine a lively conversation between Mateo and Aquino on one side, and Chupon on the other. Maybe they would not explicitly talk about the need to continue being Ayoreo, or Nicobarese, but they would tell each other stories about how they were and how they are, and it is these stories which would communicate the importance of holding on to one’s own collective way of being. In Chupon’s case, it is this, his culture of origin, which inspires him to seek a way forward for the Nicobarese, a way of changing without changing, a way to the future without losing themselves.
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Notes
[1] The interviews were held in Spanish; expressions in the Ayoreo language Zamuco (part of the Zamuco language family), whenever used in the course of the interviews, were translated and expressed in Spanish by the two interviewed leaders themselves.
[2] Union of Native Ayoreo of Paraguay.
[3] Comparable to the size of Italy, or Norway.
[4] In the psychological sense.
[5] Fragmenting and isolating the nuclear ‘essential’ part of a discourse, or connecting elements in a linear sequence, etc.
[6] Weltsicht – also ‘their theory about how the world functions’.
[7] Although the definition ‘indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation’ sometimes also includes already contacted peoples who preferred to retire again from our civilization.
[8] Although the definition ‘indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation’ sometimes also includes already contacted peoples who preferred to retire again from our civilization.
[9] Aquino mentions thermos flasks as an example of being seen like objects … thermos flasks are very common in Paraguay; they are much used to drink the daily (‘yerba’) maté tea, a habit also adopted by the contacted Ayoreo.
[10] Chicori ( Jacarantia corumbensis): a water-holding root vital for the survival of the nomadic Ayoreo in the forests, where water is scarce.
[11] For instance, they take the possibility of sensual perception out of the generalized whole … presumably a precondition for being able to overlook diversity and for multiple schemes of massive domination.
[12] Emblematic tree species common in the northern Gran Chaco and the Ayoreo territory; Lat. Bulnesia sarmientoi.
[13] Another widespread tree species; Lat. Schinopsis balanseae.
[14] Spanish word for small, non- indigenous subsistence peasants in Latin America.
[15] I thought this question was interesting, as Paraguayan ‘criollo’ campesinos are the racial result of intimacy over many generations between non-indigenous colonial settlers from Europe and the indigenous population, and their main cultural traits and patterns still reflect nowadays the Guaraní culture as we know it from the Guaraní indigenous peoples, such as the Mbyá, the Ava Guaraní or the Paï-Tavytëra, even though the cultural system of the campesinos underwent a process of incisive semantic changes. Nowadays, the campesinos themselves normally deny strongly any close cultural relation with indigenous cultures or people.
[16] Region of the Ayoreo territory, where Mateo was born; his present settlement, Campo Loro, lies outside and far away from his local groups’ territory.
[17] The original term used by Aquino literally means ‘heavy’.
[18] Mateo refers to one of the consequences of contact and being forced to adopt a new, unknown life model with its inherent new world- view. Many concepts of the original world-view left behind lose their semantic support both as concepts as well as a part of, and with a role in, a belief system or world-view. Thus, the myth about Namochai, if still told, will be perceived as vastly meaningless, or ‘pointless’.
[19] Likewise, in non-indigenous use of modern language, a specific quality appears sometimes as an adjective to describe another person or object of the same context. Example: when we speak about a ‘happy coincidence’, it is not the coincidence which is happy, but ourselves.
[20] Thus, the Ayoreo had only a fleeting contact with the Jesuits. Apparently a significant number of Ayoreo – but by no means all of them – lived for about twenty years in a Jesuit mission called San Ignacio Zamuco. Its location is a cause of speculation: it may have been near Cerro León or in the Ingávi area of what is now Paraguay. No tangible trace has been found of their contact with the Jesuits, other than a few myths – like the present one – and words in the vocabulary.
[21] In the sense of epistemology.