A preliminary remark
When reading this vision, we are listening to the voice of the collective body of an indigenous people, the Ayoreo, at a moment when this body communicates itself to its members by way of the traditional fashion of a vision which comes to a chosen individual. It then becomes the song of Ibegua…Visions are sung when waking up, sometimes in the night, sometimes at daybreak.
This particular vision is a communication addressing the Ayoreo peoples’s implicit doubts, questions and concerns about their future and about ayoreo identity.
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It was in 2007 when Mateo, a leader and also a spontaneous historian of the Ayoreo, was asked by a Ibegua, a woman living in his settlement, to organize a session in which she would communicate a vision she had received. She also expressed the wish that her communication should be registered on tape and filmed, as had been the case of conversations and interviews Mateo had conducted with numerous elders for over three years by then, with the technical support of Iniciativa Amotocodie, the NGO.
The session was set up one afternoon in the settlement, Campo Loro, in front of Ibeguas’ house, but not before Ibeguas’ daughter, who strongly disapproved of the matter, had gone away to work. Then, Ibegua surrounded by other women and also men, started to sing her vision.
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Ibegua had her vision one night while she was asleep, at the beginning of April of 2007. A spirit came to her dreams and asked her to wake up, to open her eyes and to see the world of the Ayoreo, eami[1]. The spirit showed her the future of the ayoreo children and communicated advice.
The day she had received the vision, she had sung it at dawn, for the message to be spread to all Ayoreo.
The following is a short and resumed version of what the spirit said to Ibegua:
“Wake up and look at what I show you!
Get up and pay attention
to what is happening in the world!
Ashes and dust are the future
of the new generations.
A cloud of dust becomes visible.
I want to stop it,
Thwart it,
Protect our children against it.
But the Spirit of the Dust
Pushes me aside.
Like a suction, he pulls the children away
Towards the City of the Whites.
They don’t hear me anymore.
They paint their faces,
And their true face becomes darker and darker.
It was one morning when this happened.”
And this is the literal version of what Ibegua sung:
I was fast asleep
In my dreams (it[2]) appeared and spoke to me as follows:
Ayorea, Ayorea! Wake up from your dreams right away!
How come you are in your bed and fast asleep! Get up!
Get up on your feet, right away
Look, look, look at the world
Look at the dwelling places of the other Ayoreo
Look at what I am pointing out to you
Do what I say and look at this
I tell you all what I saw in my dreams:
Look at the places I now point out to you
You must see what I am showing you
The ashes you see, the dust, this is the future
the new generations will live
Get up! Pay attention to what is happening in the world
It is a cloud of dust[3], it is the future of the new generations
Your dream lasts, and you cannot wake up
Thus, this misty cloud you desperately want to stop
You cannot stop it
I wanted to stop it…
I wanted to make it stop…
It is hard to express
what I am being told[4]
I put myself in its way but
the foggy cloud pushed me aside
because it cannot be stopped
I wanted to protect our children
That is why I stepped in its way
Even though I would not succeed I wanted to protect them
But this thing was going in the direction of Asunción[5]
it went in the morning.
But the spirit told me what it all meant:
If the children and youth stop being a cause for worrying of their parents
If the young girls won’t paint their faces[6], the world of the Ayoreo will be saved
But I did not understand
Why our children do not pay attention anymore to what we tell them
Our future will be much worse
That is what the spirit told me
They must stop painting themselves that way
It says about painting oneself…
But I do not know
How to pronounce this word
My words do not come out well in my song
I looked at their daughters
And they were more and more painted
They cannot stop painting themselves[7]
And their ayoreo faces remain dark
But this thing went in the direction of Asunción
That spirit left in the morning
This is it.
Getting to understand (interpretation)
Following the recording session, Ibegua expressed that the message should also reach non- Ayoreo and non- indigenous peoples, that it was meant for them too.
The film of the session was later shown in several other settlements to Ayoreo people gathered in the evenings. in all places it’s projection was followed by a deep, lasting silence from the audience. No comments were made.
In personal conversations, Ayoreo friends remarked
– that the vision shows what is going to happen in the future, or what is already happening
– the cloud of dust was associated with the dust created by many heavy lorries under way towards Asunción, driving past a group of Ayoreo adults with their children, huddled and seeking shelter in the gutter
– one interpretation was that the appearance of children means that there is still time left to act in order to stabilize the situation, but the time span left to do so is that of one generation – 20 years
– the girls painting and covering their face with make-up, causing the true ayoreo face to become invisible (“dark”), are a metaphor for the slow disappearance of the Ayoreo way of being, and of indigeneity as such
– the vision links an undesirable state of the world with the disappearance of indigeneity; or, in positive, the presence and vitality of the Ayoreo indigeneity could revert the undesirable process.
About Ibegua
Ibegua’s group traditional territory is the region of the salt marshes. Her group was a part of the Tiegosode local group. When taken away from the forests, Ibegua was still very young.
Ibegua feels the call to be a shaman, but her daughter is afraid of an evil spell the missionaries could cast on her. Her daughter, Abuase, beliefs that the missionaries can ask God to kill her mother; she was told that the power of the missionaries’ God is greater than the power of the shamans.
Ibegua’s father was Eapuei Chiquenoi and her mother was Chojade Dosape. She has four daughters and two sons.
Ibegua’s name means; a (plant) stem which starts growing alongside another stem, quite closely.
Technical details and credits
The recording session was conducted by Mateo Sobode Chiquenoi, with the technical support by Miguel Angel Alarcón. The translation from Zamuco (ayoreo) language to Spanish is the result of a careful and sensitive teamwork in which took part Mateo Sobode Chiquenoi, Carlos Picanerai, the anthropologist Volker von Bremen, and Miguel Angel Alarcón. The translation into English is Volker von Bremen’s (resumed version) and Benno Glauser’s, in the case of the literal, extensive version, and also of the footnotes, the surrounding texts and the setup of this document.
[1] eami is the ayoreo word for “forest” and also “world”
[2]the subject does not appear in the text; she refers to the spirit which entered her dream and asked her to wake up
[3] Ibegua refers to “something that we know as existing; it has no form…something which is there….”. The Ayoreo understand what is meant, and they depict it as dust, or very dense smoke; they even talk about ashes. It is a foggy cloud.
[4] Ibegua uses a formulation of the ayoreo language which depicts a situation in which one is being asked a question one is expected to answer, but one is unable to do so. This way, she expresses that the task to announce her dream is an enormous one, implying that she may not get to satisfy what the spirit asked of her, to deliver the message to the Ayoreo
[5]Asunción is the capital of modern Paraguay, the country where Ibegua now lives; here, it symbolizes the places of the non- indigenous people as well as their non-indigenous way of life
[6] the parents worry as the children adopt non- indigenous ways foreign to them; the young girls paint their faces in the fashion of non- indigenous women, and as a result, the ayoreo face underneath becomes invisible
[7] there is an analogy used here which depicts a situation with a vice: something which will not proceed well but in spite of this, one continues with what one is doing, and continuing, one damages oneself