Josh Starks: My Stay with the Secoya:

My Stay with the Secoya:
The Secoya people are an indigenous group consisting of a total of 900 members, 500 of which live along the Aguarico River in the Amazon jungle, in the province of Sucumbios. Their first problems with the outside world were in the 1930´s with the arrival of the rubber companies. At the time all of the Secoyas were living in Peru in the place of their historical beginnings. In 1941 war broke out between Ecuador and Peru and half the Secoyas migrated to their current home in Ecuador. The border between the two countries remained closed until the year 2000, cutting contact between the two groups. In the 1960s Texaco entered the territory of the Secoyas and began exploiting their land. At the time all the Secoya men still wore their traditional tunics and grew their hair down to their shoulders and the Texaco employees would go around lifting up their tunics to reveal the genitals saying things like, ¨is he a man? Whys he got long hair and wearing a dress?¨ The tragic result is that many Secoya began to wear pants and shirts so as to be left alone, and this is seen to be the beginning in the loss of Secoya tradition. Later in the early 1980s a group of people from the province of Manabi, on the coast of Ecuador, invaded the Secoya territory in search of land for agriculture. The colonos have been responsible for the destruction of large parts of the jungle, and overfishing and overhunting making the old way of life for the Secoyas now impossible. The colonos have also been responsible for the introduction of alchohol into the Secoya community which has become a major problem. On November 18th, 2006 Josh Starks arrived. This is his story...

To get to the community you have to take a bus from Quito to Shushufindi which takes 9 hours. Each day there are two [rancheras] that go from Shushufindi to Puerto Gregorio, one leaves at 5am and the other leaves at 1pm. A ranchera is bus with rows of bench seats and no walls- and an area on the roof where people put cargo, this serves the people going from city to farm for taking city goods home, and people going from farm to city for taking crops to sell in the cities. Our bus from Quito arrived at 5:20am so I had to wait until 1 to take the next ranchera. Since the bus has no walls you may get rained on if you sit on the sides. The right side has a plastic cover that drops down so this side is preferable. Puerto Gregorio is just a spot on the Shushufindi river (two and a half hours in ranchera from Shushufindi) where canoes meet the ranchera to go down river. Gustavo Piaguaje was waiting for us and took us to in his canoe. The canoes that the Secoyas use are mostly hollowed out trees and are all one piece of wood and are impressively long. The canoes that the colonist use are even longer and are made from wood or plastic. From Puerto Gregorio we went down the Shushufindi river until it met the much larger Aguarico river which we took headed northeast. Gustavo stopped in a colonist community called Tierras Orientales to get gas. While he was gone a colonist came with a very big screaming monkey and tied it to the canoe next to mine.
We travelled about an hour downriver and Gustavo left me with my host family, which was the family of his cousin Jose Cesar Piyaguaje. Jose Cesar is one of the community directors, musician, father of seven (grandfather of 3), proud Secoya, painter, farmer, hunter, and pastor of the evangelical church. In the section above I forgot to mention the influence of the Evangelical group: Escuela Linguistica del Verano. The Secoyas say that these people had no negative influence on them and that they only came saying that there is a god who had a son, and the Secoyas already believed in a god so they decided that it was probably the same god and adopted the religion as another way to worship the same god. Jose Cesar took me on a quick tour of their home and showed me different fruit trees. In the west the sun was setting and the sky was an incredibly bright yellow and all the trees seemed to glow. In the east there was a huge rainbow clearly carved into the fading blue sky. ¨Nature is giving you its welcome my friend Joshua.¨

Their home is a complex of three houses and about an acre of land for agricultural use. Jose Cesars two oldest sons, Wilmer and Jose, are each married and each occupy one of the houses. All the cooking and eating of meals is done in Wilmers house, and Jose Cesar does his painting in the incomplete house where Jose lives. The rest of the family sleep in the other house in one room, paired two to a bed. I was given a mattress and set up my mosquito net and we all went to sleep. The rest of the family members are Zulia(22), Reyfer (17), Eber(16), Jonathan(8), and Janeth (5). The next day Jose Cesar had to go to a meeting between various indigenous groups for two days in Lago Agrio and left early in the morning. Zulia, Reyfer and Eber all go to distance education highschool on the weekends in the colonist community Tierras Orientales so we went to the community becuase they invited highschools from two other nearby colonist communities for a day of sporting events. All the kids lined up and sang the national anthem of Ecuador and they had a little beauty contest between the three girls that each represented their community. It started raining and everyone was getting soaked and some one from one of the other communities took an umbrella to keep the girl representing their community from getting wet. The opening ceremony ended and they started blasting techno music on the PA system and the kids started preparing for the first match of indoor soccer (football for all you non united statesians), which they played outside. The sporting events lasted all day and people were getting really into it (basically everyone from all three communities was there to cheer on the kids from their community). At about 4 it was all over and they had the awards ceremony. They gave the award of second place to the school from the community called Nueva Vida and the captain of the team took the mic and made the following speech. [Im very proud that we came here, and despite the bad weather we came to triumph and arrive in second place. I would like to say to all my fellow sportsmen to say no to drugs and yes to sports.] Eventually we got in the canoe and went back home. That night I was up all night scratching myself. The next day was monday and no one really had anything to do. Jose Cesar was still at the meeting. The only chore was to wash clothes (washing clothes is a chore that extends to the women of the community). The clothes are washed in the river with soap and then put on a board of wood and smacked with a wooden mallet and then put up to dry. The clothes get clean and very suave. I took a walk in the jungle and the dog went with me and the two of us went in search of animals and saw lots of different birds and lizards and leaf cutter ants. Leaf cutter ants are fascinating because they are like little agriculturalists, cutting leaves from trees and taking the pieces back to their ant mound where they chew up the leaves and defecate on them and grow this special fungus, which is the only thing they can eat (and they are the only ones that can grow it). There is also a tree which grows its roots starting really high up and the roots that are newly grown coming down from the trunk look like penises and some people call it the Macho Tree. I got back to the house and Zulia was using their cb radio to talk to different Ecuadorian soldiers stationed in the jungle and flirt with them. Eber does sort of the same thing using a false female voice, and the two of them would sit and laugh. Its interesting because this is much like what kids in other places do with messengers and chat rooms on the internet, but these kids doing it with the radio, which suggests that this behavior is innate in adolescents. That night Jose Cesar returned and explained various things about the Secoya way of life. He told me that their god Nanu made people from the ground and the first people had tails and he ripped their tails off of them and threw the tails into the trees and the tails became monkeys. Jose Cesar mostly wears the traditional tunic of the Secoya. The name Secoya is actually a name that the Spanish gave them and they call themselves Siecopai, which in their language (paicoca) means [people of many colors- sieco meaning multi-colored, and pai meaning people.]

The next day we awoke at 5am to go on a hike through the jungle. Jose Cesar says this is his favorite time of day because all of the birds and monkeys are singing and shouting their thanks to god and nature as they awake and eat. Jose Cesar identified the different bird calls. An interesting thing is that Parrots and Parokeets in the wild dont imitate other bird calls and only sing their songs, whereas when they are pets they are capable of learning a wide variety of different sounds. This other bird on the other hand imitates all the other bird calls aside from having its own song, but as a pet is no longer capable of learning other calls. He pointed out strangler trees that use another tree as a base and then grow into huge trees slowly killing the tree that they trap inside. Later we saw some monkeys eating in a tree and it was pretty amazing as they jumped these huge distances to go from tree to tree. Along the way he continually pointed out different plants that we could eat or that had medicinal uses or that were poisonous. Later he pointed out the vines that the shaman uses to chop up and make Yaje (ayahuasca). There is a flower that has pedals that curve upwards in a sharp curve and there is a hummingbird whose curved beak perfectly matches the flower. The hummingbird can only eat the nectar of that particular flower and that flower can only be pollinated by that particular hummingbird: a story of true love. We returned to the house and ate. Most of the time the food was sort of a soup of venison meat from deer they hunted with a cooked green banana, but one day I ate armadillo which is very very tender and tasty and I highly recommend the eating of armadillos. Sometimes the food was rice and a fried eggs. Upon my return to Quito my girlfriend immediately noticed that I am much thinner than I was before I went. Im not saying they didnt feed me well, but Im also not saying that I was never hungry. When Jose Cesar came back from Lago Agrio he brought me bottled water to drink during my stay which was way cool. During meals and for about an hour afterwards I would teach English to Wilmer who learned very very quickly, especially as compared to other English students I once had. Later I taught guitar to Eber and Jose Cesar, and then we all went to the small river to bathe.

The next day we ate quickly (breakfast was always pretty good: cooked ripe bananas (as compared to green bananas), mini pancakes, coffee), and then put on our rubber boots and grabbed our machetes and got in the canoe and went down river to the community center. The community center consists of a school and about seven families (most Secoya families live in their own little pieces of jungle). We went into the house of the family of Jose Cesars wife which are Paiyaguajes and they were cooking venison over a wood fire. They served me Chicha de Yucca, which is mashed up Yucca that is left to ferment for several days and is about as alchoholic as beer. The Secoyas mash the Yucca using a stick but some indigenous peoples of the Amazon mash the Yucca for their chicha by chewing it up and spitting it back out and that way the enzymes of the saliva play a part in the fermentation process. I personally found the chicha to be very unappetizing but drank the glass out of politeness, and so they filled me up a second glass which I drank as well and later had to find the courage to decline as politely as possible when they tried to serve me more. After eating the venison I took my plate to wash it and stepped on a board that couldn´t support my weight and it broke and I fell and find myself with my leg dangling through the crack, my body covered in venison juices. All of us (a group of about 20-25) piled into a huge canoe and went further down river to do the Minga, which is a communal workday. We went to a place where they wanted to clear an acre of jungle (already secondary forest...) in order to plant cacao. We went to work all day clearing with the machetes, leaving millions of bugs without homes and the majority of them seemed to be very attracted to my gringo blood. Im going to digress from the story of working the minga to talk a bit about bites. Upon returning to the city I have counted my bites and I have a total of 1,430 bites on my body (I challenge someone to try to have more bites simultaneously on their body). In the daytime the big bad guys are tiny tiny tiny little bugs that are about the size of a pore on your skin and are bigtime biters. In the night the mosquitos are the same type of mosquitos that you normally encounter. Why did I get bitten so many times? I put on repellant and menthol about 4 times a day, which definitely helped, but did not completely deter the bugs from biting me. One thing is that my mosquito net was not the good kind. Mine was the kind that is green and the holes are big enough to let the daytime moscos in, so if you sleep in a little past sunrise you will get bitten. I recommend getting the blue mosquito net that has little holes.The Secoyas for the most part don{t get bitten and they don{t put on anything.Why did I get bitten so many times? My blood is quite sweet and tastes very good. Another quick bit about bites: I got lots of bites on my scrotum despite the fact that I was wearing pants at all times (except when bathing), and I even got three bites on my actual penis which were by far the most annoying because scratching them was painful. In general I had lots of nightmares (some types of malaria medications give nightmares) and I didn´t sleep much because I stayed up all night every night scratching myself. Other random things: it rains a lot in the rain forest so rubber boots are very necesary. Back to the minga and my rubber boots: I was carelessly taking out my frustrations on a vine and I slashed my own right foot and cut a big cut in my rubber boots so after that water always entered when we walked through giant puddles and rivers. (my actual foot only got cut in a minor way). I did lots of falling over and walking face first into things which was very entertaining for my hosts. An interesting note is that several women worked with machetes alongside the men. The other women took care of the kids and poured cups of chicha which they carried to the people that were working. Jose Cesar took me aside becuase he saw some white faced monkeys in a nearby tree and we went and looked at them. I got big blisters on my hand so I switched hands but wasn{t a very effective worker with my left hand. We finished for the day and went back to the town center and ate dinner- ah but on the way back we ran out of gas and had to wait for another canoe to pass and give us some gas. The canoes are mostly motor driven, otherwise it would take days to travel up and down the river. The Secoyas used to live off of hunting and fishing and gathering naturally growing fruits and vegetables, but becuase of the overhunting and overfishing that the colonists did the Secoyas have to buy some food from outside such as rice in order to supplement their hunted meet. Most families raise chickens and are starting to plant small fields of crops to sell and to eat.
The Secoya music is a tradition that they have mostly lost and are trying to regain. This is very important to their cultural heritage and they need support in getting instruments to supplement the instruments that they make from cane and wood. The typical group of Secoya musicians consists of several drummers playing hand-drums and then a line of flautists. The big flutes are made from cane and sustain one single note and their are between three and four of them, the biggest being a bit less that a meter in length. There is also generally a musician playing the Zamponia (pan-pipes), and quena (small wooden flute). They are very interested in incorporating guitars and violins into their music. Jose Cesar plays a bit of guitar and is the only person contributing new songs in paicoca to the Secoya tradition.

The traditional Secoya dress is a large colored tunic, a feathered crown, and beaded necklaces (the beads are different hard seeds that are found in the jungle). The feathered crown is no longer made from actual feathers but instead from colored yarn (as the Secoyas are trying to preserve the environment as much as they can). In areas where the colonists live there are not many trees whereas the majority of the Secoya territory is still primary forest.

The next day after doing various things and eating lunch I asked Jose Cesar if I could participate in a yaje ceremony with the Shaman. The Shaman is his father so he went to ask his father and said yes ok and that I had to start fasting. I fasted from noon that day on.

The ceremony was scheduled for sundown of the next day so I had to spend that day resting and not eating. Around late afternoon Jose Cesar took me to his father{s house.

When I arrived there were some people from another foundation there who had come for the ceremony but claimed that they were there to work (even though they were only going to be there for two days). They were in the kitchen eating sliced bread and canned meat which I normally find to be disgusting but in that moment it looked like the most delicious thing. I was sort of surprised because the shaman ate a slice of bread with the meat. Jose Cesar took me aside and said the shaman and I were going to do the ceremony alone and that he was going to do the ceremony separately with them. The shaman directed me as I cleaned up the porch where we were going to have the ceremony. He said something about his throat and got up and started chewing on this leaf which triggers a vomiting response and went and sat down and vomited for a while. We sat on the porch and waited for everyone to go to bed so that we could begin the ceremony. While we were waiting one of the three people from the other foundation came and asked if he could participate in the ceremony. The shaman said yes but that the other two could not. We sat for a pretty long time and the shaman told us stories. ¨When I was 11 my grandfather started giving me a little bit of yaje. I would drink, drink, and then shout and shout. Then when I was twelve he would give me a little bit more. I would drink and drink, and shout and shout. By the time I was thirteen I was already brewing yaje. Brewing for two days and drinking it one the third, and then brewing for two days and drinking it on the third. My grandfather told me that I would become a healer like him. My great-grandfather lived two-hundred years, he did. One day a black man came into our community and had measles. My grandfather tried to cure him but contracted measles himself. He lived for two years with measles and then one day he said to me, ´grandson, I am going for a walk.´ He sat down in his hammock and died and as he died there was a little earthquake. Many people came to mourn grandfather, from all over the Secoya community, crying and crying. Then that black man came and he said, ¨ha ha.. why did the old man die.¨ Everyone was very angry. We said ´it was you that gave him the disease!´ So we killed him. Then we killed his wife and kids and then chopped them up and threw them in the river so that the piranhas would eat them. HAHA.¨ The man from the other foundation chimed in, ¨yes, they were ignorant weren’t they.¨ The shaman seemed pretty contented by this response and continued his story: ¨…then three days after we buried grandfather I went and looked and the ground had opened up and his coffin was empty. He had left. Then fifteen days later he came walking out of the jungle and was standing in that spot over there and he didn’t look sick or transparent or anything and he said, ´grandson, I have a nice place there in the sky, and I have a nice woman here on the ground and I am going to wait for her, but for now I’m going to go for a walk.´ I didn’t see him for several years until he came back again, but after that I never saw him again. The only good people are the Piyaguaje ´mucho bueno, mucho bueno.´ Paiyaguaje- some good people also, but other Secoya families-many bad people. Wooooooooo! Many bad people!¨ He continued telling stories about giving people the yaje and them shouting and shouting, and I started to get a little worried that I was going to be shouting like the people in his stories. Then he started talking about the yaje that he brews that other types taste very bitter and that his tastes sweet. I remembered Jose Cesar telling me that the yaje vines were planted and were not native to that jungle so I asked the shaman and he told me that the yaje they had before was native and that yaje was the bitter yaje but they cleared it out in order to plant this sweet yaje. He started talking about the war with Peru and that there was a Secoya who was a guerilla fighting by himself and that everyone tried to kill him and shot him more than twenty times and that he wouldn’t die. The other two from the other foundation approached and sat with us. The shaman implied that because they were women they had to do a cleansing ceremony before taking the yaje and that the invitation to take the yaje wasn’t extended to them. The two started to ask me what I was doing there with the community in a very aggressive way and were putting me off quite a bit, but I was too weak from having not eaten for so much time to defend myself. After the shaman´s wife had turned off the lights in the other house he started encouraging the other two to leave and go to bed so we could start the ceremony. The shaman poured the yaje from the 2 liter plastic coke bottle it was in into a cup made from some sort of gourd or coconut shell or something and started blowing air in order to bless the drink and then handed it to me and told me to drink it all in one gulp. I did and then laid back down in my hammock. He did the same for the other guy. The first thing that started happening is that I felt some sort of tension where my ¨third eye¨ is coming from both within and from outside as if someone was encouraging me to open it. Everything started getting very crazy in a way that is difficult to explain but that the normal laws that apply to the space around me were being broken as the space around me was getting warped and contorted and I felt very uncomfortable. I started to find myself within waves of bright colors and then these people started approaching me. There were many many many colorful spirits of all ages and of both genders that were hovering above me and touching me. All of them were making loud sounds like insects and in general there was a lot of ¨nanananananananaana, eyeyeyeyeyeyeyeyeyeyey, iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii, and weiweiweiweiweiweiweiweiweiweiwieiweiwei.¨ They were reaching inside me and messing with things and I started to feel some intense abdominal pain and fell out of my hammock and started vomiting over the side of the porch to the cheering of the universe. There was a procession of these men walking in a sort of a dancing manner in a long line next to me while I was throwing up. They were dressed in a sort of greenish armor and had something to do with lizards but there wasn´t much about them that was very lizard like except for their manner of dress. They told me to join the line and go with them and I told them that I would as soon as I was done throwing up. I took some labored breaths and tried to climb back into my hammock but was way too confused to figure out how to climb inside so I laid down on the porch and began to be consumed by the world around me. There were snakes slithering all over me and I was being eaten alive by insects. I continued to have intense abdominal pains and in general I was mentally resisting everything that was happening. In the distance I heard some people from the same world as the spirits and lizard men that were laughing and talking in a bizarre language. I started focusing on the sounds around me and heard tons of monkeys and birds making all kinds of noise and I began to exist only on the level of sound. At some point I stopped resisting and everything just sort of happened and I was no longer part of it. A voice started explaining my psychological problems to me one by one and about an hour or two passed as I listened. I suppose everything I was told is best summed up by the nike advertisement: ¨Just Do IT¨ because I until that day was a person of ideas and no action. The shaman said ¨Is the yaje passing,¨ and I don´t know whether out of spiritual command or simply psychological suggestion but I began to throw up more and threw up everything I had ever eaten. The interesting thing about this is that I had fasted for more than 30 hours at this point and had drinken little water, and the yaje itself was maybe two gulps worth. So where did all of this vomit come from? After more time thinking my life over I felt more intense abdominal pain and climbed off the deck and wandered into the jungle to defecate and defecated a mountain worth of feces, once again I ask, where did all of this come from? I wandered back towards the porch and the Shaman was laying in his hammock searching the jungle with his flashlight. When I arrived he asked if i wanted to take more (normally the ceremony is supposed to last all night), I was definetely not up for taking more, although I genuinely feel that the drug helped me. They talk about the drug being a medicine against everything including aids. I tried to talk to the shaman about my experience and he just said, ¨oh, so you want some more?¨ He has a habit of not really listening to what poeple say, I ´m not sure if this is a character flaw or lack of proficiency in spanish. The next day I woke up with the sun and took the trail back to Jose Cesar´s house and decided it was time to leave the jungle. I have a lot of things to accomplish, and there aren´t a lot of facilities for those things in the jungle. So I went with Wilmer to Shushufindi because he was going to sell some crops and go to a tourism course in Lago Agrio, and from there I took a ranchera to Lago Agrio and then back to Quito.