Slavery and Utopia: The Wars and Dreams of an Amazonian World Transformer 9781477317150

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Slavery and Utopia

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Fernando Santos-­G r anero

Slavery and Utopia

The Wars and Dreams of an Ama zonian World Tr ansformer

University of Texas Press

Austin

Copyright © 2018 by the Smithsonian Institution All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2018 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713–7819 utpress​.utexas​.edu​/rp​-­­form c The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper). Libr a ry of Congr ess C ata loging -­i n-­P ublic ation Data Names: Santos-Granero, Fernando, 1955- author. Title: Slavery and utopia : the wars and dreams of an Amazonian world transformer / Fernando Santos-Granero. Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017054255 ISBN 978-1-4773-1643-6 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4773-1714-3 (pbk.) ISBN 978-1-4773-1715-0 (lib e-book) ISBN 978-1-4773-1716-7 (non-lib e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Indians of South America—Peru—Ucayali (Region) | Ashaninca Indians—Peru—Ucayali (Region) | Slavery—Peru—Ucayali (Region)—History. | Indigenous peoples—Civil rights—Peru—Ucayali (Region) | Social change—Peru—Ucayali (Region) | Ucayali (Peru : Region)—Social conditions. | Peru—Colonization. Classification: LCC F3430.1.A83 S26 2018 | DDC 985/.43—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017054255 doi:10.7560/316436

To my Yanesha and Ashaninka friends, some of whom have passed but are always remembered: Pedro Antonio López Segundo Arroyo Espíritu Bautista Pascual Alcides Calderón José Chapeta Armando del Arca Adolfo Gutiérrez Domingo Huayol Augusto Francis Lores Espíritu Francisco Juan Francisco López Mercedes Francisco Yurich Francisco Margarita López Armando Mariño César Mariño Domingo Mariño Martín Mariño Pedro Ortiz Rebeca Ortiz Berna Pascual Coronel Vicente Pishagua Amador Quinchuya Benjamín Sedano Margarita Sedano Rosa Sedano Raúl Tepa Marín Valerio

The past is never dead. It’s not even past. William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

Contents

Illustrations  viii Acknowledgments  xi Prologue  1 Ch a p ter 1. An Indian Uprising Thirteen Years Later, 1928  12 Ch a p ter 2. Chronicle of a Revolt Foretold, 1915–1916  26 Ch a p ter 3. First Signs of Indigenous Discontent, 1910–1914  45 Ch a p ter 4. Early Years of an Indian Slaver, 1875–1897  70 Ch a p ter 5. A Struggle for Vitality, 1912–1914  90 Ch a p ter 6. After the Waters of Youth, 1915–1916  109 Ch a p ter 7. From War Chief to People-­Gatherer, 1921–1929  132 Ch a p ter 8. Twilight Years of an Old World Transformer,

1930–1958  157 Epilogue  179 Glossary  193 Notes  195 References  254 Index  277 [ vii ]

Illustrations

Figures Figure 1. Aerial view of the Ucayali River, 1940s.  xvii Figure 2. Capt. Lepecki and members of the Polish expedition, 1928. xviii Figure 3. Ashaninka chief Ompikiri, 1928.  xix Figure 4. Chief Tasorentsi with members of the Polish expedition, 1928.  xx Figure 5. News clip on the Upper Ucayali uprising, September 6, 1915.  xxi Figure 6. Ashaninka warriors, Lower Urubamba, 1920s.  xxii Figure 7. Conibo group, Ucayali River, 1900s.  xxii Figure 8. Yine men, Lower Urubamba, 1920s.  xxiii Figure 9. Port at Fundo Cumaría, Ucayali River, 1905.  xxiii Figure 10. Ashaninka counting sticks, 1920s.  xxiv Figure 11. Steam launch Libertad, circa 1910.  xxiv Figure 12. Rubber entrepreneur Carlos Corpancho, circa 1910.  xxv Figure 13. Ashaninka group, Perené Colony, 1910.  xxvi Figure 14. Postmen traveling along the Pichis Trail, 1926.  xxvi Figure 15. Capt. Herrera and his troops, Perené Colony, June 1914.  xxvii Figure 16. Tambo Miritiriani, Pichis Trail, 1926.  xxvii Figure 17. Perené Colony indigenous chiefs visiting Lima, 1914.  xxviii Figure 18. Caricatures of an Ashaninka chief and an army officer, July 1914.  xxix Figure 19. Ashaninka chief Venancio Amaringo Campa, circa 1900.  xxx [ viii ]

Illust r ations  [ ix ]

Figure 20. Fr. Gabriel Sala and Chief José confronting hostile Ashaninkas, 1897.  xxxi Figure 21. Score of Tasorentsi’s song.  xxxii Figure 22. Phase of the moon on September 3, 1915, at 5:30 a.m.  xxxii Figure 23. Night sky on September 3, 1915, at 5:30 a.m.  xxxiii Figure 24. Adventist missionary Ferdinand A. Stahl curing people, early 1920s.  xxxiv Figure 25. Stahl curing people in Cascadas, Perené River, early 1920s.  xxxiv Figure 26. Ashaninka delegation in Metraro, Upper Perené, circa 1928.  xxxv Figure 27. Stahl and Ashaninka converts in an unknown Adventist ­mission, mid-­1920s.  xxxvi Figure 28. Ashaninka chief José Carlos Tasorentsi, 1928.  xxxvi Figure 29. Ashaninka people attending Sabbath School, circa 1928.  xxxvii Figure 30. People-­gatherers Manuela and Ulises in Cheni, circa 1928.  xxxvii Figure 31. Francisco Vargas Hernández and an elderly Ashaninka woman, circa 1927.  xxxviii Figure 32. Atalaya on the confluence of the Tambo and Ucayali Rivers, 1928.  xxxix Figure 33. Telegram from Francisco Vargas warning of imminent Ashaninka attack, May 1928.  xxxix Figure 34. Stahl and 2nd Lt. Carlos Gensollen visiting the Tambo River, 1928.  xl Figure 35. Chief Tasorentsi’s camp in Santaniari, Ucayali River, circa 1929.  xl Figure 36. Ashaninka and Yine converts in Santaniari, circa 1929.  xli Figure 37. Police report denouncing Adventist subversive activities, 1928.  xli Figure 38. Lts. Leonardo Alvariño and Harold B. Grow in San Ramón, 1927.  xlii Figure 39. Village of Contamana on the Ucayali, 1926.  xlii Figure 40. Shirunkama and Jaromi in Aruya, Ucayali River, circa 1929.  xliii Figure 41. Shipibo-­Conibo converts in Ebenezer, Ucayali River, 1930s. xliii Figure 42. Yine debt-­peons belonging to Francisco Vargas, 1928.  xliv Figure 43: National Integrated Agricultural High School “José Carlos Amaringo Chico,” 2017.  xliv

[ x ]  Illust r ations

M a ps Map 0.1. Selva Central region showing nineteenth-­century political demarcation 3 Map 1.1. Selva Central indigenous peoples  14 Map 2.1. Upper Ucayali region during the 1915 multiethnic uprising  28 Map 3.1. Pichis-­Perené region during the 1912–1914 Ashaninka movement 46 Map 7.1. Selva Central region during the 1920s and 1940s Adventist effervescence 134

Acknowledgments

T

his book owes much to many people, and although as the author I am ultimately responsible for its accomplishments and failures, this has nevertheless been a truly collaborative project. So there are many people to whom thanks are due. First and foremost, I would like to express my gratitude to my Polish colleague and fellow Peruvianist Łukasz Krokoszyn´ski, who brought to my attention the extraordinary figure of Ashaninka shaman, chief, and world transformer José Carlos Tasorentsi. In the prologue, I recount how this happened, but I wish to thank him here again for his unwavering support throughout this scholarly adventure. He pointed out to me little-­known Polish publications on the subject, translated the relevant paragraphs and sections, helped me find photographs and other materials in Polish archives, and shared his contacts in hard-­to-­access Peruvian archives. I owe a similar debt of gratitude to two anthropologists, specialists on the Ashaninka people, who generously shared with me their field information on José Carlos Tasorentsi. Without their support this book would have been much poorer. John H. Bodley, who did his doctoral fieldwork among the Upper Ucayali Ashaninka in the 1960s and was the first to write about the “transformative movement” triggered by Adventist missionary Ferdinand A. Stahl’s preaching, was especially generous. Not only did he send me scans of his fieldnotes, genealogies, and maps, but also he was always open to answer my many queries about Ashaninka ethnography and history, and also to discuss my hypothesis about obscure aspects of Chief Tasorentsi’s life history. Jeremy Narby was equally generous. He took the time to read 130 pages of transcripts of interviews he recorded with the Ashaninka leader Carlos Pérez Shuma during his 1985 fieldwork on the Pichis River in order to find information on José Carlos [ xi ]

[ xii ]  Ack now ledgmen ts

Tasorentsi and related subjects. More importantly, he provided me, from his numerous field tapes, with a recording of the song Tasorentsi sang to the young Pérez Shuma, a song that was crucial to understanding the Ashaninka chief’s world-­transforming message. I am also very grateful to Ingrid Kummels, who went through the notes written by the late Manfred Schäfer during his early 1980s fieldwork among the Gran Pajonal Ashaninka, unsuccessfully seeking references to Chief Tasorentsi. I am indebted to many other specialists on the Ashaninka cluster of peoples, including the Ashaninka, Asheninka, and Nomatsiguenga, among others, who were always ready to answer my inquiries. Special thanks are due to Lucy Trapnell for providing me with many leads about early twentieth-­century Ashaninka history, for sharing her memories of a world-­transforming movement she witnessed while doing fieldwork among the Upper Perené Ashaninka during the 1970s, and for facilitating contacts with key Ashaninka leaders. Linguist Elena Mihas kindly shared her fieldnotes on important Ashaninka war chiefs associated with José Carlos Tasorentsi during the 1912–1914 Ashaninka movement. She also interviewed some of her collaborators on my behalf to determine to what extent Chief Tasorentsi was still remembered by the Upper Perené Ashaninka. Eduardo Fernández, Evan Killick, Søren Hvalkov, Hanne Veber, Juan Pablo Sarmiento Barletti, Marc Lenaerts, Jacques Chevalier, Pilar Saravia, Margarita Benavides, Mariella Villasante de Beauvais, and Karen Jacobs, who did fieldwork among different Ashaninka subgroups at different times during the last forty years, were also very helpful, promptly responding to my queries about Tasorentsi and discussing with me the finer points of Ashaninka ethnography. To them I am extremely grateful. Chief Tasorentsi’s political trajectory had a great impact not only in the lives of Ashaninka people but also in those of their Yine and Shipibo-­ Conibo neighbors. I could not have written this book without the help of those anthropologists who have worked among these peoples. My first debt of gratitude goes to Peter Gow, longtime colleague and friend, for providing me with invaluable information on Yine cosmological views and historical perceptions, and generously sharing his views on different aspects of my research. His shrewd insights, questions, and comments made me look with new eyes at the documentary and oral evidence. My thanks to Minna Opas, who provided me with a key Yine myth she collected during her doctoral fieldwork and was always willing to answer my questions regarding Yine mythology and cosmology, and to Luis Román, who shared with me his recollections of Ulises Díaz, the Yine Adventist preacher and “people-­gatherer” whom he interviewed in 1983.

Ack now ledgmen ts  [ xiii ]

Among the Shipibo-­Conibo specialists, I wish to thank Pierrette Bertrand-­Ricoveri for providing me with additional information on several of the myths published in her book Mitología Shipibo. Pierrette, François Morin, Bruno Illius, and Ann-­Marie Colpron were extremely helpful whenever I had questions regarding Shipibo-­Conibo ontologies and worldviews. Lucille Lindholm (formerly Eakin), SIL linguist who has worked extensively among the Shipibo-­Conibo, answered my questions about some of the shamanic narratives she had collected, and she put me in contact with Shipibo-­Conibo bilingual teachers to help me find answers to various questions about Shipibo-­ Conibo mythology. One of them, Artemio Pacaya Romaina, provided me with rich information on the movements in search of the Inka gods and the relationship between the Milky Way and the mythical waters of youth. To all of them my deepest gratitude. Dan Rosengren, France-­Marie Renard-­Casevitz, and Esteban Arias Urizar were always ready to answer my queries about the Matsigenka, who are Arawak speakers like the Ashaninka and their close neighbors. Their comments about the multiple meanings of the term tasorentsi helped me arrive at a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of this complex term. I am particularly indebted to Esteban, who shared with me his insights about tasorentsi “world transformers” among the Matsigenka and provided me with feedback on some of my interpretations of Ashaninka oral traditions. One of the main pillars of this book is the song that Chief Tasorentsi used to sing to his followers, which I have called the “Sky River Song.” The translation of this song, which combines Ashaninka, Yine, and Yanesha expressions, would have been impossible without the help of a large number of people. Lucy Trapnell and missionary Mark Friesen, who was by then embarked on the translation of the New Testament, consulted their Ashaninka and Yine collaborators, obtaining important information on diverse aspects of the text. Linguists Mary Ruth Wise and Pilar Valenzuela helped me disentangle obscure verses and linguistic conundrums. Austrian ethnomusicologist Bernd Brabec de Mori, who has done extensive field research among the Ashaninka, Conibo, Yine, Amahuaca, and Cocama peoples of the Ucayali basin, helped me transcribe the song’s text and wrote down its musical score. Not only did he analyze the song from a musical point of view, but he generously and patiently answered all my queries about a variety of related subjects. Elena Mihas checked the final translation and helped refine it by pointing out certain inconsistencies. To all of them I am deeply indebted.

[ xiv ]  Ack now ledgmen ts

This is as much a work of history as of anthropology. As such it has benefited from the support of five noted historians. Frederica Barclay Rey de Castro, with whom I have collaborated for the past forty years, shared with me her notes on the activities of Adventist missionaries in the Perené Colony based on documents that are no longer accessible to the public. She also provided me with obscure and difficult-­to-­get materials and helped me check and translate many German sources. More importantly, she accompanied me on a trip to the Pichis and Pachitea Rivers, where I was able to interview key Ashaninka leaders and elders, including Chief Tasorentsi’s youngest son. Without her company and enthusiasm that trip would not have been half as lively as it was. Juan Carlos La Serna Salcedo, who has written extensively on Adventist missionizing in the Selva Central region, supported this scholarly adventure from the very beginning, suggesting little-­known Adventist sources, providing me with his notes on the Union Incaica, and sharing with me an interview with Pastor Alejandro Bullón Páucar that was key to understanding Ferdinand Stahl’s strategy to win the hearts of his Ashaninka listeners. To them I am deeply thankful. Thanks are also due to Pilar García Jordán and Núria Sala i Vila, authors of important historical works on nineteenth-­century Peruvian Amazonia, for their generosity in sharing their materials and ideas. Pilar provided me with the transcription of an important document on the slaving activities of the Upper Ucayali rubber entrepreneurs that no longer exists because the papers of the Archivo de la Prefectura de Loreto were burned in 1998. Núria supplied me with information on several prominent rubber entrepreneurs and shared with me the information she gathered on Chief Tasorentsi while doing research at the Peruvian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Though not an Amazonian specialist, my longtime friend Scarlett O’Phelan also contributed to this project by furnishing me with a list of references of historical works dealing with the issues of modernity, indigenism, and nation building in Peru. All these contributions helped me contextualize Chief Tasorentsi’s political activities and refine my historical analysis. And for this I am very grateful. I would also like to thank Adventist pastors Alejandro Bullón Páucar and Merling Alomia for taking time to respond to my queries about diverse aspects of the history of the Adventist Church in the Selva Central region. Special thanks are due to Alberto Timm, theologian at the Ellen G. White Center of the General Conference of Seventh-­Day Adventists, for his patience and kindness in answering my many questions about Adventist doctrine and its evolution through time.

Ack now ledgmen ts  [ xv ]

Over the past seven years, I have received courteous assistance at many archives, museums, and libraries. Here I want especially to acknowledge the help of Manolo Ramos Zegarra, executive director of Hemerographic Services, and Patricia Soto, librarian at the Manuscript and Rare Book Collection of the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú; Rafael Tapia, Vilma Gutiérrez, and Javier Pacheco of the Archivo del Congreso de la República; Víctor Solier, director, and Juan José Huaroc, archivist, of the Archivo Regional de Junín; Fr. Andrés Alegre, director of the archive of the Provincia Misionera de San Francisco Solano and its provincial, Fr. Mauro Vallejo, who allowed me to consult their archives and shared with me their bread and salt; Peter Chiomenti, director, Benjamin Baker, assistant archivist, and Eucaris Galicia, assistant, of the Office of Archives, Statistics and Research of the General Conference of Seventh-­Day Adventists; Rafael Alonso of the Centro Cultural José Pío Aza; and Margarita Benavides, Carla Soria, and Paulo Sima of the Instituto del Bien Común. Special thanks are also due to Pat Nietfeld, retired collections manager of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), for providing me with the inventories of the William Schaeffler and Ferdinand A. Stahl collections, and for going out of her way to help me explore the NMAI collections in search of objects and photographs on the Ashaninka, Shipibo-­Conibo, and Yine peoples. Thanks also to Rachel Menyuk and Heather A. Shannon of the NMAI Archive Center for their help in securing copies of documents and photographs from the William Schaeffler and Ferdinand A. Stahl collections. Thanks are also due to Eric W. Schnittke, assistant archivist of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, for providing me with the finding aid for the museum’s William C. Farabee collection of objects from the Upper Ucayali River. Although a large portion of this book is based on documentary sources, the text would not be half as interesting were it not for the oral information provided by several knowledgeable Ashaninka leaders and elders. Adolfo Gutiérrez of Churingaveni on the Perené River, who participated as an Ashaninka sage in the Programa de Formación de ­Maestros Bilíngües de la Amazonía Peruana (FORMABIAP), told me about Chief Tasorentsi’s youthful years and his imprisonment as a result of accusations of being an Adventist subversive. Armando del Arca Huamani, one of the founders of the community of Kirishari on the Pichis River, provided me with crucial information on Chief Tasorentsi’s shamanic activities and the mystery surrounding his death. Raúl Tepa of the settlement of Zungaroyali on the Pichis River discussed Tasorentsi’s

[ xvi ]  Ack now ledgmen ts

participation in the Adventist exodus from the Perené to the Pichis River and the shamanic practices of the leaders of the 1912–1914 Ashaninka movement. Alcides Calderón, leader of the Ashaninka army that fought against the insurgents of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement in 1990, told me about Chief Tasorentsi’s activities as an Adventist preacher and his participation in the confrontations resulting from the 1921 uprising of Capt. Guillermo Cervantes. More importantly, it was Alcides who helped me contact Segundo Arroyo, Chief Tasorentsi’s youngest son. My thanks go to all of them, but especially to Segundo, who provided me with vital information on his father’s slaving activities and moral conversion, and on the circumstances of his death. The book contains more than forty pictures. Most of them come from newspapers, magazines, photographic albums, and old books deposited at the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú. Others come from Adventist periodicals kept at the Office of Archives, Statistics and Research of the General Conference of Seventh-­Day Adventists; the Center for Adventist Research at Andrews University; the Smithsonian Institution’s National Anthropological Archives; and the National Museum of the American Indian. I wish to thank all these institutions for granting me permission to publish their photos. Special thanks go to Carlos Runcie Tanaka, director of the Archivo Fotográfico Walter O. Runcie (AWFOR), and to Augusto Dreyer Costa, director of the Archivo Fotográfico Carlos Dreyer, for opening the doors of their family archives and offering me their warm friendship. Thanks also to Juan Carlos La Serna Salcedo, who helped me identify historical photographs to illustrate the book and presented me with a copy of his wonderful work El bosque ilustrado: Diccionario histórico de la fotografía amazónica peruana (1868–1950). Many of the photographs reproduced in this book are of great historical value but low photographic quality. I wish to thank Lina González of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Digital Imaging Lab, for her splendid work in editing and improving the quality of the photographs. This book also owes much to my longtime friend Anthony (Tony) Coates, who revised the manuscript for the press and got so caught up with Chief Tasorentsi’s story as I handed him chapter after chapter that he encouraged me to go on. To him my deepest gratitude. Last, but not least, I must thank my wife, Clara, who night after night would listen to my many doubts concerning my research on Chief Tasorentsi’s life and always managed to bring me back down to earth with her wise and discerning questions.

figure 1. Aerial view of the Ucayali River, 1940s. The Ucayali is a whitewater river that meanders through a vast Amazonian floodplain from south to north. Also known as the Lake Region, its basin is strongly marked by large fluctuations in precipitation and river levels that determine its navigability, food accessibility, and health conditions. Source: Máximo H. Kuczynski-Godard, La vida en la amazonía peruana: Observaciones de un médico (Lima: Librería Internacional del Perú, 1944). Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú. [ xvii ]

figure 2. Capt. Lepecki and members of the Polish expedition, 1928. This photograph was taken on board the Cahuapanas, the war steamboat that the Peruvian government put at the disposal of the representatives of the PolishAmerican Migration Syndicate. It shows Capt. Mieczysław B. Lepecki (first man seated from left to right) and Dr. Aleksander Freyd (second man standing from left to right). Courtesy of Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe. [ xviii ]

figure 3. Ashaninka chief Ompikiri, 1928. Ompikiri was one of the Ashaninka chiefs who participated in the 1915 Upper Ucayali uprising. After embracing the Adventist faith, in 1928 he moved with his people to Cheni, on the shores of the Tambo River, where he waited for the teacher promised by Pastor Ferdinand Stahl and the imminent transformation of the world. Source: Carlyle B. Haynes, “The South American Division,” Review and Herald 106(19) (1929): 12. Courtesy of the Office of Archives, Statistics and Research, General Conference of Seventh-Day Adventists. [ xix ]

figure 4. Chief Tasorentsi with members of the Polish expedition, 1928. This picture shows Chief Tasorentsi (second standing from left) flanked on the left by Dr. Aleksander Freyd and on the right by his deputy, his wife with two of their children, and Capt. Lepecki. It is not clear whether the deputy chief is Ompikiri or Napoleón, both of whom were in Cheni when the meeting took place. The woman must be Santana, Tasorentsi’s first wife. Source: Aleksander Freyd, “Garść grażeń z Amazonji Brazylijskiej Peruańskiej,” Auto 12:653. [ xx ]

figure 5. News clip on the Upper Ucayali uprising, September 6, 1915. El Oriente, one of Loreto’s most important newspapers, was the first to inform of the seriousness of the multiethnic uprising that began on September 3, 1915, with concerted attacks on several Upper Ucayali targets. In the following months, it justified the revolt as the consequence of the exactions of white rubber bosses and slavers. Source: El Oriente, “Graves sucesos en el Ucayali,” September 6, 1915. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú. [ xxi ]

figure 6. Ashaninka warriors, Lower Urubamba, 1920s. This picture depicts a group of Ashaninka men from the Lower Urubamba armed with bows and arrows. The Ashaninka formed the bulk of the warriors that participated in the 1915 revolt. This picture must have been taken shortly after the expelled patrones started to reoccupy the region, around 1921. Source: Album Casa Baselli. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú.

figure 7. Conibo group, Ucayali River, 1900s. Known as “Lords of the Ucayali” for the dominion they had historically exerted as pirates and raiders along the Ucayali River, the Conibo together with the Shipibo played an important role in the 1915 uprising and were harshly persecuted. Some of their leaders were captured and sent to prison in Iquitos. Source: A. Miles Moss, A Trip into the Interior of Peru (Lima: Printed by Charles F. Southwell, 1909), 106. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú. [ xxii ]

figure 8. Yine men, Lower Urubamba, 1920s. The picture of this group of Yine men wearing their best tunics was taken in front of the casa grande of a Lower Urubamba patrón, most probably Francisco Vargas Hernández. Yine people had been taken by rubber patrones to work in other areas in the 1890s and were only able to return to their lands around 1912. Source: Album Casa Baselli. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú.

figure 9. Port at Fundo Cumaría, Ucayali River, 1905. Also known as Nueva Italia, Cumaría was a large rubber entrepôt and sugarcane hacienda owned by two Italian brothers, Fernando and Francisco Francchini. It was also a busy port for the transshipment of goods because it was the highest point of year-round navigation on the river for the larger steamships. Source: César Cipriani, Informe del Ing. Sr. César Cipriani sobre la ruta Perené-Ucayali (Lima: Imprenta del Estado, 1906). Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú. [ xxiii ]

figure 10. Ashaninka counting sticks, 1920s. Ashaninka people used these “counting sticks,” collected by Adventist missionary William Schaeffler in the late 1920s, to reckon the days and keep track of work done on a weekly basis, as suggested by the fact that they have deeper notches every seven marks. Source: William Schaeffler Collection (196023). Courtesy of the National Museum of the American Indian.

figure 11. Steam launch Libertad, circa 1910. The Libertad, a double-deck steamer owned by the Delgado brothers, was attacked twice by indigenous rebels in 1915. Their obsession with capturing the ship was due to the fact that its owners were actively involved in the slave trade both as outfitters of the region’s largest slavers and as carriers of captive women and children. Source: Variedades, no. 394, September 18, 1915. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú. [ xxiv ]

figure 12. Rubber entrepreneur Carlos Corpancho, circa 1910. The young Carlos Corpancho was a member of a patrician family from Lima who, at the height of the rubber boom, moved to the Selva Central to try his luck extracting rubber. After “going native” and attempting to be recognized as a divine emissary, he was killed by his peons for not living up to their expectations. Source: Variedades, no. 244, November 2, 1912. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú. [ xxv ]

figure 13. Ashaninka group, Perené Colony, 1910. The rebels that attacked the Pichis Trail tambos must have looked very much like the men in this photograph, taken in the Perené Colony a few years before the Ashaninka 1912–1914 movement. Note that by then many Ashaninka men already possessed shotguns or rifles. Source: National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution: NAA INV 04326100. Courtesy of National Anthropological Archives.

figure 14. Postmen traveling along the Pichis Trail, 1926. Mail between Lima and Iquitos was transported by bus to La Merced, mules to Puerto Bermúdez, and steamboat to Iquitos. During the 1912–1914 Ashaninka movement, the rebels made a point of burning the mailbags and destroying the telegraphic lines. Photo: Walter O. Runcie. Courtesy of the Archivo Fotográfico Walter O. Runcie. [ xxvi ]

figure 15. Capt. Herrera and his troops, Perené Colony, June 1914. Captain Herrera (center), commander of the Mounted Infantry of the Andean town of La Oroya, was one of the first officers to be sent to the Selva Central to punish the Ashaninka rebels. Here he appears in the company of friendly Yanesha and Ashaninka chiefs while his soldiers raise the Peruvian flag. Source: Variedades, no. 309, January 31, 1914. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú.

figure 16. Tambo Miritiriani, Pichis Trail, 1926. Miritiriani was one of the twelve tambos established by the government along the Pichis Trail. In December 1913, the insurgents attacked five of these tambos, including Miritiriani, setting the houses on fire, killing those who opposed them, and cutting down the telegraph lines to prevent the attacked from asking for help. Photo: Walter O. Runcie. Courtesy of Archivo Fotográfico Walter O. Runcie. [ xxvii ]

figure 17. Perené Colony indigenous chiefs visiting Lima, 1914. In July 1914, Víctor Valle Riestra, administrator of the Perené Colony, took a group of indigenous workers to Lima to ask for guarantees for their lives. Led by Ashaninka chiefs Zárate (far left) and José Kinchori (far right), and by Yanesha chief Santiago López (center), the group caused a great sensation among the authorities and public at large. Source: La Prensa, “La vida entre los Campas y Amueshas,” July 18, 1914. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú. [ xxviii ]

figure 18. Caricatures of an Ashaninka chief and an army officer, July 1914. This caricature expresses the fascination mixed with condescension that urban Peruvians felt for the Ashaninka insurgents. Through a play on words, the caricaturist mocks former president Augusto Leguía, by then exiled in Panama, intimating that he should turn to the Ashaninka for help in order to force his way back to the country. Source: Variedades, no. 332, July 11, 1914. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú. [ xxix ]

figure 19. Ashaninka chief Venancio Amaringo Campa, circa 1900. Chief Venancio was an enterprising Ashaninka chief who committed his followers to working for the famous rubber barons Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald and Carlos Scharff. At the turn of the nineteenth century, he was considered to be one of the “owners” of the Upper Ucayali. Source: Pedro Portillo, Las montañas de Ayacucho y los ríos Apurímac, Mantaro, Ene, Perené, Tambo y Alto Ucayali (Lima: Imprenta del Estado, 1901), 42. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú. [ xxx ]

figure 20. Fr. Gabriel Sala and Chief José confronting hostile Ashaninkas, 1897. In this watercolor, Fr. Sala depicts his exploration team confronting a group of hostile Ashaninka in the Gran Pajonal through the mediation of his guide, presumably Chief José (center left). The young chief, who stands out from the surrounding Ashaninka because of his short hair and dark tunic, was probably the same man who later on came to be known as Tasorentsi. Source: Richard Chase Smith, “Los Amuesha: Una minoría amenazada,” Participación 3(5) (1974): 55. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú. [ xxxi ]

figure 21. Score of Tasorentsi’s song. Tasorentsi’s song does not resemble any of the known styles of Ashaninka songs, but it has some of the gravity of beshiriantsi worshipping songs. It betrays elements of both the Andean huaynos of the neighboring highland peoples of Pasco and Junín and the ancient Catholic hymns sung in Franciscan missions during colonial times. Courtesy of Bernd Brabec de Mori.

figure 22. Phase of the moon on September 3, 1915, at 5:30 a.m. On September 3, 1915, the moon was in a waning phase and only 33 percent full. This means that it must have been a dark night, making the stars more visible. Source: http://www.moonpage.com/index.html. [ xxxii ]

figure 23. Night sky on September 3, 1915, at 5:30 a.m. Chief Tasorentsi sought to identify the river of youth that appears in the mythologies of most Selva Central indigenous peoples with the Milky Way. His decision to start the 1915 uprising on the dawn of September 3, when the Milky Way shined at the center of the night sky, seems to have been made to reinforce this association. Source: http://www.astroviewer.com/interactive-night-sky-map.php. [ xxxiii ]

figure 24. Adventist missionary Ferdinand A. Stahl curing people, early 1920s. Stahl’s success among the Ashaninka lay to a great extent in his training as a nurse. Wherever he went, the first thing he did was to gather the sick to cure them. Since he claimed that it was God who cured people, many believed that he was Pabá, the Sun god. Source: Center for Adventist Research (P 004115). Courtesy of Center for Adventist Research.

figure 25. Stahl curing people in Cascadas, Perené River, early 1920s. In his first years among the Ashaninka, Stahl often wore cushma while visiting nonconverted villages. Because of his healing powers and quick adoption of Ashaninka customs, he was soon called the “blond shaman.” Source: Center for Adventist Research (P 003999). Courtesy of Center for Adventist Research. [ xxxiv ]

figure 26. Ashaninka delegation in Metraro, Upper Perené, circa 1928. Stahl’s presence in the region created great expectations among the Ashaninka and other Selva Central indigenous peoples. The rumor was that a “white god” had appeared in the Perené valley. As a result, people began to flock to Metraro, sometimes in small family groups or, as in this case, in larger groups led by their chiefs. Source: Ferdinand A. Stahl Photograph Collection (P08619). Courtesy of National Museum of the American Indian. [ xxxv ]

figure 27. Stahl and Ashaninka converts in an unknown Adventist mission, mid-1920s. The hills on the background of this picture indicate that it was taken somewhere in the Upper Perené region, probably in Metraro or Cascadas. The man at the center dressed in Western clothes resembles Chief José Carlos Tasorentsi in features and posture as he appears in the best accredited photo of him that we know of. Photo: Unknown. Courtesy of the Archivo Fotográfico Carl Dreyer.

figure 28. Ashaninka Chief José Carlos Tasorentsi, 1928. This photograph of Chief Tasorentsi (fourth man from left, standing in the second row) was taken around May 1928 in Cheni, where he and other leaders of the 1915 uprising had gathered hundreds of followers to wait for the cataclysmic event that would liberate them from white domination and bring them wealth and immortality. Source: V. E. Peugh, “Through the Jungles to Iquitos (Part 3),” Review and Herald 106(2) (1929): 13. Courtesy of the Office of Archives, Statistics and Research, General Conference of Seventh-Day Adventists. [ xxxvi ]

figure 29. Ashaninka people attending Sabbath School, circa 1928. This picture was probably taken in Cheni, on the Tambo River, during missionaries Stahl’s and Peugh’s 1928 trip to Iquitos. The visitors stayed several days in Cheni teaching the “word of God” to the locals. They were surprised by the large number of people that attended the Sabbath School and their willingness to learn. Source: Center for Adventist Research (P 003995). Courtesy of Center for Adventist Research.

figure 30. People-gatherers Manuela and Ulises in Cheni, circa 1928. When Stahl and Peugh decided to establish a new mission in Cheni, they appointed Ulises, a Yine man, and Manuela, his Ashaninka wife, as the new mission’s native preachers. Not long afterwards, the couple were arrested and imprisoned for seven months at the instigation of the local bosses. Source: Ferdinand A. Stahl, “God’s Guiding Hand,” Review and Herald 106(34) (1929): 19. Courtesy of the Office of Archives, Statistics and Research, General Conference of Seventh-Day Adventists. [ xxxvii ]

figure 31. Francisco Vargas Hernández and an elderly Ashaninka woman, circa 1927. Pancho Vargas, one of the most powerful Upper Ucayali patrones, commanded a large workforce of Yine and Ashaninka people. Of indigenous or mestizo origins, he was a charismatic, authoritarian man who adopted and played the roles of white patron and indigenous leader. Source: Alberto Gridilla, “Felicidad de los Campas,” Florecillas de San Antonio 203 (1928): 430. Courtesy of Archivo de la Provincia Misionera San Francisco Solano. [ xxxviii ]

figure 32. Atalaya on the confluence of the Tambo and Ucayali Rivers, 1928. Founded in 1928 on lands provided by Pancho Vargas, Atalaya was meant to become the stronghold of the Upper Ucayali patrones and a deterrent to the Adventist missionaries’ subversive influence. When this picture was taken, Atalaya had a small school and was inhabited by only four families. Source: Mieczysław B. Lepecki, Od Amazonki do ziemi ognistej (Warsaw: Ludowa Spoldzielna wydawnicza, 1958), 144–145.

figure 33. Telegram from Francisco Vargas warning of imminent Ashaninka attack, May 1928. This telegram caused the arrest of native preachers Ulises and Manuela and marked the beginning of the persecution of Adventist missionaries and their assistants in the Upper Ucayali region. Source: Telegram of Francisco Vargas Hernández to Ucayali Congressman Abraham Rivero, May 23, 1928 (AGN: MI/PR 278/DP/LR). Courtesy of the Archivo General de la Nación. [ xxxix ]

figure 34. Stahl and 2nd Lt. Carlos Gensollen visiting the Tambo River, 1928. This picture of Stahl and 2nd Lt. Gensollen (center), commissioned to determine the veracity of the accusations raised by local patrones against Adventists missionaries, was probably taken in Colonia Pira. It also seems to feature chiefs Ompikiri (first man standing from left) and Tasorentsi (third man standing from left). Source: Ferdinand A. Stahl, “God’s Guiding Hand,” Review and Herald 106(34) (1929): 19.

figure 35. Chief Tasorentsi’s camp in Santaniari, Ucayali River, circa 1929. After abandoning Cheni, chiefs Tasorentsi, Ompikiri, and Napoleón moved with their followers to Santaniari on the Upper Ucayali. There they seem to have settled separately, each on its own camp. Source: Barbara Osborne Westphal, “Up the Amazon,” The Youth’s Instructor 78(29) (1930): 4. Courtesy of the Office of Archives, Statistics and Research, General Conference of Seventh-Day Adventists. [ xl ]

figure 36. Ashaninka and Yine converts in Santaniari, circa 1929. Stahl’s message about Christ’s second coming, in addition to indigenous expectation that a flying steamboat would arrive bringing them wealth and destroying their white-mestizo enemies, attracted a large number of Ashaninka and Yine converts to Santaniari. Source: Barbara Osborne Westphal, “Up the Amazon,” The Youth’s Instructor 78(29) (1930): 4. Courtesy of the Office of Archives, Statistics and Research, General Conference of Seventh-Day Adventists.

figure 37. Police report denouncing Adventist subversive activities, 1928. Report in which the police constable of the Upper Ucayali accuses Adventist preachers of “sowing panic and terror in the region” and persuading indigenous peons to abandon their patrones by claiming that Stahl is God and that those who do not respond to his calls will be destroyed by a flying steamboat. Source: Letter of the Police Constable of Tambo and Upper Ucayali to the Prefect of Loreto, Mouth of the Tambo, November 3, 1928 (MRE: 2.0.E, 1929-Entradas, no. 73). Courtesy of the Central Archive of the Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores del Perú. [ xli ]

figure 38. Lts. Leonardo Alvariño and Harold B. Grow in San Ramón, 1927. On October 26, 1927, Lt. Alvariño, charged with the task of establishing Oriental National Airline, connecting Lima with Iquitos, completed the first trip from Lima to San Ramón. The appearance of airplanes had a deep impact among the Ashaninka, who identified them with a mythical bird that was to herald the end of the world. Source: Amaru Tincopa, Alas de la montaña: La aviación en el Oriente peruano. Accessed July 2013. http://alasandinas.wordpress.com/2012/05/23/ alas-de-la-montana-la-historia-de-la-aviacion-en-el-oriente-peruano/.

figure 39. Village of Contamana on the Ucayali, 1926. When in 1928 Chief Tasorentsi settled in Contamana to study at the Adventist Bible School, the town, with more than 2,000 inhabitants, was the largest along the Ucayali River. It boasted a central plaza, two main streets, a post office, two elementary and two high schools, one for girls and one for boys, and an electrical plant. Photo: Walter O. Runcie. Courtesy of Archivo Fotográfico Walter O. Runcie. [ xlii ]

figure 40. Shirunkama and Jaromi in Aruya, Ucayali River, circa 1929. Aruya converts with people-gatherers Shirunkama and Jaromi (standing on the extremes). Like Tasorentsi, Shirunkama preached an indigenized version of the Adventist doctrine, while at the same time seeking communication with the creator god through the ritual consumption of ayahuasca. Source: Henry Westphal, “My Paisanos Want God’s Word,” South American Bulletin 6(8) (1930): 5. Courtesy of the Office of Archives, Statistics and Research, General Conference of Seventh-Day Adventists.

figure 41. Shipibo-Conibo converts in Ebenezer, Ucayali River, 1930s. Founded in 1931 by Aymara preacher Rufino Pacho, Ebenezer, located on the mouth of the Roaboya River, soon attracted a large number of Shipibo-Conibo converts. Source: Center for Adventist Research (P 004119). Courtesy of Center for Adventist Research. [ xliii ]

figure 42. Yine debt-peons belonging to Francisco Vargas, 1928. Yine debt-peons from Pancho Vargas’s fundos participated in both the 1915 uprising and the 1920s Adventist effervescence. Many of them abandoned Vargas to take shelter in Shahuaya under Chief Tasorentsi’s protection. This led to Tasorentsi’s arrest and torture, and his subsequent abandonment of the Upper Ucayali region. Source: Mieczysław B. Lepecki, Od Amazonki do ziemi ognistej (Warsaw: Ludowa Spoldzielna wydawnicza, 1958), 112–113.

figure 43. National Integrated Agricultural High School “José Carlos Amaringo Chico,” 2017. Erected in Santa Teresa (Pachitea River) in 1987, this school was named after José Carlos Amaringo Chico, the community’s founder. The picture depicts students celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the school’s foundation. Photo: Idalita Chauca Chávez. Courtesy of the Instituto del Bien Común. [ xliv ]

Slavery and Utopia

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Prologue

T

he lives of books, as those of people, are usually shaped as much by design and intention as by sheer chance. In this case, however, chance has played a larger role than design, at least with regard to its origins. Its beginnings go back to an e-­mail that Łukasz Krokoszyn´ski, by then a Polish anthropology student, sent me on October 22, 2008. I had met Łukasz a few months earlier at the Oxford-­ Paris conference of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America. He had been doing historical research on the Pano-­speaking Remo and Kapanawa of the Sierra del Divisor in eastern Peru, and, as I was also interested in the history of Peruvian Amazonia, we soon engaged in a lively discussion about archives, documentary sources, and a variety of historical conundrums. I promised to send him the two volumes on Panoan peoples of the Guía etnográfica de la alta amazonía, a collection of ethnographic monographs that I had coedited with my Peruvian colleague Frederica Barclay.1 His e-­mail was to confirm receipt and thank me for the volumes. At the end he added: “I am sorry that there is little I can reciprocate with at the moment. The only thing that comes to mind is a book that you may not be familiar with, as it was published in Polish by a Polish traveler. It contains some interesting first-­ hand information on the Peruvian Montaña in the 1920’s.”2 The book in question, titled Na Amazonce i we wschodniem Peru (In the Amazon and Eastern Peru), recounts the personal experiences of Mieczysław B. Lepecki, a Polish army officer, during a 1928 reconnaissance trip to the Upper Ucayali River.3 What led Łukasz to bring this particular book to my attention was Lepecki’s mention of an encounter with a Campa or Ashaninka4 chief who claimed to be “hijo del Sol,” “son of the Sun.” His followers, according to Lepecki, called him [1 ]

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“Tasulinchi”—a misrendering of tasorentsi, the Ashaninka term for a category of gods and good spirits that may be translated, as I argue in chapter 1, as “all-­powerful blower world transformer.” Lepecki described Tasorentsi as “the greatest chief of the Campas” and paramount leader of a violent uprising that in 1915 had swept the Upper Ucayali and Lower Urubamba, killing many rubber extractors and forcing the survivors to abandon the region. Knowing of my interest in the struggles of the indigenous peoples of the Selva Central region5 against white people’s encroachment, Łukasz assumed that Lepecki’s reference would be of interest to me (see map 0.1). He was right. The information was extremely puzzling. In all the years I had spent studying the history of the Peruvian montaña,6 I had never read of a native uprising led by a charismatic leader in that particular area and at that date. I told Łukasz that I suspected that Lepecki belonged to that breed of roguish adventurers that from time to time come to “explore” the Amazon in search of exotic stories to publish when they go back home, travelers who claim to have found El Dorado, lost Inka cities, the largest assassin boa ever, or never-­before-­contacted cannibalistic tribes. Lepecki, I ventured, seemed to have merged accounts of the well-­attested 1912–1914 Ashaninka attacks on white-­mestizo settlements in the neighboring Pichis, Perené, and Pangoa River basins with older narratives about Juan Santos Atahualpa, the head of an eighteenth-­ century utopian and anticolonial uprising against the Spanish who also styled himself “son of God.”7 I was not prepared, however, to dismiss the story entirely and asked Łukasz whether he could translate for me the section recounting Lepecki’s meeting with Tasorentsi. One full year passed by before Łukasz could complete the translation. But when he finished, he had translated not only the passages on Lepecki’s encounter with Tasorentsi but also all the chapter sections in which Tasorentsi was mentioned. In addition, he had drawn a detailed synopsis of each of the book’s chapters. I was now able to verify Lepecki’s story. Capt. Lepecki did not provide many details about Tasorentsi’s revolt. He asserted that it had taken place in 1915, it had involved a confederation of tribes from the Gran Pajonal and Ucayali River, the insurgents had killed many of the white people living along this river, they had sought to capture the steam launch Libertad, and Tasorentsi had won the war, after which for five years the region had been freed from the presence of white-­mestizo patrones.8 It was not much to go on, but it was enough to launch a search for independent evidence that the revolt had indeed occurred. I spent several days checking all the published

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M a p 0.1. Selva Central region showing nineteenth-­century political demarcation.

sources on the history of Peruvian Amazonia that I had at hand, but to no avail. None of them mentioned the uprising. When I was about to give up my search and tell Łukasz that Lepecki was probably a fabulist, I came across the briefest of statements by Franciscan historian Dionisio Ortiz: “As a result of the rubber crisis, there were serious disorders in the Pichis, Pachitea and Upper Ucayali rivers in which native people, angry at the abuses committed against them, rose against the rubber extractors, killing some of them. On top of decreasing remunerations, they complained about physical maltreatment. In the Upper Ucayali the

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Campa killed some rubber extractors on the Unini River and attacked the launch Libertad. The government had to take action in the matter, establishing military garrisons in Iparía, Cumaría and the mouth of the Tambo River in order to safeguard the civilized.”9 Ortiz did not mention the exact year in which the uprising took place, but his references to the rubber crisis, which started in 1910 and deepened in 1914, and to the attack on the Libertad persuaded me that Lepecki’s story could be true. At that point, it became clear to me that the only way of assessing the full scope and significance of Tasorentsi’s revolt was to examine the newspapers published at the time. It took me another two years, until 2011, before I found the time to travel to Lima to examine the National Library’s newspaper collection. My expectations were more than fulfilled. The many references that I found in regional and national newspapers on the 1915 Upper Ucayali uprising confirmed not only that Lepecki was a credible source, but also that, at the time, the insurrection had been considered a much more serious affair than Ortiz’s brief mention suggested. Łukasz had given me the greatest gift of all: a new and intriguing research topic. And for that I am greatly thankful. What I did not know at the time was that my new project, originally focused on Tasorentsi’s 1915 revolt, would lead me, as the information started piling up, to attempt reconstructing the extraordinary life and political trajectory of a man who was undoubtedly one of the greatest, if not the greatest, twentieth-­century Ashaninka leader.10 And what an extraordinary life it was. A life full of dramatic chance events, unlikely changes of direction, and strategic self-­reinventions, but also one driven by a deep-­rooted adherence to three basic Ashaninka cultural values: unrestricted generosity, interethnic openness, and the hope for immortality. A cosmopolitan life marked by a mixed ethnic background, a more than passing acquaintance with the cultural practices and cosmologies of the region’s diverse indigenous peoples, and an unusual—at least for the time—knowledge of white people’s language and lifeways. But also a life doggedly dedicated to fighting indigenous slavery, challenging white domination, and defending indigenous peoples’ rights. Not a life, however, of ethical blacks and whites but one characterized by moral greys and radical moral conversions. The child of an age that brought about radical changes to the lives of the Selva Central indigenous peoples, Tasorentsi began his teenage years working as a quasi-­enslaved debt-­peon for a well-­known Peruvian slaver. He went on to become a wealthy slave trader and shaman-­chief after abandoning his patrón (boss), until he finally renounced slave raiding in

Prologue  [ 5 ]

order to catalyze Ashaninka discontent at the end of the rubber boom era. After that, he went on to head the largest multiethnic antislavery uprising of twentieth-­century Peruvian Amazonia, abandoned violence as a political tool after embracing Seventh-­Day Adventism, and spent most of the rest of his life as a “people-­gatherer,” preaching and practicing a shamanized version of Adventist doctrine. As might be expected of a world transformer, Tasorentsi’s death was shrouded in myth and mystery. The only constant throughout this eventful life was his quest for the sky river: either under the form of the indigenous tradition of the “waters of youth” where the higher gods bathe in order to remain forever young, or as the “river of life” that traverses the celestial New Jerusalem of the Adventist canon. Tasorentsi’s “wars” (his armed actions, mystical battles, and ideological struggles) and his “dreams” (his political aims, moral hopes, and ayahuasca visions) of the book’s title were driven by this greater purpose: the goal of attaining immortality for himself and his followers. I have tried to put together the many pieces that compose the large puzzle of Chief Tasorentsi’s life by combining a vast array of materials: archival documents from national and regional repositories with oral histories recorded from knowledgeable indigenous elders; journalistic articles and editorials with field materials collected by Ashaninka specialists in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s; Adventist and Catholic missionary literature with ethnographic works; articles produced by scientists and explorers with travelogues published by globe-­trotters and adventurers; dictionaries of indigenous languages with old maps, sky charts, and atlases; and musical recordings and scores with photographs, early films, and other visual materials. It is thus a work of historical anthropology, a hybrid book combining the conventions of anthropology and history. But one that differs substantially in both style and methodology from other historical works on Lowland South America, which seek to unveil the history of first encounters by deconstructing early colonial narratives,11 reveal indigenous modes of historical consciousness,12 or elucidate the ways in which indigenous peoples set about constituting the specific historical situations in which they have been involved.13 It also differs from the biographical or autobiographical works on native Amazonian leaders, shamans, and thinkers, which are mainly based on information provided by living subjects and make little use of other kinds of historical sources.14 These approaches—which indeed have produced groundbreaking studies on the history of native Amazonian peoples and individuals— share the tendency to privilege orally transmitted indigenous historical

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understandings and perceptions over nonindigenous written sources. Without dismissing the writings of colonial actors as important historical sources, Neil Whitehead considers that, given their incomplete and biased nature, these need to be interpreted in the light of “Native social and cultural practices, particularly as expressed in Native discourse,”15 or, as Bruce Albert would put it, in the light of indigenous “expressive regimes.”16 Rightly questioning the notion that written sources are more “objective” than oral narratives or nonverbal formulations (such as ritual performances, dances, or mimic representations), Jonathan Hill places emphasis on the latter modes, claiming that although they “cannot be literally read as direct accounts of historical processes, they can show how indigenous societies have experienced history and the ongoing means by which they struggle to make sense out of complex, contradictory historical processes.”17 In turn, Peter Gow mentions the difficulty of incorporating historical methods into anthropology given the absence of historical records prior to the colonial encounter and the scarcity of documents on native Amazonian societies in colonial archives. “In searching to use historical methods,” Gow claims, “anthropological thought must often admit defeat, not because it is intrinsically limited as an intellectual project, but because that project finds no corresponding evidence.”18 Gow concludes that “an anthropological analysis that uses historical methods must start from ethnography, and from the problems ethnography presents.”19 Although I adhere to the rationale of these arguments, I often have the feeling that they result from what is commonly called “professional bias,” an inclination to view the world through the lenses of one’s own profession and confine oneself to doing what one is best trained to do. In this book I have tried to escape from the anthropological bias, not in order to replace it by an equally biased historical approach, but to come up with a new way of doing Amazonianist historical research. Since in this particular instance there is no lack of written sources, I hope to embrace oral tradition and the written historical record equally, with their respective flaws and shortcomings but also with their distinct advantages, in order to create something larger: a tridimensional construct of the kind envisioned by Haruki Murakami, one “in which truth isn’t always real and reality isn’t always truthful.”20 In other words, a construct that acknowledges that not all events present in the historical record or oral tradition really happened, while at the same time recognizing that events that do not appear in the documentary or oral sources might have happened.

Prologue  [ 7 ]

This in no way means that I advocate an uncritical use of documentary sources or a taken-­for-­granted approach to oral evidence. On the contrary, I support the notion that evidence should not be taken at face value but must be cross-­checked and questioned from a variety of perspectives in search of hidden meanings, biases, or understandings. This is particularly true of nonindigenous colonial sources. In the case of indigenous allocutions and texts, the evidence should be further analyzed in the light of indigenous worldviews in search of native perceptions that may not be evident at first sight. I am convinced, however, that no matter how rigorous we might be in assessing the meaning, internal consistency, and veracity of written or oral sources, we will never be able to fully comprehend the intricacy of the social and political contexts in which they were produced or the complexity of the thought processes that produced them. For the above reasons, I make no apologies for the subjective and sometimes conjectural aspects of my historical reconstruction of Chief Tasorentsi’s life. On the contrary, together with Walter Benjamin, I believe that “to articulate what is past does not mean to recognize ‘how it really was.’ It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.”21 By which he meant that the task of the historian is not, as Leopold von Ranke, founder of modern history, would have it, to reconstruct the past in a formally objective fashion, but rather to draw from the memory of the past the inspiration that may help the living to envision and build a different, less oppressive future. This book’s aim is, thus, not to recreate the past as it was, but, paraphrasing Guido Ruggiero, one of the leading members of the Italian school of microhistory, “to tell tales, stories told in a way like those told by the first storytellers. Elaborate rich stories that, for all their potential untruths, overstatements, and misunderstandings, and all their latent multiple levels of meaning, nonetheless provide underlying proximate truths about whatever is the matter at hand.”22 This is not, therefore, a book that seeks to problematize the relation between history and anthropology. It is neither a book aimed at determining the meaning of history for “peoples without history” nor a book concerned with depicting a particular period in the history of Peruvian Amazonia along the lines of what John Brewer has called “prospect history,” a large-­scale history written from a single, superior point of view.23 Rather, I assume a “refuge history” approach, a more close-­up, small-­ scale kind of history that privileges narrative over structure, agency over determinism, and microhistories over grand narratives. Above all, an approach that incorporates diverse points of view and in which historical

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figures are treated as the subjects rather than the objects of history, as actors endowed with agency, motives, feelings, and consciousness. A kind of history whose appeal derives not so much “from a sense of control of history but from a sense of belonging, of connectedness—to both persons and details—in the past.”24 Although this is not a novel approach either in the field of Amazonianist anthropology 25 or in that of history at large,26 as far as I know this is the first time it has been adopted as a guiding paradigm in an Amazonian historical study. I leave it to the reader to judge whether the experiment has been worthwhile. From the very beginning I knew that this book would have the privilege, but also the great responsibility, of bringing to the fore a fragment of Ashaninka history that had been pretty much relegated to a state of oblivion. As I delved deeper and deeper into Chief Tasorentsi’s life, it dawned on me that his life history was much more than a piece of Ashaninka history; it encompassed the history of the various Selva Central indigenous peoples: the Ashaninka, Yine, Conibo, Shipibo, and Yanesha, whose lives Chief Tasorentsi shared and partly contributed to shaping. Thus, by reconstructing Chief Tasorentsi’s personal and political trajectory, I hope not only to celebrate the life of a staunch defender of native Amazonian peoples’ rights but also to draw attention to this important period of the Selva Central’s history. Although I adhere to the African proverb quoted by Nigerian Igbo writer Chinua Achebe that “until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter,”27 I believe that this will not happen until the lions rediscover those portions of their past that were intentionally or unintentionally veiled, disguised, or omitted by the hunters, or that, for one reason or another, did not make it into their collective memories; it will not happen, that is, until they become aware of the importance of bringing back to life those obliterated aspects of their history that enlighten their rights as a people. As Achebe asserts, this is “not one man’s job. It’s not one person’s job. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail—the bravery, even, of the lions.” If this book—which I intend to publish also in Spanish—can contribute in whatever little measure to achieving this greater goal, I will feel more than satisfied. « » The book starts by recounting Capt. Lepecki’s encounter with Chief Tasorentsi in June 1928, a particularly significant meeting since it took place at a transitional point in the life of the Ashaninka shaman-­chief,

Prologue  [ 9 ]

when he had left behind his years as a determined warrior of the Sun god and had begun a new path as a more conciliatory—yet far from tamed—Adventist preacher and people-­gatherer. Capt. Lepecki was a privileged witness of this unique moment in Chief Tasorentsi’s life, who by then already called himself José Carlos Amaringo Chico but was better known as Tasorentsi. His detailed report provides evidence as much of the Ashaninka leader’s great influence over his followers as of his capacity for change and self-­reinvention. It also gives testimony of Chief Tasorentsi’s complex religious understandings, which Lepecki regarded as instances of “cognitive dissonance” but which may be better considered as the outcome of the workings of “conceptual integration,” a kind of human mental operation particularly prevalent in contexts of clashing thought systems and worldviews, not only among indigenous people but also among white patrones and foreign missionaries.28 In an exercise of “regressive history,”29 and taking Lepecki’s encounter with Chief Tasorentsi as the narrative’s main historical milestone, in the following chapters I proceed to trace backwards the high points in Chief Tasorentsi’s life as a world transformer, shaman-­chief, and slave trader earlier to his formative years as a debt-­peon in an Upper Ucayali rubber entrepôt (chapters 2, 3, and 4). After putting together a personal and public portrait of Chief Tasorentsi, I go on to discuss the causes of the 1912–1914 Ashaninka movement and the 1915 multiethnic Upper Ucayali uprising from both an etic and emic point of view (chapters 5 and 6). I then go back once more to Lepecki’s encounter with Chief Tasorentsi and finish the book by reconstructing the Ashaninka leader’s trajectory as an unorthodox Adventist preacher from his conversion in 1922 until his death in 1958 at the age of eighty-­three (chapters 7 and 8). Such back-­and-­ forth movements in time are meant to reflect the course of my research process and to allow readers to share with me the surprises I found at each turn of the road while researching the life of this extraordinary man. I conclude the book with an epilogue in which I address two questions that had intrigued me since the very beginning of my research: Why have Chief Tasorentsi’s wars and dreams left such a feeble imprint on both the history of Peruvian Amazonia and indigenous oral memory? And, more importantly, what do these wars and dreams tell us about what a scholar has called the “ethnographic ‘black hole’ of Ashaninka messianism”?30 Before plunging into the narrative, it is worth clarifying a few practical issues. The ethnonyms used in this work are the self-­designation terms accepted nowadays by the ethnopolitical organizations of the Selva Central indigenous peoples: Ashaninka instead of Campa, Yine

[ 10 ]  Sl av ery a nd U topi a

instead of Piro, Yanesha instead of Amuesha.31 I have only maintained the older ethnonyms when they appear within quotes. For the purposes of this book I have adopted the Ashaninka alphabet approved in 2008 by the Macroregional Ashaninka Congress and Peru’s Ministry of Education, which unified the various alphabets produced by different institutions over the years. The new alphabet contains the following letters: a, b, ch, e, i, j, k, m, n, ñ, o, p, r, s, sh, t, ts, ty, y. All Ashaninka names and words have been adapted to the new alphabet, except when they appear in quotes.32 The only other exceptions are Ashaninka words containing the consonant j, which I have replaced by h so as to preserve its original sound when pronounced in English. Interviews with Ashaninka elders were held in Spanish since I do not speak Ashaninka. Although as an undergraduate student I did a three-­month-­long fieldwork among the Ashaninka of Río Negro and visited on different occasions several of the various groups that compose the Ashaninka cluster, particularly those along the Satipo, Pangoa, Kiatari, Apurimac, and Ene Rivers, I have never done prolonged fieldwork among the Ashaninka and thus have no direct knowledge of Ashaninka ethnography or oral history. The same is true in relation to the other indigenous peoples that feature in this account, such as the Yine, Shipibo-­Conibo, and Matsigenka. I have compensated for this disadvantage by reading as much of the available ethnographic and linguistic literature on these peoples as possible and, above all, by frequently consulting with the various specialists on these peoples whenever I had an ethnographic or linguistic doubt (see acknowledgments). Their help has been invaluable. However, I take full responsibility for any mistakes or misinterpretation left in the present study. Given that there are many common terms in Selva Central regional Spanish that have very specific meanings and are difficult to translate, I have opted to incorporate them in italics into the text. The same is true of many of the more commonly used Ashaninka terms. To make it easier for readers, at the end of the book I have included a glossary with brief definitions of each of these terms. Since to write this book I have had to use a broad range of sources, including hundreds of archival documents and other materials, I have opted to organize the references following the “notes and bibliography style” as proposed by the Chicago Manual of Style.33 This documentation system, which presents bibliographic information in both endnotes and a bibliography (see references), is favored by historians and scholars in the field of the humanities, for it allows one to accommodate a variety

Prologue  [ 11 ]

of sources, including esoteric ones less appropriate to the “author-­date system” predominant among anthropologists and other social scientists. The photographs that illustrate the text come from a variety of sources, mainly old newspapers, journals, and books. We know of only two accredited photographs of Chief Tasorentsi, one taken by Dr. Aleksander Freyd, one of the members of the Polish expedition, and found by Łukasz Krokoszyn´ski (see figure 4), the other taken by pastor Ferdinand Stahl and published in the Adventist journal Review and Herald (see figure 28). There are, however, two other pictures featuring men who resemble the Ashaninka leader (see figures 27 and 34). In order to verify if the look-­alikes were Chief Tasorentsi, I had the photographs analyzed by facial-­recognition software.34 Unfortunately, because of the accredited images’ low resolution, the software was unable to confirm this identification. Since one of the two unconfirmed photographs (figure 34) was taken in a well-­attested context in which we know Chief Tasorentsi could have been present, it is more than probable that the man who appears in it is indeed the Ashaninka leader. As to the third photograph (figure 27), I have kept it in the hope that someday we will have a better picture of José Carlos Tasorentsi to compare it with.

One

An Indian Uprising Thirteen Years Later, 1928

I am son of the Sun. Chief José Ca r los, a k a Tasoren tsi

W

hen Capt. Mieczysław B. Lepecki arrived in the Ashaninka village of Cheni, on the Tambo River, in a late evening in May 1928, he could have hardly known that he was about to meet the most feared and maligned indigenous chief of the Upper Ucayali River.1 It is not as if Lepecki had never heard of “the bloody Tasulinchi,” as he wrote Chief Tasorentsi’s name, before meeting him in Cheni. Lepecki was no stranger to the region as he had been commissioned by the Polish government to accompany a scientific expedition whose task was to identify suitable places for the establishment of a Polish colony. He had been traveling several months along the winding Ucayali on his way upriver from Iquitos, the capital of Loreto (see figure 1). A photograph taken at the time shows an animated Capt. Lepecki wearing civilian clothes on board the Cahuapanas, the war steamboat that the Peruvian navy had put at the disposal of the Polish expedition (see figure 2). It was thanks to his enthusiasm and unlimited curiosity that ­Lepecki was able to form, during his long, ten-­month trip, a quite accurate picture of the state of white–Indian relations in the region. The first time Lepecki heard of Tasorentsi had been two months earlier, when the Cahuapanas was about to dock in Puntijau on its way upriver to Atalaya.2 While standing on the deck watching the dozens of Ashaninka men, women, and children who had gathered on the shore to welcome the boat, José Enrique Urresti, who accompanied the expedition as the prefect of Loreto’s representative, warned him: “Captain, [ 12 ]

A n Indi a n Upr ising T hirt een Y ea rs L at er  [ 13 ]

these people are murderers!” He then went on to inform Lepecki how, in 1915, the people of Puntijau had joined the Ashaninka rebels of the Gran Pajonal commanded by Chief Tasorentsi with the intention of massacring and expelling all white people from the Upper Ucayali region. On that occasion, he said, when he and Julio César Delgado, owner and captain of the steam launch Libertad, tried to land in Puntijau, the Ashaninka had gathered on the shore to prevent them from disembarking. The same curaca (headman) that was now welcoming them had aimed his rifle at Capt. Delgado, threatening to open fire if the ship dared stop in the village. When Capt. Lepecki observed that the behavior of the Indians might have been considered quite natural given that it was a time of war, Urresti exclaimed indignantly: “No, Capitain! There was no war. It was a rebellion!”3 Urresti had very good reasons to fear the Ashaninka and recall with dread the 1915 uprising. He was a well-­known Upper Ucayali patrón, who, at the height of the rubber boom had been deeply involved in rubber extraction and trade.4 Lepecki, who does not hide how much he disliked his forced trip companion, reports that in those years Urresti was associated with Francisco (Pancho) Vargas Hernández, one of the region’s most powerful patrones and a man whose reputation as a slaver was an open secret in the region. Like Vargas, Urresti had also engaged in ­co­rrerías (slave raids) against Indian people, having admitted to Lepecki with “naïve frankness” that on one occasion he had captured 1,500 Ashaninka. Lepecki remarks that even if this figure was greatly exaggerated, it is indicative of the magnitude of slave hunting in the Upper Ucayali. He reports that after news of this large correría reached Lima, Urresti was arrested. Unfortunately, he was never convicted. The 1915 uprising put an end to Urresti’s profitable dealings as rubber extractor and slave trader, so to avoid indigenous retaliation the slaver moved with his Ashaninka peons to the Lower Ucayali, where he established a large fundo (landholding) named Monte Carmelo.5 It comes as no surprise, then, that he referred to Tasorentsi and the Ashaninka rebels in such hostile terms. Other ucayalinos6 had also apprised Capt. Lepecki of the “atrocities” committed by the indigenous rebels in 1915. Julio César Paredes, pilot of the Cahuapanas, had spent long hours telling him about the terrible year when the wild Gran Pajonal “Campas” joined forces with the Conibo, Yine, and Amahuaca peons of the Upper Ucayali area in order to strike their common enemy (see map 1.1).7 Paredes told Lepecki that many civilizados8—more than one hundred families according to some counts—had been killed on that occasion. The only survivor, the pilot

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M a p 1.1. Selva Central indigenous peoples.

claimed, was Pancho Vargas, and this only because his Yine peons, who hated the Ashaninka, had defended him.9 According to Paredes, those had been difficult times. The rebels had even dared to attack a post ship, the steamer Libertad, and in only a few months had managed to expel most white patrones from the region. In time, the rebels were crushed by government forces. Many abandoned their homes on the shores of the Ucayali and moved inland. Others took refuge in the Gran Pajonal or in other remote areas with scant government presence. But the shock among the civilizados was so great, according to Paredes, that afterward, for many years, no one dared to settle along the Upper Ucayali upriver from Cumaría. Lepecki was not won over by the stories told by Urresti, Paredes, and other upper-­rung ucayalinos condemning indigenous people as “savage

A n Indi a n Upr ising T hirt een Y ea rs L at er  [ 15 ]

murderers.” He was well acquainted with the region’s social and economic conditions, and in a short aside that reveals his inner thoughts on the matter, he ponders: “It is such people: proud, beautiful and noble who are called murderers on the Ucayali. And who does that? Those on whose hands so much Indian blood has dried that it could fill many rivers; those whose conscience is heavily weighted with so much tragedy of people hunted for slavery and forced to work that even the misfortunes of people shaken by the bloodiest social turmoils seem only meager in comparison.”10 He was, however, a man of his time, who could not escape contemporary prejudices. So, after stating in unambiguous terms why he felt indigenous hostilities had been justified, he added: “The Campas are as I have described them, but it is not to be forgotten that at the same time they are also wild savages, whose blood teems with untamed passions. Gentle and noble at times of peace, they betray cruelty and inexorability at war.” It is clear, then, that by the time Capt. Lepecki entered into the Tambo River on his way to Lima, the country’s capital, he was fully informed about the impact that the 1915 uprising had had on the region’s white-­mestizo elite11 and about the central role that Tasorentsi had played in it. He also knew that the Tambo River was an area beyond the control of the Peruvian government—a “river of blood and death,” according to a noted Franciscan missionary,12 populated by indios bravos (wild Indians) who rejected white people and did not hesitate to attack passing foreigners.13 By then very few whites had traveled throughout the entire length of the Tambo. In 1920, at the head of a joint Swedish-­ Peruvian scientific expedition, Swedish geographer Otto Nordenskjold set out to explore the entire Tambo but only managed to traverse its upper reaches.14 It was only in 1921 that Franciscan friar Juan M. Uriarte accomplished this feat.15 In his travel report, published in the bulletin of the prestigious Boletín de la Sociedad Geográfica de Lima, he asserts that the whole river is inhabited by “wild Campas,” with those in its upper half being the most aggressive. Commercial navigation, he warned, is very dangerous, especially if voyagers travel in small groups. What Lepecki and his companions did not know was that the Tambo valley was one of the areas where many of the leaders of the 1915 revolt had hidden after being defeated. This became quite evident shortly after the Mantaro, the large, single-­t runk canoe in which members of the expedition were traveling, landed in Cheni. After announcing their arrival with flares and gunshots, the visitors were received by Chief Ompikiri,16 whom Lepecki describes as a man in his forties

[ 16 ]  Sl av ery a nd U topi a

dressed in cushma (cotton tunic) and wearing a feather headdress (see figures 3 and 34). During the talk that ensued, Lepecki learned that Ompikiri was a pinkatsari (chief) who ruled over the various peoples—nampitsi, or kin-­based groups—living along a long stretch of the Tambo River between Poyeni and Anapati.17 Neither he nor his people were at that time subjected to a patrón, but in the past they had worked for Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald, the legendary rubber entrepreneur who in 1893 discovered the portage between the Purus and Sepahua Rivers, opening new lands to rubber extraction and amassing a large fortune in the process. What Ompikiri did not tell the Polish explorer is that he had been one of the leaders of the 1915 revolt and that his people had severed relations with the Fitzcarrald family after they were defeated and had to escape to the Tambo valley. After chatting for a while, Ompikiri finally dared ask Lepecki the question that most worried him: “So you’re really not soldiers?” When Lepecki replied that they were not, Ompikiri pronounced: “That’s very good; I thought you were soldiers who had come to kill us.”18 It was at this point in the conversation that Chief Tasorentsi made his somewhat theatrical entrance, emerging from the mass of people that had come to the shore to have a peep at the foreign visitors. In quite good Spanish, according to Capt. Lepecki, the newcomer said, “Glad was my heart when I learned you were not mala gente [bad people],”19 indirectly revealing that he had been listening incognito to Lepecki’s conversation with Ompikiri. That he would have chosen to do so is not surprising. Although Lepecki had no way of knowing it, at that precise moment, Samuel Figueroa, police constable of the Tambo River, was on his way to Cheni to confront Tasorentsi, accused of being an Adventist agitator intent on subverting indigenous peons and attacking the Franciscan mission of Puerto Ocopa.20 By then, Tasorentsi, Ompikiri, and other leaders of the 1915 uprising were propagating an indigenized version of the Adventist doctrine that missionary Ferdinand A. Stahl had been preaching in the region since 1921. Hundreds of Ashaninka followers had been gathering in Cheni, attracted by the proclamation of the second coming of Christ and the imminent destruction of the world. Many had abandoned their patrones and forsaken their debts in order to join their paisanos (fellow tribespeople). Tasorentsi must have known that it was only a matter of time before the local patrones and government authorities took action against the new believers. It was for this reason that he had refrained from showing up until he was sure that Lepecki and his companions did not have hostile intentions.

A n Indi a n Upr ising T hirt een Y ea rs L at er  [ 17 ]

As soon as Tasorentsi spoke, Capt. Lepecki asked Ompikiri who the newcomer was. When Ompikiri replied that the man was a chief from the Gran Pajonal, Lepecki was elated, for he wished to learn more about this remote area, which he knew was almost totally inaccessible to white people. His excitement was cut short by Asencio, his mixed Yine-­Ashaninka translator, who whispered in his ear that the man was “Tasulinchi, famous in all the montaña.” After hearing so much about the fearful Tasorentsi, the man “who had covered himself with blood during the war of the joined groups of the Gran Pajonal and the Ucayali River,”21 Capt. Lepecki seems to have been somewhat disappointed by the Ashaninka chief’s demeanor. He describes the native leader as a short, rather slim man wearing a traditional, long cushma, and a less traditional cyclist cap, “of the type you can see in Wola or in Czerniaków,” working-­class Warsaw boroughs.22 There was nothing extraordinary in his appearance, Lepecki observed, and his “filthy cushma” and “grotesque cyclist cap” did little to improve this first impression. Only his face had something particular to it. It expressed, according to Lepecki, “a fox-­like cunning, distrustfulness, relentlessness and a calm, cold cruelty.”23 Whereas this unforgiving judgment derives doubtless from Lepecki’s own imaginings of “Indian savagery,” his former impressions seem to be confirmed by the two accredited pictures of Chief Tasorentsi that we know of (see figures 4 and 28). Tasorentsi was indeed short, even by Ashaninka standards. He was a simply dressed, lean man with strong arms and a neat bowl haircut, who had no distinguishable features other than his proud bearing, furrowed brows, and set look about his mouth. And yet, according to Lepecki, when this “inconspicuously looking man” approached the visitors, the crowd stepped aside not only with respect “but even with fright.” Dr. Aleksander Freyd, who was present at the meeting, confirms Lepecki’s impression, stating that Chief Tasorentsi’s eyes were “strong, male, intrepid, good eyes of a free man of the forest.”24 Tasorentsi was fluent in Spanish, although Lepecki points out that he often “used sumptuous words that did not always have anything to do with the matter at hand.” And Lepecki knew enough Spanish to communicate without problems with white and indigenous people alike. The conversation that followed between the two men is extremely revealing, providing a glimpse not only into Lepecki’s misconceptions about indigenous peoples but, more importantly, into the ways in which the Ashaninka shaman-­ chief had constructed his self-­image and political persona. The first thing that Lepecki asked the Indian chief was, “Curaca, are you Tasulinchi?” The Ashaninka pinkatsari, according to Lepecki, gave

[ 18 ]  Sl av ery a nd U topi a

him a “suspicious look” and replied in “evasive” terms: “Yo soy hijo del Sol [I am son of the Sun].” Why was the Ashaninka leader so distrustful? And why did he reply in evasive terms? To answer these questions it is necessary to first ascertain how the Ashaninka chief might have interpreted Lepecki’s question, then how Lepecki interpreted the curaca’s answer, and, finally, what the Ashaninka chief might have meant by his answer. The Ashaninka term tasorentsi—also tasorintsi, tahorentsi, or tosorintsi25—is not a personal name and its meaning varies according to context. In its first acceptation, tasorentsi is the appellative used to designate the most powerful of the Ashaninka “good spirits,” known also as amatsenka (fellow tribespeople) or, alternatively, as maninkari (the hidden ones).26 In this sense, the term refers to a category of good spirits or creator gods renowned for their capacity to create something through the act of blowing their breath into it. In fact, according to Weiss, the term tasorentsi is the substantive form of the verb root -­tasonk-­(to blow).27 In that they are creators by virtue of their powerful breath, I suggest that the term tasorentsi in its collective or categorical sense can be translated as “all-­ powerful blower world creators.” However, since among the Ashaninka, according to Weiss, “there is no such occurrence as a creation of something out of nothing, but only a transformation of something out of something else,”28 a more accurate translation of tasorentsi as a categorical notion would be “all-­powerful blower world transformers.” In its second sense, however, and written as it were with a capital T, Tasorentsi is the name of a particular god, whose identity varies according to the different subgroups composing the Ashaninka cluster. Some assert that Tasorentsi is Sun, known as Katsirinkaiteri, “the hot one,” in day-­to-­day speech and as Pabá, “Our Father,” in ritual contexts.29 Others claim that Tasorentsi was one of the primordial humans, brother-­in-­ law of Manchakori, Moon, the original creator god, whom Moon left as his replacement on this earth when he ascended to the sky.30 Still others maintain that Tasorentsi is the “father” of the gods of the tasorentsi category, which would include, among others, both Pabá (Sun) and Manchakori (Moon).31 And some even claim that Tasorentsi is the son of Pabá.32 Be that as it may, the god known as Tasorentsi is always represented as a powerful world transformer. In other contexts, however, the term tasorentsi may have more earthly connotations. In some cases, it is used simply as a synonym for “powerful.” Among the Matsigenka, who are Arawak speakers like the Ashaninka and share with them many cultural traditions, a person may be said to be tasorentsi if he or she excels in a particular activity,

A n Indi a n Upr ising T hirt een Y ea rs L at er  [ 19 ]

especially when others have failed in the same task.33 The term may be also applied to powerful individuals—shamans, chiefs, godly men—who stand out because of their personal capacities and the strength of their thoughts. In such cases, the term tasorentsi may once again regain its more divine connotations, being used to indicate that an individual considered to be “powerful” has come to possess the creative/transformative qualities characteristic of the tasorentsi gods, that is, the makings of a divine world transformer. According to Esteban Arias Urízar, when used in this sense, “the term seems to have a double life, functioning as an adjectival noun and as a term describing the gradual process of recognition of the status of ‘all-­powerful one.’”34 This is the process by which, in the words of France-­Marie Renard-­Casevitz, “men—and women— reformers, great leaders, revolutionaries, all of them tasorentsi, end up being deified and replacing worn out gods.”35 Given the transcendent connotations of the term, and the fact that it is not a personal name, it is not surprising that the Ashaninka chief expressed suspicion when Lepecki asked him if he was Tasorentsi. Was the foreigner asking him whether he was the ancient creator god? Was he asking whether he had the faculties of the all-­powerful blower world transformers? Or was he simply asking him whether he was a powerful man? In general, tasorentsi is not a term that one applies to oneself but rather one used by others to refer to a third party. No Ashaninka would claim, “I am Tasorentsi.” It would be considered not only presumptuous but a sure sign of the claim’s falseness. It is for others to suggest that someone is Tasorentsi or has the qualities of the tasorentsi good spirits. Likewise, no Ashaninka would say, “I am tasorentsi,” in the sense of “powerful,” because a really powerful man, or woman, does not need to proclaim it out loud. The Ashaninka chief’s answer—“I am son of the Sun”—which Lepecki found evasive, was, I suggest, the best way he found to avoid a tricky situation—even if, like with the term tasorentsi, the Ashaninka would normally avoid claiming to be son of Pabá, the solar divinity.36 Capt. Lepecki believed that the Ashaninka were the only people in Peru who still followed the old Inka cult of the Sun god. “God and sun,” he states, “are synonymous for them, and they consider themselves children of the ever hot Pahua, or in Quechua—Tahuanty.”37 In his view, then, when the Ashaninka pinkatsari claimed “I am son of the Sun,” he was not being literal but rather was stressing, on the one hand, the common lineage connecting the Ashaninka to the ancient Inka and, on the other hand, the fact that all Ashaninka are children of the solar divinity Pahua (Pabá).

[ 20 ]  Sl av ery a nd U topi a

Was Lepecki right? Is that what the Ashaninka shaman-­chief meant when he said, “Yo soy hijo del Sol”? It is obvious that we will never know this for certain, but we can offer some reasonable conjectures. In Ashaninka, the Spanish expression Yo soy hijo del Sol would be translated as itomi Pabá. As we have seen, Pabá is the Ashaninka Sun god, the son of Moon according to some, whose name can be translated as “Our Father.” So itomi Pabá could be rendered as “I am the Son of Our Father.” Now, before conversion to Christianity, all Ashaninka considered themselves to be the children—in the sense of “creatures”—of Pabá, the Sun god. This holds true for many Ashaninka even today. This notion is implicit in the name they use to refer to the solar divinity: Our Father. So the claim to be itomi Pabá would be a useless exercise in redundancy unless the speaker wished to convey a deeper, more theological meaning. Weiss asserts that the Ashaninka consider the good spirits— amatsenka or maninkari—to be itomi Pabá, children of the Sun god.38 The usually hidden good spirits sometimes render themselves visible in the form of certain birds or animals, such as the swallow-­tailed kite, the roseate spoonbill, certain hummingbirds, or the neotropical river otter.39 These material manifestations of the good spirits are also believed to be itomi Pabá. More importantly, Weiss reports that the Ashaninka “also believe that good spirits, when they so will, can materialize in visible human form, as amatsenka instructing and leading a group of Campa for a time.”40 These spirits in human form are also considered to be itomi Pabá, children of the Sun god, and generally appear in the guise of a poor, ragged stranger to announce the end of the world and help the Ashaninka achieve immortality.41 Given that the Ashaninka regard Pabá as one of the gods of the tasorentsi category, that at least some consider him to be the god Tasorentsi himself, and that others even claim that Tasorentsi is son of the Sun god, by answering Lepecki’s question with the claim that he was itomi Pabá, the Ashaninka leader was neither stating the obvious fact that he, like his paisanos, was a creature of the Sun god, nor proclaiming his affiliation with the ancient Inka. He was affirming in a way that would not sound presumptuous but would leave no doubts in the minds of his audience that he was indeed tasorentsi, in the sense of supernaturally powerful. The question of whether this extraordinary power derived from his being Tasorentsi with a capital T, an amatsenka good spirit incarnate in human form, or one of Tasorentsi’s emissaries was left for his followers to guess. Whatever the case, by claiming to be hijo del Sol or itomi Pabá, the Ashaninka chief was letting all those hearing him know that he was endowed with the extraordinary

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powers of the tasorentsi gods, or good spirits. In other words, that, like other tasorentsi, he was a powerful blower world transformer. After this first exchange of words, and whether by sheer chance or because he knew by experience that this was what Ashaninka people expected from a visitor, Lepecki presented Tasorentsi with a knife and a handful of beads. This pleased the Ashaninka pinkatsari greatly, which gave Lepecki the cue to ask his second question: Why had the chief decided to come to the Tambo valley? This second exchange of words is equally revealing and deserves deeper examination. The Ashaninka chief replied, “I have been visited by padre Stahl and he told me to gather lots and lots of Campas here on the Cheni, so he will come from Iquitos with a great boat filled with knives, axes, machetes and firearms, and he will create an Indian pueblo. We are quiet people, we want to live in peace with the whites, we want to plant cotton and manioc, and gather rubber in the forest.”42 Capt. Lepecki had met Adventist missionaries Ferdinand A. Stahl and V. E. Peugh while visiting Bolognesi, a small settlement on the Upper Ucayali River, so he knew who Stahl was.43 When he met Stahl, the German American missionary was traveling downriver to Iquitos, where the previous year he had established the headquarters of what came to be known as the Upper Amazon Mission. Lepecki does not seem to have appreciated the Adventist missionary very much. He reports that Stahl’s face bore no traces of spiritual inclination and that his somewhat obese shape reminded him of those “of a good old beer drinker who likes to eat well and tell not-­so-­proper jokes.”44 He did recognize, however, that the missionary seemed to be an excellent organizer and that, from what he had heard, he was extremely well liked by indigenous people. The hundreds of men, women, and children gathered in Cheni by Tasorentsi, Ompikiri, and other Ashaninka pinkatsari at Stahl’s request confirmed what the Polish officer had heard about the Adventist missionary’s extraordinary pulling power. Lepecki took Tasorentsi’s declaration to mean that he was an Evangelical, and in his account of the meeting he says, “Tasulinchi has announced to us that he is an Evangelical and was questioning us with alacrity on the subject of the precise whereabouts of padre Stahl.”45 This assertion seems to be somewhat unjustified, since no such declaration appears in Lepecki’s transcription of Tasorentsi’s speech. What is important here, however, is that Lepecki could not understand how someone who claimed to be “son of the Sun” could at the same time proclaim that he was “Evangelical.”46 His solution was to attribute what he perceived as a flagrant contradiction to the indigenous incapacity to

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understand that admitting to a Christian religion must be followed by the rejection of native beliefs. Lepecki also noticed, and was intrigued by, the importance that Tasorentsi attributed to Stahl’s promises in his speech. He knew that these promises had engendered great expectations among the Ashaninka, and in another section of his account he remarks, There was at that time the rumor among the Campas that Evangelicals were to arrive on the Tambo River on a great ship filled with useful things and establish a great Indian village. The Indians were telling each other that this city will be governed by the red men alone, with the benevolent assistance of the Evangelicals only. This version was confirmed in many other settlements, so it is not impossible that the expedition of Peugh and Stahl, who had already traveled the whole length of the Perené and Tambo rivers, and were currently crossing the Ucayali, was a mission of reconnaissance related to the plans of which the Indians of the Gran Pajonal were talking about.47

Capt. Lepecki was right in supposing that the Adventist missionaries’ trip was aimed at assessing indigenous support in order to better organize the newly created Upper Amazon Mission. What he did not realize, though, was that the enthusiasm aroused by the passing missionaries not only derived from the anticipation of a magical increase of their material wealth and liberation from white oppression, but also was linked to the expectation of the imminent end of the world, an expectation nurtured not only by Adventist imagery of the Second Coming but by long-­standing indigenous traditions. This is why Tasorentsi questioned Lepecki “with alacrity” about the whereabouts of Pastor Stahl. He was worried not about Stahl’s location or safety, but about when his promised return would take place, an event that would bring about a world upheaval and mark the beginning of a new era for him and his people. This also explains why Tasorentsi did not regard his claim of being son of the Sun god and follower of the Adventist creed as a contradiction. I suggest that if the Ashaninka leader was able to make these simultaneous claims, it is because of the native Amazonian proclivity for “conceptual integration”—also known as “conceptual blending”—a powerful basic mental operation that is considered to play a central role in human cognitive and creative processes.48 Developed by cognitive psychologists, this notion is defined as the ability “to blend two different conceptual

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arrays so as to produce an emergent outcome in the blend.”49 Such a mental process “allows several connected, but heterogeneous mental spaces to be maintained simultaneously within a single mental construction.”50 More importantly, Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, the two main proponents of conceptual integration, assert that this kind of mental operation allows for the formation of “new meaning, global insight, and conceptual compressions [that are] useful for memory and manipulation of otherwise diffuse ranges of meaning.”51 In native Amazonian societies, such ability is magnified, I would contend, by what Lévi-­Strauss described as the indigenous “openness to the Other,” and particularly to white people.52 According to Overing, such openness is grounded in the native conviction that the construction of proper humans and a proper society requires the incorporation and mixing of foreign entities and forces.53 And it finds its maximum expression in what Hugh-­Jones has described as native Amazonian “consumerism”54 and what Viveiros de Castro labels “ideological voracity,”55 that is, the indigenous fascination with, and receptivity to, foreign goods and ideas. In native Amazonia, conceptual integration is facilitated by four cultural practices widely reported in the region: bricolage, mimesis, emulation, and translating acts. Bricolage refers to a main feature of mythical thought, namely, the indigenous intellectual inclination to create new concepts, images, and stories by ordering and reordering in novel ways bits and pieces of a preexisting, limited set of materials in accordance with changing historical circumstances.56 Mimesis, in turn, denotes a mental faculty especially put into play in colonial situations by which native subordinates seek to mimic or replicate the artifacts, images, rituals, and bodily movements of powerful colonial Others in order to magically capture or appropriate their power.57 Emulation could be considered as the secular counterpart of mimesis, insofar as it refers to the process by which collectivities involved in political or cultural hierarchical relations seek to imitate or adopt some of the practices of a collectivity perceived as being somehow superior in order to obtain a social or political advantage.58 In other words, it is a strategy aimed at acquiring through imitation the prestige and authority of the dominant group without renouncing one’s own differentiated identity. Finally, the notion of translating acts designates a kind of mental operation by which indigenous thinkers immersed in colonial situations “transcreate” their experience of both worlds in order to produce a certain commensurability between the indigenous and nonindigenous traditions.59

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The integration of mental arrays of diverse origins to create a novel conception is made even easier in situations of a “mirror network,” that is, when the diverse conceptual inputs share the same frame.60 This, I would contend, is precisely the case of Chief Tasorentsi’s simultaneous claims of being son of the Sun god and an Adventist faithful, which troubled Lepecki so much. As we shall see, the shared apocalyptic and salvationist roots of Ashaninka mythology and Adventist doctrine coalesced to give rise to new, blended understandings of the world, of the relation between humans and gods, and of that between humans themselves. What Lepecki regarded as a contradiction, an instance of what we would now regard as “cognitive dissonance”—holding inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes—Tasorentsi experienced, thanks to the workings of conceptual integration, as a natural way of thinking. This approach to understanding the kind of contradictions pointed out by Lepecki transcends previous notions derived from the fields of religious studies, linguistics, and botany, such as syncretism, creolization, and hybridity, in that rather than placing emphasis on the outcome—the “mixture”—it focuses on the process—the “how” and “why” the mixing or integration comes to be. However, conceptual integration is not the prerogative of indigenous people. It is also present in the discourse and practices of nonindigenous social actors. What remains to be assessed is, first, whether in each of these cases conceptual integration occurs naturally—as one among other tools in the bag of mental operations common to all human beings—or appears as a premeditated, goal-­oriented, and manipulative maneuver, and, second, to what extent the stress on one or the other component of conceptual blends is an unconscious process or responds to conscious choices motivated by interest, convenience, or political tactic. Capt. Lepecki may have not realized how extraordinary were Tasorentsi’s claims or that he was witnessing what I will call the first great wave of “Adventist effervescence.” Nor may he have realized that the region was about to enter into a new period of white–Indian hostilities. But he was definitely aware—and quite awed—by Tasorentsi’s outstanding skills as a leader. One of the Polish captain’s ucayalino informants had told him that as a young man, the Ashaninka chief had been a slave of a Unini River patrón. During that time the boy had learned Spanish and had become acquainted with the diverse “tribes” that lived along the shores of the Upper Ucayali River. Lepecki was intrigued by how someone with such a lowly background could have achieved so much. In

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a paragraph in which he makes no attempt to conceal his admiration for the Ashaninka leader, Lepecki muses: How this modest Indian slave managed to unite the antagonistic tribes of the Ucayali and Gran Pajonal, and what’s more, stand as their leader and force them to dig up the war axe against the whites, will most likely remain a mystery forever. How much diligence, shrewdness, and diplomatic skills to achieve this amazing deed! Tasulinchi has taken the war flame far away to the Masisea River, and even further, to the middle course of the Ucayali. He managed to win the war and secure five years of peace to his people. Not until 1920 did a few settlers dare to return to the Upper Ucayali.61

Tasorentsi did not win the war. He lost it. And he was not the flawless Indian hero that Lepecki thought he was. He was a former slave trader who had greatly profited from enslaving his own people. As Lepecki observes, however, he did manage to free the Upper Ucayali from most white patrones for several years, providing a respite to the Ashaninka, Yine, Conibo, and Shipibo that inhabited the area, and allowing many of them to break the bonds of indebtedness that kept them enslaved. As to how Tasorentsi managed to overcome his disturbing past and mobilize the antagonistic tribes of the Upper Ucayali region, this is one of the many “mysteries” this book is set to unveil.

T wo

Chronicle of a Revolt Foretold, 1915–1916

We will exterminate all white-­lipped peccaries. Chief Bruno

T

he first news announcing that the indigenous peoples of the Upper Ucayali region were on the warpath reached the government on September 5, 1915, in the form of a telegram sent by the administrator of the Pichis Trail to the minister of public works.1 Its text was very brief: “Bermúdez reports that armed bands of ‘Cunivos’ and ‘Campas’ have attacked several posts on the Upper and Lower Ucayali, asserts deaths Fitzcarral [sic] family and 30 more, inhabitants took refuge in fundo ‘Pucalpa,’ property of Cecilio Hernández, from Iquitos.”2 The telegram did not indicate when the attacks had taken place. Despite the establishment of telegraphic connection between Lima and Iquitos in 1908, and the inauguration of a network of radiotelegraphic stations along the Ucayali in 1912,3 communication between the Pacific coast and the Amazon region was still difficult. News from areas not directly served by these stations often took days in reaching the capital. It was, therefore, only in the morning of September 6, 1915, that news of the uprising was published simultaneously in regional and national newspapers, and that the public found out that the attacks had begun in the early hours of September 3.4 The date and time for the beginning of the uprising was not, as I will discuss in chapter 6, chosen randomly. It had important cosmological and theological connotations. What is important at this point, however, is that both El Oriente of Iquitos and La Prensa of Lima reported that on Friday, September 3, at 6:30 a.m., a joint force of “campas, cunibos and piros”—that is, Ashaninka, Conibo, [ 26 ]

Chronicle of a R evolt For etold  [ 27 ]

and Yine—attacked several targets along the Upper Ucayali and Lower Urubamba Rivers simultaneously. The headlines of El Oriente were particularly sensationalist: “Grave incidents in the Ucayali River—A triple alliance among savages—Attack to steam launch ‘Libertad’—Six dead and eight wounded—The ‘Sepa’ massacre—Upper Ucayali neighbors flee—Panic in the province” (see figure 5).5 With a more restrained style—perhaps because they were not as well informed as the local El Oriente—the national La Prensa and El Comercio were equally alarming.6 Though greatly exaggerated in their details, these first news reports present a quite accurate account of the incidents that took place on the first day of the revolt. They all reported that the Ashaninka, in alliance with the Yine and Conibo, simultaneously attacked the rubber entrepôts of Cumaría, Casa Fitzcarrald, Sepa, and Chicotsa, and also the steamer Libertad (see map 2.1). Later on, it was discovered that Amahuaca warriors had also been involved, but not much is known about the role they played in the uprising. The alliance was, in fact, quite unlikely. The Conibo—by then the largest and most powerful of the Pano-­speaking peoples of eastern Peru— occupied both banks of the Upper Ucayali River. Known as “Lords of the Ucayali,” they were renowned pirates and slave raiders.7 Their main rival to the south were the Yine, Arawak speakers who occupied the Lower Urubamba, the Upper Ucayali, and the mouth of the Tambo River. Before the changes brought about by the rubber boom era—which in Peru began around 1870 and lasted until 1910—the Conibo and Yine had competed for supremacy in the region, raiding each other and the interior peoples that lived on both sides of the Upper Ucayali/Lower Urubamba axis. Their main targets were the Pano-­speaking Amahuaca, who lived on the headwaters of the right-­bank tributaries of the Upper Ucayali and Lower Urubamba, and the Arawak-­speaking Ashaninka, who inhabited the Tambo River, Gran Pajonal, and the left-­bank tributaries of the Upper Ucayali. The Conibo and Yine, who shared a warlike ideal of masculinity, viewed their relation as one between equals, but they regarded the Ashaninka and Amahuaca as lesser peoples in terms of both their cultural practices and military skills. It is this perception that renders their alliance even more improbable, since it was the Ashaninka who played the leading role in the 1915 uprising. As we shall see in chapter 4, what made this shift possible was the decimation and displacement of the Conibo and Yine peoples during the rubber boom era, which created the conditions for the gradual rise of the Upper Ucayali Ashaninka. At the time of the revolt, the Ashaninka, Yine, and Conibo

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M a p 2.1. Upper Ucayali region during the 1915 multiethnic uprising.

shared some customs, such as the use of cushma, but, as revealed by photographs taken at around that time, they also displayed very distinct cultural traits (see figures 6, 7, and 8). The rubber entrepôts targeted by the rebels were spread along a large tract of the Upper Ucayali and Lower Urubamba Rivers. Like the date and time of the revolt, the selection of these targets seems to have been

Chronicle of a R evolt For etold  [ 29 ]

carefully planned. Three of them were emblematic rubber posts, not only because they were among the largest of their kind but also because they belonged to the region’s most powerful patrones. Cumaría, also known as Nueva Italia, was the northernmost of the attacked posts (see figure 9). It was a large rubber entrepôt and sugarcane hacienda owned by two Italian brothers, Fernando and Francisco Francchini.8 It had a considerable number of Conibo peons9—probably mixed with some Ashaninka—and through the aggregation of a variety of government officials, small farmers, fluvial traders, and migrant workers, by 1915 it had acquired the size of a small town.10 It was also a busy port for the transshipment of goods because it was the highest point of year-­round navigation on the river for the larger steamships.11 Casa Fitzcarrald, located on the confluence of the Urubamba and Tambo Rivers, was the headquarters of the famous rubber baron, Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald, who had died in 1897 after the ship in which he was traveling sank. It had been founded around 1893, and in 1915 it was run by Federico and José, the founder’s sons and heirs, who controlled a large Ashaninka workforce.12 Sepa, the southernmost of the attacked posts, was the smallest of the three haciendas owned by the powerful Francisco Vargas Hernández. Its workforce was mainly Yine peons, mixed with some Ashaninka, Amahuaca, and Matsigenka.13 All of these entrepôts were important economic hubs with large indigenous workforces. More importantly, they were all owned by patrones who were infamous slavers. By contrast, Chicotsa, owned by Emilio García, was a minor rubber post with a small Ashaninka workforce, its only outstanding feature being that it was located at the center of the rebel area.14 So, why was it attacked? The answer appears to be that the rebels knew the steam launch Libertad was to arrive in Chicotsa shortly after dawn, on September 3, around the time they had planned to begin the revolt. This was no ordinary ship, and the rebels had good reasons to want to destroy it. The reports that appeared in El Oriente and La Prensa suggest that the 1915 upheaval was not a spur-­of-­the-­moment, disjointed outburst of anger on the part of a mixed collection of oppressed Indian peons. In fact, since March that year the local press had been calling attention to the rumors indicating that the Upper and Lower Ucayali Indians were preparing a massive uprising.15 There is no doubt that the concerted attacks with which the rebels launched the uprising required much planning. That the insurgents were able to achieve such a high degree of coordination is quite amazing, given that at the time nearly all indigenous

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people were illiterate and lacked calendars or watches to keep track of time. We know, however, that they had other methods to measure time. According to John H. Bodley, around 1914, Jacinto, an illiterate Ashaninka chief who commanded a group of Ashaninka rubber extractors in the Upper Pichis River, used notched sticks not only to keep track of time but also to handle the payment of merchandise to his workers.16 In these notched sticks, known as ontashirontsi,17 Jacinto “recorded names, amounts of merchandise advanced, and amounts of rubber received.” An Adventist missionary confirms this practice, reporting in 1924 that the Ashaninka “use a counting stick by which they keep track of their work, and also reckon the days.”18 Two of these counting sticks—mistakenly recorded as “notched time beating sticks”—can be seen in the Schaeffler Collection at the National Museum of the American Indian (see figure 10).19 The first news of the September 3 assault painted a very bleak prospect.20 It was reported that in the north, the Conibo had attacked Cumaría, forcing Francisco Francchini and the town’s inhabitants to take refuge in Pucallpa, and driving the people of the neighboring Iparía to take up arms in order to repel possible attacks. At the center of the insurgent area, a mixed party of Ashaninka and Conibo warriors armed with rifles and arrows had taken over Chicotsa and killed its owner, Emilio Garcia, and his family. After having secured the post, they proceeded to attack the Libertad, which was about to dock in Chicotsa’s port, and killed six sailors and wounded six others, including the ship’s owner and captain, Julio César Delgado. In the south, a joint force of Yine and Ashaninka peons attacked Casa Fitzcarrald and killed the Fitzcarrald brothers and their families. They also stole all the rifles and ammunition they could carry with them. The rebels continued up the Urubamba River and, with the help of Amahuaca peons, attacked Sepa and massacred its inhabitants, including the hacienda’s owner, Pancho Vargas. It was later reported that they had also killed two of his most trusted employees, the brothers Alfredo and Pablo Magne. The press claimed that the insurgents were advancing downriver along the Ucayali, killing all the civilizados they found on their way. A later source indicates that they were armed with rifles, bows, and macanas—the sword-­like hardwood weapon favored by Conibo warriors.21 Although many rebels carried rifles and shotguns, some still used bows and a large variety of war arrows. In the following days, the press continued to cover the uprising, delivering more details about the rebels’ first assaults. In Iquitos, the arrival of the Libertad on September 7 provided new sources of

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information.22 A large crowd of anxious relatives, curious onlookers, and avid journalists was expecting the steamer when it docked in Iquitos’s main port at 8:20 p.m. Capt. Delgado recounted to the press the details of the attack on the Libertad. He said that on his way upriver to Unini in late August, he had left a passenger in Chicotsa, arranging to pick him up on his way back to Iquitos. On September 3, the Libertad went back to Chicotsa to pick up the waiting passenger. As they were about to land at 6:30 a.m., Delgado spotted his sister María and her two children covered in blood and crying for help on the shore. He ordered the crew to take a boat to rescue his sister, which they did under heavy Indian fire. Meanwhile, another group of sailors set out to rescue three other women who were also crying for help. At this point, the rebels started shooting at the Libertad with rifles, shotguns, and arrows, wounding Delgado, who lost control of the rudder. As some of the rescuers were trying to go back to the launch with the rescued women, and the pilot of the Libertad was trying to prevent the drifting steamer from crashing, a large number of insurgents attacked the ship in four large canoes. Since the crew had no weapons to repel them, having used the few they had to arm the sailors that had gone ashore, Delgado ordered the crew to escape downriver at full steam, leaving behind one of the ship’s boats with some of the rescuers. While heading downriver, the passengers of the fleeing steamer saw how the rebels attacked the abandoned rescuers, killing three of them while the others tried to escape. All in all, Delgado claimed, the insurgents had killed more than thirty-­one people in Chicotsa, including the fundo’s owner, his wife, and two sons. In addition, they had killed six of the people that were in the Libertad, between passengers and crew, and wounded another seven.23 On their escape downriver, as we know through José Enrique ­Urresti’s account,24 Delgado tried to land in Puntijau but was rejected by the local Ashaninka, who had joined the rebels. Seeing how wide the scope of the uprising was, Delgado decided to continue downriver to help another sister who owned a fundo on the mouth of the Pacaya River, close to Puntijau.25 When they arrived, they found the post burned down and no sign of its residents.26 After a short while, they saw how some Indians brought a body to the riverbank and left it there. Through his binoculars, Delgado realized that it was his sister. She was still alive. With a group of sailors he rowed to the shore to rescue the woman. But when they came closer, the rebels started shooting at them from behind some bushes. According to Urresti, the rebels had abandoned the woman as a lure to attack them from a safe spot. Delgado finally

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managed to rescue his sister but not before two of his men were killed and eight were wounded. The newspaper reports and Urresti’s account suggest that in both Chicotsa and Pacaya the insurgents’ true objective was to capture Delgado, using the latter’s sisters as bait. Why were the insurgents so intent on killing Capt. Delgado? And why did they want to sink the Libertad so badly? That the rebels granted these targets great importance is revealed by the fact that Chief José Tasorentsi, as he was known at the time, participated personally in the attack on Chicotsa. From later news, we know that the attack on this site was led by Francisco el Chino, a mixed Chinese-­A shaninka chief, with the support and advice of four Ashaninka pinkatsari—Tasorentsi, Acasharontsi, Pihorato, and Samoto.27 It was Tasorentsi, however, who had recruited the bulk of the forces that participated in the assault. Why did the rebels think it was worth investing so much effort in this minor entrepôt? The short answer is that it was not worthy. What was worth attacking was the Libertad. The Libertad was a two-­deck steam launch purchased sometime before 1913 by G. Delgado & Sons, a merchant house and shipping company founded by Gregorio Delgado in the late 1800s.28 In 1915 it was registered as belonging to Julio Delgado & Brother, a company formed by the brothers Julio César and Gregorio Delgado, presumably after their father’s death.29 It was a small ship, as can be seen from an archive photograph published by the weekly Variedades shortly after the attack (see figure 11). But, according to La Prensa,30 it was the ship that traveled most frequently to Cumaría during the dry season (July–November), and further upriver to Sepahua, on the Lower Urubamba, during the rainy season (December–June), bringing passengers, merchandise, and mail, as can be seen in an early movie shot by Guillermo Garland Higginson in 1929.31 Based on information obtained from local informants, La Prensa speculated that the attack on the Libertad may have been organized not by Indian rebels but by one of the region’s slave traders, who, indebted with Capt. Delgado, tried to avoid paying his debt by killing the shipper.32 Although rather far-­fetched, La Prensa’s speculation suggests that at the time it was well known that Julio Delgado & Brother outfitted at least some of the region’s white-­mestizo slavers, suggesting that the company may have also been involved in this kind of trade. That the captains and crews of the ships traveling along the Ucayali dabbled in slave trafficking is confirmed by various independent sources. Around 1913, Stuart J. Fuller, US consul in Iquitos, informed the US secretary of state that indigenous slavery was rampant in the Upper Ucayali,

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and that “the crews of launches operating in this river all expect to make something by trading in girls and children.”33 A few years later, the subprefect of Ucayali confirmed the US consul’s claim, reporting that “this cruel business is supported and backed by launch owners, who are often buyers of Indians.”34 This would constitute only circumstantial proof of the Delgados’ involvement in the Ucayali slave trade if it were not for the fact that we know that the brothers continued to engage in such prosperous business even as late as 1933. That year, Arkady Fiedler, a Polish writer, journalist, and adventurer who was visiting the Polish colony of Cumaría, reported that the Upper Ucayali patrones had solved the problem of the chronic scarcity of hands by organizing slave raids to capture young Indian boys and girls, whom they raised to become servants and peons.35 He further claimed that many of the children captured by these slavers “were exported to Iquitos on the steamer Libertad (!) by Gregorio Delgado,” whom Fiedler describes as “a jovial, portly gentleman with an amiable smile and an education acquired in Geneva.” The exclamation mark inserted by Fiedler was meant to underline the irony of a slave ship named Liberty. In turn, his reference to Gregorio Delgado’s bonhomie and Geneva education must be read as a subtle condemnation of those outwardly civil and well-­educated loretanos who had no qualms in participating in the despicable traffic of Indian slaves. Fiedler’s account leaves no doubt that the Delgado brothers and their steamer Libertad were actively involved in slave trading both as carriers of “human commodities” and as outfitters of the region’s most conspicuous slavers.36 This is further confirmed by Barbara Osborne, wife of Adventist missionary Henry Westphal, who in 1929 claimed that the captain of the Libertad “is a special friend of Pancho Vargas,” who was one of the region’s most powerful slaveholders.37 For the Ashaninka, Conibo, and Yine ­people, we must surmise, the busy Libertad embodied the most odious aspects of white domination in the region, being regarded as the means by which white patrones took away their women and children, never to be seen again. This confirms that the attacks that took place on September 3, 1915, not only were carefully planned and coordinated, but were meant as a political statement, namely, an indictment against indigenous slavery and the region’s white slavers. The events that followed corroborate this impression and underline the insurgents’ determination to expel all birakochas—as the Ashaninka call white people—from the region. On his return to Iquitos, Capt. Delgado provided a detailed list of the number of people killed in the diverse posts attacked by the rebels

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on the first day of the insurrection, asserting that there had been at least forty-­eight casualties.38 These figures must have been only rough estimates obtained from different informants, since we know that Delgado was not present in all the sites attacked by the rebels and was, in fact, rather busy running for the safety of Iquitos. Other sources estimated the number of white people killed by the insurgents at around fifty to sixty.39 Based on information delivered by an Ashaninka woman who claimed to have escaped from the Sepa massacre, El Oriente asserted that “the campas, in alliance with the cunivos, piros and amahuacas, were set on exterminating the region’s civilizados.”40 Later on, it reported, on the basis of news obtained from Chapalba, a loyal Ashaninka chief, and Bruno, a rebel chief who still maintained contacts with certain rubber patrones, that “the rebel Indians . . . were determined to exterminate all white-­lipped-­peccaries, which is how they call white people.”41 This is one of the few near-­verbatim references that we have of the rebels’ intentions. The analogy between birakochas and peccaries was central to the Ashaninka cosmology of white–Indian relations. I will develop this idea more closely when I analyze the causes that led to the Upper Ucayali uprising as seen from an indigenous perspective in chapter 5. After only a few days of inactivity, the rebels renewed their offensive. On September 6, a large flotilla of insurgents attacked fundo Lagarto, killing Francisco Acosta, its owner, and one of his employees, and kidnapping Acosta’s sister-­in-­law.42 On September 12, Manuel Maceda, owner of fundo Puntijau, and one of his employees were killed by a small group of Ashaninka rebels when he returned to inspect his property after moving his family to the safety of Cumaría.43 On September 20, joint bands of Conibo and Ashaninka Indians closed the Pachitea River to prevent the transit of mail and passengers to and from the Pichis Trail.44 On September 23, Ashaninka rebels attacked two rubber posts on the Tahuanía River, killing ten people, including their owners, Custodio Rengifo and Raymundo de Matos, and abducting the latter’s daughter.45 A few days later, on October 3, the Ashaninka attacked fundo Tahuanía, setting it on fire and killing its owner, Elías La Torre, his wife, his daughters, and several employees, totaling twenty dead.46 They also took with them several white women. At the time, according to La Prensa, the ucayalinos feared new attacks on Cumaría and Sepa.47 During the following weeks, the insurgents seem to have retreated, putting a stop to their attacks, probably in response to the government’s counteroffensive. But on October 30, the Ashaninka renewed their attacks, assaulting fundo Maquinaria, in the environs of Iparía, where

Chronicle of a R evolt For etold  [ 35 ]

they killed its owner, took with them his wife and children, and stole a great deal of merchandise.48 And on November 8 they attacked fundo Anaquiría, killing its owner, Eduardo Rothmund, and kidnapping his wife and children.49 A week later, on November 16, a combined force of Ashaninka and Conibo warriors attacked several rubber entrepôts on the Pacaya River, taking six white men as hostages.50 And on November 29, a group of Amahuaca warriors assaulted Sepahua and took a large number of hostages.51 This was to be the rebels’ last large attack. According to information obtained by the press, each of these actions was preceded by a period of surveillance by Indian spies sent by the rebel leaders.52 The intelligence gathered by these spies ensured the maximum efficacy of the attacks with as few losses as possible. In all their attacks the insurgents killed those who resisted, set on fire all houses and buildings, stole as many weapons and as much ammunition as they could, and carried away as much merchandise as they found. In many instances the rebels also took with them the wives and children of the posts’ owners and personnel. Such kidnappings, as we shall see in chapter 5, not only mimicked white-­mestizo correrías against Indian settlements but sought to redress the unbalanced flow of vitality, in the form of women and children, that favored birakochas, to the detriment of their Indian counterparts. Not all the insurgent attacks were reported by the press, so the above summary is necessarily incomplete. In contrast, based on the accounts of local “witnesses” and correspondents, the press seems to have inflated—at least at first—the number of deaths attributed to the rebels. By the end of September, however, many journalists started to amend their previous reports based on newer information. First, it was announced that the brothers Pablo and Alfredo Magne, who worked for Pancho Vargas in fundo Sepa, had been in effect attacked by the rebels, but had managed to escape.53 Then it was reported that the sailors abandoned by Capt. Delgado in Chicotsa, and who were presumed to be dead, had reappeared in Iquitos, reproaching their superior for having left them behind and forcing the authorities to open an investigation on Delgado’s cowardly behavior.54 Having announced with great foreboding the deaths of both Pancho Vargas and the Fitzcarrald brothers, the press now reported they were alive. In addition, some of the women and children kidnapped by the rebels, such as the family of rubber entrepreneur Eduardo Rothmund, were recovered by government forces.55 First estimated at around fifty or sixty, the number of victims reported by the press was soon increased to one hundred fifty.56 With the

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passage of time and the kind of optical enhancement produced by the process of mythification, the number of white-­mestizo casualties came to be remembered as “over one hundred families,”57 that is, around five hundred victims. It is impossible to know for certain how many people died during the uprising. But if we count not only the white-­mestizo victims— apparently the only ones that mattered to the press—but also those on the rebel camp, the death toll probably reached several hundred. As to the number of indigenous people raised up in arms, the press reported that it fluctuated between 1,000 and 1,500.58 Dr. Aleksander Freyd asserted that Chief Tasorentsi commanded an army of 800 warriors.59 At one point, it was said that 500 rebels had gathered on the Pacaya River.60 These figures were probably inflated by fear, but they are not necessarily inaccurate. They seem high if they are taken to represent the size of the rebel “army.” But there was no proper rebel army. Most of the armed actions were undertaken by small to mid-­size groups of warriors with the connivance and active participation of the Indian peons of the attacked posts. This suggests that some of the rebels were full-­time warriors that moved to wherever they were needed according to plan, whereas others were people who acted only when their localities were directly affected. Rebel bands were not particularly big, fluctuating between nine and forty warriors.61 But since there were thousands of indigenous peons in the fundos and rubber entrepôts along the Upper Ucayali/Lower Urubamba axis, it is not improbable that the number of indigenous people that rose up in arms at one point or another amounted to more than one thousand. How many of these were active, full-­time warriors moving throughout the region in organized bands under the command of local chiefs is harder to guess. Similarly difficult is the task of establishing how the rebels were organized. Who were the leaders of the revolt? How did they reach decisions? And to what extent was the uprising’s leadership centralized? Contemporary and later sources report a total of sixteen indigenous curacas directly involved in the 1915 revolt. Although these sources mention the active participation of Conibo, Yine, and Amahuaca warriors in many of the uprising’s more dramatic actions, all of the curacas mentioned in them were said to be Ashaninka, or can be assumed to be Ashaninka by context: Acasharontsi, Bruno, El Boliviano, Kasanto, Francisco el Chino, Shirunkama, Chobiri, Chobabuenga, Cipriano, Kirebo, Napoleón, Ompikiri, Pihorato, Tasorentsi, Uribe, and Samoto.62 It is not clear why the press does not mention Conibo, Yine, or Amahuaca rebel chiefs. The reason cannot be that these peoples were less inclined to warring than the Ashaninka.

Chronicle of a R evolt For etold  [ 37 ]

The Conibo and Yine were renowned pirates and warriors, whereas the Amahuaca were used to defending themselves from their riverine enemies, and often took the initiative of raiding their weaker neighbors whenever possible.63 The most plausible explanation is either that the number of Conibo, Yine, and Amahuaca warriors participating in the revolt was substantially lower than that of the Ashaninka, or that they, for the purposes of this particular war, accepted Ashaninka leadership. Contemporary observers noted that most rebel leaders, and a large number of their followers, were individuals who had suffered slavery and debt-­peonage personally.64 In other words, they were among those who had experienced white domination most brutally. As a result of this experience they often knew Spanish and were well acquainted with the ways of white people. This background became an invaluable advantage to the insurgents. Having firsthand knowledge of the power of firearms and being acquainted with the birakochas’ offensive and defensive strategies, the rebel leaders often joined efforts to attack their targets in order to minimize risks.65 This kind of coordination reaffirms the notion that the 1915 uprising was not a spontaneous outbreak, but rather a carefully planned initiative that must have required—as Lepecki observed many years afterward—“much diligence, shrewdness, and diplomatic skills.”66 Such coordination must have also required a certain degree of centralized planning. If it is not particularly difficult to get two neighboring chiefs belonging to the same ethnic group to sit down to organize a joint attack against a common enemy, the same cannot be said of the kind of large-­ scale, simultaneous offensive involving four different ethnic groups that launched the indigenous uprising on the dawn of September 3, 1915. We have solid evidence that the attacks were not small-­scale affairs mobilizing only local forces and chiefs. At least five of the chiefs involved in the revolt were reported to have participated in more than one action, often in sites that were miles away from each other.67 These were not local chiefs interested only in killing their patrones in revenge for past grievances. They had larger objectives and did not act singly. They established alliances and coordinated their efforts. They planned their actions carefully. They mobilized their warriors to different areas as required by the general strategy. And they exercised their personal influence to recruit reinforcements not only from among their own people but also from distant areas. Most of the contingent that attacked Chicotsa was made up of Ashaninka warriors recruited by Tasorentsi in the Perené region, an area in which he had been warring in the previous two years. According to

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the press, once the rebels took over Chicotsa, Tasorentsi went back to the Perené valley, accompanied by seven Ashaninka and two Conibo, “boasting of his deed and presenting the stolen merchandise as trophies, probably with the aim of awakening the greed of the region’s wild Indians and inducing them to support him and join him in his raids.”68 The curaca known as El Boliviano also set off to the Perené valley to announce the rebel victory in Chicotsa and persuade more people to join the rebels.69 Further on, in late November, when the troops sent by the prefect of Loreto were pursuing the rebels with the help of the militias raised by the local patrones, Francisco el Chino was seen navigating upriver on the Coenhua—a river inhabited by Conibo people—in search of reinforcements.70 At around the same time, Tasorentsi was on the Upper Ucayali navigating downriver in a flotilla of seven large rafts at the head of a force of forty Ashaninka warriors “armed up to their teeth,” which he had recruited on the Autique River—a tributary of the Tambo, according to the press, but actually a branch of the Perené River.71 It is clear that the uprising’s leaders knew the importance of increasing their ranks and devoted a great deal of time to attracting new followers. They also knew the value of propaganda, using their victories and the appeal of industrial goods as powerful incentives to persuade others to join them. That they were successful in enticing warriors from the Perené and Pichis valleys is not surprising given that the Ashaninka living in those areas, like the Upper Ucayali Ashaninka, Conibo, and Yine, were involved in market activities, either as peons in the coffee plantations of the British-­owned Perené Colony or as rubber gatherers along the Upper Pichis. However, the rebels were also successful in recruiting followers in areas that were only marginally linked to the regional economy, such as the Tambo valley and the Gran Pajonal. The reasons for this success will be examined further on. What do we know of Tasorentsi’s role in the Upper Ucayali uprising? At first, the press speculated that Francisco el Chino was the “movement’s leader.”72 El Chino was the son of a Chinese immigrant named Francisco Aseki, who had settled on the Apurimac River around 1878, and a local Ashaninka woman.73 In the mid-­1880s, Aseki moved with his Ashaninka family downriver, to the Upper Ucayali, where he became a renowned slaver.74 In 1897, he was reported as living in the environs of Chicotsa.75 His son must have been around thirty-­five years old in 1915, and if he had participated as a youth in his father’s slave raids—which is most likely—by then he must have had considerable experience in war tactics. Given that his family had lived for many years on the opposite

Chronicle of a R evolt For etold  [ 39 ]

margin of the mouth of the Chicotsa River, it is not surprising that he was chosen to lead the attack to this small entrepôt. There is no doubt that Francisco el Chino Jr. was an important rebel leader, but apart from a few references in the 1915 press he disappears from the historical record as soon as the uprising was suppressed. In contrast, although the press did not conjecture about Tasorentsi’s role in the uprising, it referred to him as “the famous curaca Tasolinche.”76 Why was Chief José so “famous”? One possible answer is that his fame derived from his many exploits during the uprising. The press was well aware that Tasorentsi was one of the Indian leaders who had planned the simultaneous attacks that launched the uprising. He had participated personally in the assault on Chicotsa and the steamer Libertad, he had been successful in recruiting warriors from faraway areas, and he obviously had enough warring experience to command a party of forty heavily armed warriors. However, the context in which the press uses the qualifier “famous” in relation to Tasorentsi seems to imply that he was already famous before the uprising began. There are good reasons for this: shaman-­chief Tasorentsi had been one of the main leaders of the intermittent guerrilla warfare that the Pichis, Pangoa, and Gran Pajonal Ashaninka had waged against the white-­mestizo patrones of the Lower Perené and Upper Pichis Rivers between 1912 and 1914. It was probably during this period, in which he collaborated closely with an older generation of Ashaninka pinkatsari, that he acquired his warring experience and refined his capacity for military strategy. But it was also during this stage of his life that his followers must have conferred on him the epithet of tasorentsi, or “almighty blower world transformer,” since the regional and national press mentions him by this appellative from the very beginning of the 1915 revolt. As I shall contend in chapter 6, if shaman-­chief José was successful in persuading the Ashaninka, Conibo, and Yine to rise up in arms against the white-­mestizo patrones, this was due as much to the appeal of his radical political discourse as to the allure of his fame as a world transformer, which resonated with the apocalyptic and liberationist expectations of these three indigenous peoples. It was only much later that the sources refer to Tasorentsi as the paramount leader of the 1915 uprising. Lepecki alludes to him as “the greatest chief of the Campas” and as “the famous in all the montaña Tasulinchi.”77 He implies that Tasorentsi was the revolt’s principal leader when asserting that it was he who united the antagonistic tribes of the Ucayali and Gran Pajonal, and stood “as their leader, forcing them to dig up the war axe against the whites.”78 Such enthusiastic appraisal could be

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attributed to the romantic views of an overzealous Polish adventurer if it were not for the fact that other, independent sources endorse his assertions. In a September 1928 report, the police constable of Puerto Ocopa refers to Tasorentsi as “the great curaca Tasorinche, the one of the 1915 massacre.”79 In a second report, written a month later, he is even clearer, referring to the Ashaninka pinkatsari as “Tasorinche, former chief of the 1915 massacre.”80 Was Tasorentsi indeed the paramount chief of the 1915 uprising? If we take the position of paramount chief as equivalent to that of a “general” in an organized army—modern or ancient—the answer would be no. Given the native Amazonian reluctance to endow leaders with too much power and authority, it is difficult to believe that Tasorentsi would have been granted the kind of power normally associated with a general of a professional army. But if we understand this notion as corresponding to that of an “inspirer” and war chief who stands as first among equals, then there can be no doubt that Tasorentsi was the paramount leader of the Upper Ucayali revolt. The Ashaninka call such primus inter pares leaders hibataintsiri, “the first one,” “the chief.”81 As such, he not only would have been responsible for rallying the forces, but would have had the last word in outlining the movement’s main objectives, tracing a ­general strategic plan, and defining such key issues as the date for the beginning of the uprising. What were these objectives? The press did not seem very eager to find an answer to this question; it speculated much on the causes of the uprising and on the best means to put an end to it, but it made no effort to find out what exactly the rebels wanted. It assumed, based on information provided by friendly Indians, that the insurgents’ main aspiration was to “exterminate civilized people” in revenge for the many abuses they had suffered in their hands.82 The press was not entirely wrong, but it failed to understand the complex magico-­religious motives behind this goal. The rebels’ agenda was not as simplistic as journalists represented it. It was a combination of political claims and utopian expectations, which I will examine in greater detail in chapters 5 and 6. What is clear, however, is that one of Tasorentsi’s main objectives was to put an end to indigenous slavery and its disguised avatar, indigenous debt-­peonage. This entailed not only eliminating or chasing away those white-­mestizo patrones who were engaged in the slave traffic but, above all, persuading their indigenous associates to stop enslaving their own or other indigenous people. Whereas in the early years of the rubber boom most slave raids were carried out by white-­mestizo patrones,

Chronicle of a R evolt For etold  [ 41 ]

in later years rubber extractors began to outfit friendly indigenous chiefs or even some of their own criados—captive indigenous boys raised as servants and peons—to procure Indian slaves for them. In exchange for shotguns, rifles, ammunition, and other industrial goods, these indigenous partners provided their bosses with a steady flow of Indian captives—mostly women and children. The rebels’ first targets confirm Tasorentsi’s resolve to accomplish his first objective. Francisco Vargas Hernández, the Francchini family, and the Fitzcarrald brothers were all infamous slavers who controlled large indebted indigenous workforces.83 In turn, the Delgado brothers, owners of the steamship Libertad, were known for outfitting the region’s slavers and being involved in the transport of captive slaves.84 Attacking them meant a hard blow to the region’s slave traffic, but also a warning to other white slavers to put an end to their trade. Tasorentsi was also successful in convincing some of the region’s most powerful Indian slavers to end their dealings and join him in expelling white-­mestizo patrones from the region. At least three of the uprising’s sixteen known leaders were former slavers. Kirebo was a Gran Pajonal strong man, who, together with his three brothers, Andrés, Lucas, and Irantis, worked as slave raiders for Jaime Morón de la Fuente, the owner of a rubber entrepôt located on the mouth of the Unini River.85 He used to raid the Perené Ashaninka, who still remember him as “the one who kidnapped children long ago.”86 Kirebo and his brothers were cross-­cousins of Chief Tasorentsi—or treated each other as such— and knew each other well. Kirebo must have been a fearsome warrior, for many years later he was described as “a former agent for the child-­ slave traffic .  .  . who had, in carrying forward this work, killed at least twenty families.”87 Uribe, the second former slaver, was an Ashaninka chief reportedly associated with the Unini “traders in human flesh.”88 In 1914, he was accused of trying to kill César Lurquín, police constable of the Upper Ucayali area, supposedly in revenge for the latter’s persecution of the area’s white and Indian slavers. Finally, Francisco el Chino Jr. was, as we have seen, the son of a well-­known slaver and most probably a slaver himself. In 1901, his father, Francisco Aseki, was described as one of the “absolute owners” of the Upper Ucayali region together with other white and Indian slavers, such as the Francchini and Fitzcarrald brothers and the Ashaninka chief Venancio Amaringo Campa.89 Tasorentsi had also been able to persuade many Pangoa and Lower Perené Ashaninka slavers to stop raiding their fellow tribespeople and join him in killing or expelling white-­mestizo slavers from the region (see chapter 3).

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The determination with which Chief Tasorentsi undertook the task of eliminating indigenous slavery in the Upper Ucayali region is all the more surprising since we know through oral sources that before becoming the “famous Tasulinchi,” he had been involved in the region’s slave trade. These sources, which include his youngest son, Segundo Arroyo, and Alcides Calderón, one of the most prominent Pichis Ashaninka contemporary leaders, are nothing but sympathetic to Tasorentsi’s cause, so there is little reason to believe that they made up this story to tarnish the rebel leader’s memory.90 If anything, the fact that the man who came to be acknowledged as a tasorentsi emissary was originally a slave trader confirms that he was not a unidimensional, black-­and-­white Ashaninka hero but a man of his time, morally gray, whose greatest achievement was his capacity to change and put the interests of the Ashaninka people above his own. The turning point in Tasorentsi’s life, as I shall discuss in chapter 3, took place in late 1911, when a group of desperate parents asked him to rescue their abducted children. From then onward, the elimination of indigenous slavery became a dream that was to drive most of Tasorentsi’s political and military actions. The Upper Ucayali uprising lasted slightly less than three months, from September 3 to November 29, 1915. Despite the desperate demands for help from the region’s rubber bosses, the authorities were slow in sending troops to the region. It took a week before the prefect of Loreto designed a plan, in alliance with the largest merchants and leading men of Iquitos, to suppress the Indian revolt.91 The authorities agreed to immediately establish a fifteen-­man garrison in Cumaría, appoint fifty men to guard Unini Island, and assign ten soldiers to each of the steam launches navigating along the Upper Ucayali. None of this was accomplished. The first punitive forces arrived in the region quite late, on September 27.92 They consisted of thirty-­nine men, twenty-­four of whom already formed part of the Contamana garrison, and only fifteen fresh soldiers sent from Iquitos. The government troops were slow to act. Their first counteroffensive took place on October 15, when twenty men under the orders of Sublieutenant Pedro Urdiales and the subprefect of Ucayali, Cesar Castañeda, arrived on the Libertad at the mouth of the Unini River. The rebels were said to have gathered there,93 but when the troops arrived, they had already escaped. In contrast, the local militias organized by the Fitzcarrald brothers in the Unini area,94 Pedro Moreno on the Pacaya River,95 and Pancho Vargas on the Urubamba River96 were much more effective, probably because they knew the area better and had greater experience in raiding tactics. If we are to trust El Oriente,

Chronicle of a R evolt For etold  [ 43 ]

these paramilitary forces far outnumbered the troops sent by the government: the militias raised by Pancho Vargas and the Fitzcarrald brothers alone amounted to eighty-­t wo men.97 After the first blunders, however, the government troops recovered, and with the support of the local militias they embarked on a swift counteroffensive, killing many rebels, retrieving almost all the white people kidnapped by the insurgents, and retaking the largest entrepôts and fundos occupied by the insurgent forces. Not many rebels were captured; perhaps because the patrón-­sponsored militias followed a take-­no-­prisoners strategy. The few detainees mentioned by the press—five men and one woman—arrived in Iquitos on November 21, 1915, on board the Libertad. Two of the captives were Conibo men accused of killing Miguel Langredo, an employee of the Spanish merchant house Bernardino Perdiz, on the Sepahua River; two were Amahuaca—Máximo and Jucípero—­ suspected of killing Alejandro Velasco, owner of fundo Sampaya, with five arrow shots; the remaining two were a Conibo couple—José Domingo and his wife—accused of having participated in the various murders that took place during the attack to Chicotsa.98 There were, surprisingly, no Ashaninka prisoners. The captives, secured with heavy chains and shackles, were sent to the public jail, where they probably died, since no further news about them appeared in the regional press. The last journalistic information on the uprising appeared in La Razón in early April 1916.99 It came as a note lamenting the uprising and its main consequence: the depopulation of the Upper Ucayali region. In effect, the indigenous revolt had affected a vast area: more strongly along the Upper Ucayali/Lower Urubamba axis—from Iparía in the north to Sepahua in the south—and less directly along the Pichis and Pachitea Rivers. Although the revolt was not as massive and bloody as the press and the ucayalino public claimed, it was quite effective. By mid-­November 1915, La Razón recorded that at least eleven of the fundos and rubber entrepôts attacked by the insurgents had been abandoned by their owners: Lagarto, Unini, Chicotsa, Puntijau, Tahuanía, Betijay, Tranquilidad, Miraflores, La Poza, Monteverde, and Puerto Vigo.100 It is quite probable that the number of abandoned posts was much higher, since several sources establish that most patrones fled shortly after the beginning of the uprising, and that the region was almost totally abandoned until at least the early 1920s.101 In fact, in a long article published by La Voz del Ucayali to mark the first anniversary of the revolt, it is said that the number of deserted fundos and entrepôts had risen to forty.102 As a result, the region entered into a period of fear, abandonment, and

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economic depression that had still not been totally overcome in 1922, and it was to last well into the 1920s.103 Most indigenous rebels returned to their settlements or took refuge in remote areas with little government presence. According to one source, José Tasorentsi went back to the Gran Pajonal, where he hid for many years.104 Other oral accounts suggest that he took refuge on the Pachitea River, where he reappeared in 1921 as a guide for the rebel troops of Capt. Guillermo Cervantes.105 In an effort to prevent new attacks, the government established small, five-­men garrisons in Sepahua and at the mouth of the Tambo River, plus twenty soldiers in Cumaría and at another ten in Iparía.106 Indigenous resistance persisted, however, in the form of isolated attacks and generalized hostility.107 Ironically, by driving away the smaller rubber extractors, the rebels ended up strengthening the region’s most powerful patrones. In effect, Cumaría, Casa Fitzcarrald, and the Vargas haciendas were among the few operations that managed to survive, while their owners continued to prosper and dominate the region even in the dark and ruinous years following the indigenous uprising.

Three

First Signs of Indigenous Discontent, 1910–1914

Come to Nazarateki to see God. Chief Sa rgen to

T

he 1915 revolt was not an isolated, self-­contained event as it was portrayed in most contemporary press reports.1 It was the last of a series of Ashaninka actions that began exactly three years earlier, in September 1912, with the massive flight of peons from the Pichis-­Pachitea rubber entrepôts, and two seemingly unconnected murders, those of the young rubber patrón Carlos J. Corpancho on the Upper Pichis River, and the Austrian slave trader Oscar Sedlmayer in the Pangoa valley. These events were followed a year later by attacks on colonist farms in the Pangoa area and by a series of assaults on the inns and road-­maintenance camps along the Pichis Trail (see map 3.1). At first sight, the revenge killings, attacks on colonist settlements and missions, theft of merchandise and weapons, and destruction of public property appeared to be unconnected events, dispersed in both time and space. This was not the case. Although the 1912–1914 Ashaninka movement does not seem to have been as centralized and well coordinated as the multiethnic Upper Ucayali uprising that followed it, it was doubtless inspired by similar politico-­religious expectations and responded to common lines of action. As such, the 1912–1914 hostilities could be characterized as a tryout or preparatory phase of the conflict that allowed Chief José Tasorentsi and his allies to acquire the necessary skills in political propaganda, social mobilization, and military strategy for engaging in a much larger confrontation with white people and their world. [ 45 ]

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M a p 3.1. Pichis-­Perené region during the 1912–1914 Ashaninka movement.

The first sign that something was wrong in the region came on September 23, 1912, when La Prensa received a telegram from its correspondent in Azupizú, on the headwaters of the Pichis River: “An Indian called ‘Sargento’ has announced that all the Campas of the Pichis and Pachitea rivers have abandoned their patrones, tired of suffering so many hostilities.”2 The correspondent did not say who Sargento was or why he acted as if he were a spokesman for all the Ashaninka. He did remark, however, that the alarm caused by this event was unjustified since the Ashaninka were abandoning their patrones peacefully.

First Signs of Indigenous Discon t en t  [ 47 ]

What motivated the Ashaninka peons to leave their patrones? Who was Sargento? And what was his role in all of this? The answer to these questions appeared in an editorial published by La Voz del Ucayali in 1916, on the occasion of the first anniversary of the Upper Ucayali uprising. In this piece, which recounts the main events of the indigenous unrest of previous years, the paper includes the following short statement: “Two years before the Puerto Yessup massacre there was already news about the attitude of the Campas gathered in Nazarateki in the house of curaca Sargento, where the flight of peons was promoted under the pretext of seeing their god” (emphasis in original).3 The description of Sargento as a curaca, or chief, indicates that he was someone whose authority and influence were already recognized. The activities held at Sargento’s Upper Pichis house suggest that he was also a sheripiari, or tobacco shaman. Not only were these powerful medicine men but they often sought to restore communication between the Ashaninka and their creator gods.4 Sargento was depicted as a successful pinkatsari who was able to gather a large number of fugitive peons, and whose main aspiration, according to La Voz del Ucayali’s reporter, was “to expel white people from their properties, burn their bones, and seize their children as servants.”5 Due to its symbolic importance and the fact that it was written in quotation marks to indicate that it was a verbatim declaration by Chief Sargento, I shall analyze this statement in greater detail in chapter 5. What is relevant here is that the Puerto Yessup massacre took place in January 1914, which means that Chief Sargento’s proselytizing began in 1912, probably sometime before September 23, as indicated by La Prensa. La Voz del Ucayali presents Chief Sargento as a herald announcing the arrival of an expected god, rather than as the god himself. The journalist’s use of the expression “their god” suggests that the expected god was not the Christian God, but a native deity. In accordance with Ashaninka theology, such a divinity could have only been a tasorentsi emissary, one of those “almighty blower world transformers” that appear among the Ashaninka to announce a cosmic transformation in times of chaos, oppression, and imminent annihilation. There is good evidence to presume that the god announced by Sargento was shaman-­chief José. It was in the midst of the mass migration of Ashaninka peons, inflamed by the prospect of seeing their god, that Carlos Corpancho was murdered, on or around September 28, 1912. This is probably the most intriguing of the violent actions that preceded the 1915 revolt. Carlos Corpancho was related to Oswaldo Corpancho, a powerful patrón, who

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owned the rubber post Cahuapanas and fundo Santa Zita, in the Pichis valley, and the entrepôt Santa Rosa, on the Upper Ucayali River (see figure 12). The young Carlos Corpancho belonged to a patrician family from Lima and was at least partly educated in Europe and the United States.6 In his obituary, which appeared in the magazine Variedades, he was described as a “self-­made man.”7 On his return to Peru three years earlier, at the age of twenty-­two, he had settled on the Pichis River to work with his relative—older brother? cousin? uncle?—in the extraction of rubber. This was not particularly exceptional, since many younger members of distinguished Peruvian families flocked to the Amazon to try their luck in the extraction of the famous “black gold.” What was different in Carlos’s case was that he had suddenly and deliberately “gone native.” In an article announcing his death in La Prensa, it was said that the young Corpancho “led the same life as the savages.”8 He wore cushma, drank chewed manioc beer, slept in open Indian huts, and lived for months on end deep in the forest in the company of his Ashaninka peons. El Comercio added that as soon as he settled in the region, Corpancho had set about learning Ashaninka and was soon fluent in the language.9 It was said that Corpancho’s “identification with Indian savagery [and] his adaptation to their life and customs was aimed at earning the Indians’ good will and becoming their ‘Curaca’ or God, as they call their chiefs.”10 It went on to say that, in this case, the young Corpancho’s attitude, far from gaining him the affection and sympathies of his Ashaninka peons, generated in them a profound hatred that eventually led to his demise. Why would Corpancho want to become an Indian chief or god? And why did his stratagem go wrong? To start with, it is important to clarify that the Ashaninka did not—and do not at present—call their chiefs curaca, a Hispanicized form of the Quechua word kuraq, meaning “elder,” “older brother,” or “superior,” which has been used by Spanish speakers since colonial times to refer to Andean and Amazonian chiefs. If anything, Ashaninka people call their chiefs pinkatsari, “the one who commands respect.”11 Nor do they call chiefs “god.” There is no word for “god” in the Ashaninka language, but, as we have seen, their theology includes several figures that have the characteristics usually attributed to gods.12 They do believe, however, that the amatsenka good spirits may sometimes adopt human shape to lead the Ashaninka in difficult times, and that Pabá, the Sun god, may send one of his children under the form of a tasorentsi emissary to guide and help his human creatures if needed. In other words, though Ashaninka chiefs are never gods, some gods may sometimes assume the role of Ashaninka chiefs. We can thus presume

First Signs of Indigenous Discon t en t  [ 49 ]

that Corpancho intended to be recognized as a tasorentsi world transformer or godly chief. The young Corpancho must have banked on the Ashaninka belief that divine emissaries, or itomi Pabá (sons of the Sun god), often appear to mortals in the form of a birakocha, a white or mestizo man.13 While sharing food, shelter, and work with his Ashaninka peons, Corpancho must have learned about their hope for the appearance of a world transformer that would liberate them from white oppression. He must have also known that such leaders command a profound respect among the Ashaninka and that he could take advantage of this particular belief in order to gather his own group of loyal Ashaninka peons who would obey his orders unhesitatingly, allowing him to amass a fortune in the process. This is not mere speculation. Corpancho was not the first patrón to try to take advantage of the Ashaninka anticipation of a divine messenger. Fifteen years earlier, in 1897, Fr. Gabriel Sala, a Franciscan missionary well acquainted with Ashaninka cultural practices, reported that while traversing the Gran Pajonal region he heard that the Ashaninka were fighting the white settlers of Chanchamayo and the British-­owned Perené Colony,14 instigated by their Amachegua—a misspelling of amatsenka.15 Later on, he learned that the so-­called Amachegua was really an astute slave trafficker who sought to “seduce” Ashaninka men and women into meeting him in the Pangoa valley, with the intention of seizing them as slaves.16 The Franciscan missionary does not say whether that ruse was successful. We know that Corpancho’s was not. Before Carlos Corpancho was killed, many Ashaninka peons of the Pichis and Pachitea valleys had begun to abandon their patrones and gather in Chief Sargento’s house on the Nazarateki River. Among the fugitives were the peons of Oswaldo Corpancho and Gumercindo Rivera, two patrones for whom Carlos had worked on different occasions.17 After a failed attempt to capture his peons, Oswaldo Corpancho sent Carlos to track them down. This time, however, the fugitives were not caught by surprise. They ambushed Carlos on the Tiriario River, a tributary of the Nazarateki, shot him with their bows and rifles, and threw his corpse into the river. Most reporters attributed Carlos’s murder to his mistreatment of the fugitive peons, but one of them suggested that it might have been related to his attempts to become a curaca, or god, of the Ashaninka.18 He was probably right. Carlos’s effort to recapture the runaways, with whom he had worked closely,19 was totally out of line with what was expected from a tasorentsi envoy, namely, liberation from white domination. By

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attempting to retrieve the peons by force, Carlos revealed himself not as the fatherly leader or godly liberator he pretended to be, but as what he really was, a greedy patrón. It is this betrayal that partly explains the brutal way in which he was killed. The fact that his assailants dumped his body into the river is, as we shall see in chapter 5, very significant and throws more light on the rebels’ intentions.20 Carlos Corpancho’s attempt to adopt the attributes of Ashaninka godly chiefs, like that of the 1897 fake amatsenka or of other white patrones who followed them,21 could be construed as an example of “calculated” conceptual integration, as opposed to the “inherent” conceptual blending characteristic of human cognitive thinking. In this case, an individual deliberately appropriates a foreign concept (the Ashaninka notion of amatsenka, world transformer or godly leader) to merge it with a native concept (the Peruvian notion of patrón) in order to produce a new blend (that of godly patrones). The resulting concept has the advantage of enhancing the power of the claimer, while at the same time rendering his authority nearly absolute. Unlike the more unconscious forms of conceptual integration in which the blend is assumed as natural, in the calculated version the blend constitutes a means to an end, a tactic to achieve a certain goal or obtain a personal advantage. Such ­examples of calculated conceptual integration were not unusual at the time among white-­mestizo patrones and missionaries, generating many of the paradoxes and contradictions that characterized white-Indian relations in the Pichis-­Perené and Upper Ucayali regions. As we shall see in chapter 6, it was not unusual among indigenous leaders. The second murder took place many miles away at the same time that Carlos Corpancho was killed. Though less intriguing, the circumstances of this murder are clouded in mystery. Oscar Sedlmayer22 was an Austrian subject who, after working as a colonist on the Palcazu River, established his headquarters in Rio Negro, Satipo, where he operated as a slave trader along the Pangoa, Perené, Tambo, and Ene Rivers.23 In a series of letters published in late 1911, Sedlmayer and his German associate, Juan Fitkau, were accused of being Indian slave traders. In one of these letters, published by the weekly La Verdad of Jauja and La Prensa of Lima, the author, a Mr. Villafranca, claimed that Sedlmayer had engaged Ashaninka chief Tsiri24 as his lieutenant to furnish him with Ashaninka captives in exchange for firearms and merchandise.25 He accused Sedlmayer of manipulating his Ashaninka associates to turn them against the colonists of Pangoa. Villafranca claimed that the colonists were forced to tolerate Sedlmayer’s “human traffic” because in that “forgotten region there is no

First Signs of Indigenous Discon t en t  [ 51 ]

known authority.” And he warned the authorities that Sedlmayer and his Indian henchmen might succeed in evicting the colonists, since they were heavily armed and the settlers had few weapons to defend themselves. These letters caused an uproar in Lima. Many urged the authorities to arrest the slave trader immediately. In response, and in what can only be considered a desperate move, Oscar Sedlmayer wrote a letter to Dora Mayer, member of the Board of Directors of the Asociación Pro-­Indígena, to counter the accusations.26 Founded in 1909 by a group of modern liberal professionals and intellectuals to protect the interests of the country’s indigenous peoples, the Pro-­Indian Association had gained much prestige among the Peruvian public because of its passionate defense of Indian people and the reliability of its accusations. In his letter, Sedlmayer admitted that indigenous slavery was rampant in the Upper Ucayali region. He added that the police constable of the Upper Ucayali was aware of this trade, but since he doubled as a river merchant and many of his clients were slavers, he abstained from denouncing or arresting them, for this would have harmed his business. Sedlmayer then goes on to say that through patience and hard work he had managed to enter into fair trading relations with the Onconinos, the wild Ashaninka inhabitants of the Tambo River. As a result, the latter had refused to continue providing captive slaves to the Upper Ucayali patrones. It was this, he claimed, that explained why the powerful Upper Ucayali slavers had ganged up on him, using the press to slander him publicly. What is intriguing about Sedlmayer’s move is that he asked Dora Mayer not to publish his letter for fear of being killed if his accusations were made public. This request makes little sense if the letter was meant, as apparently he wished, to counter the accusations of the Upper Ucayali slavers. But it makes much more sense if his real intention was to persuade the Pro-­Indian Association to initiate an investigation on the Upper Ucayali slavers that would send his rivals to jail and put them out of business. That way he could get rid of his enemies without incurring the risk of dying at their hands. Despite his staunch denials, there is no doubt that Sedlmayer was a slaver. Fr. Francisco Irazola, a Franciscan missionary who knew the Satipo-­Pangoa region and its inhabitants very well, claimed in 1912 that Sedlmayer “was an expert in organizing slave raids, and still lived off the detestable profession of trading in human flesh.”27 He was murdered, however, not by his Upper Ucayali rivals, but by his Ashaninka associates who had decided to quit the slaving business. Tired of the social havoc generated by internal slave raiding and inspired by the proclamations

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of Tasorentsi, the divine emissary announced by Chief Sargento, they sought to eliminate the region’s white slavers. This is confirmed by Fr. Irazola, who in September 1912, while on a trip from Apurimac to Satipo, found Sedlmayer’s house had been recently sacked and abandoned. Although nobody knew the whereabouts of the slaver, Irazola suspected that he had “succumbed and disappeared . . . in the hands of the Campas that he used to employ as decoys in his abominable trade.”28 His body, like that of Carlos Corpancho, was never found—another bizarre connection between both murders that we will examine further on. After the killings of Corpancho and Sedlmayer, calm returned to the region, but most colonists believed it was the calm before the storm. They were right. Almost exactly a year after the killings, all hell broke loose in Pangoa on the Lower Perené River. The coca farmers of Pangoa sent an urgent telegram to the prefect of Junín reporting that on August 29 the Ashaninka had attacked José Cham’s fundo and killed eight persons.29 Five days after the attack, a group of nineteen coca farmers armed with carbines went to Cham’s fundo to appraise the situation. They found the houses burned and the bodies of the men killed by the rebels scattered about.30 On their way back, the Ashaninka rebels, armed with rifles, ambushed the punitive party, killed eight men, and gravely wounded another four. After this victory the insurgents continued their march upriver along the Pangoa, where they killed another three coca farmers and put siege to the fundo owned by Nazario, brother of the late José Cham. In the following days, the subprefect of Jauja announced that three “tribes” had been involved in the Pangoa attacks: the Satipuki led by Tsiri, the Perené led by Maniaro,31 and the Shora led by the chief of the same name.32 These three headmen, according to the authorities, commanded a force of around 150 to 200 warriors.33 Oral sources assert that the various chiefs that participated in the attacks were in permanent communication and gathered frequently to make decisions, but that it was Tsiri who “commanded all the obayeris [warriors].”34 This suggests that the Pangoa uprising was not a spontaneous upsurge but a response to a premeditated plan. The subprefect of Jauja claimed that the three chiefs were associated with two known slavers, the German Juan Fitkau and the Peruvian Bezada, son of the Spanish slaver Antonio Bezada, who used to trade Winchester rifles and ammunition with the Indian chiefs in exchange for children obtained in raids from other Ashaninka areas.35 He speculated that the revolt had been promoted by Fitkau and the young Bezada with the aim of cutting off the advance of the Pangoa coca farmers to the Tambo valley, an area used by the slavers as a refuge

First Signs of Indigenous Discon t en t  [ 53 ]

and transit point to sell their captives to the Upper Ucayali patrones. He was right in asserting that the Ashaninka rebel leaders were associated with the region’s white slavers,36 but he was wrong in thinking that the revolt’s instigator was the German slaver. In effect, it came to be known that four months earlier, on May 12, 1913, Juan Fitkau had been killed by his Pangoa workers on the Tambo River. According to the report of César Lurquín, police constable of the Upper Ucayali, Fitkau was murdered in revenge for ordering the killing of an Ashaninka peon, and for not punishing one of his servants who had killed Chief Tsiri, his Ashaninka partner.37 The report is quite vague, and the constable’s revenge theory does not hold up well. More plausible is the notion that Juan Fitkau, like his former associate Sedlmayer, was killed by the Ashaninka as the result of the latter’s decision to put an end to their slaving activities. As we have seen, the leaders of the Pangoa revolt were not only well-­known warrior chiefs but also dreaded slavers. That these ruthless Ashaninka slavers decided to turn against their white partners must be regarded as one of Chief Tasorentsi’s greatest achievements. The recruitment of Ashaninka slavers to put an end to indigenous slavery in the Selva Central region seems to have been a strategy developed by Chief José after experiencing an existential crisis in reaction to the miseries produced by indigenous slavery. Oral sources indicate that before being acknowledged as a tasorentsi emissary, Chief José had been involved in the region’s slave traffic. Described by one source as a “children plucker” (jalador de niños), he is said to have operated from the Gran Pajonal and to have procured and handed over Ashaninka children obtained from the Perené and Pangoa areas to the Upper Ucayali patrones.38 This same source claims that he was a “hunter of children,” suggesting that he was directly involved in slave raiding.39 Others explicitly deny the idea that he was a slave raider, leaving open, however, the possibility that he might have been a slave trader.40 An account by Segundo Arroyo, Chief José’s youngest son, confirms that his father was indeed a slave trader. At the same time, it provides important clues about what seems to have been the turning point that led Chief José to quit his slaving activities in order to become a charismatic world transformer and liberator of his people. Because of its importance, I reproduce Arroyo’s account in detail below: At that time the Ashaninka fought against each other in a place not very far downriver from Atalaya. They killed each other. There was a mister, I don’t know who he was, from the United States or somewhere

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else, who had a house there. He bought children. He gathered many Ashaninka and gave them Dumoulin shotguns.41 And we only had bows and arrows. So they always won. They killed the fathers and mothers and took the children to sell them in the Perené valley. Seeing these things, my father came from Contamana, from Roaboya, with his Shipibo followers and some Ashaninka. He came to where the Ashaninka used to fight and the people gathered round him. They told Tasorentsi: “They have taken my child. I’m very sad. I want to recover him. Please help us.” “OK,” said Tasorentsi. Then they had a meeting and although my father was an Adventist, he told them: “Give me ten children and I will save the rest. Give me ten children and right now I will go see the gringo to make business with him.” Some distrusted my father. Others said: “We should give him the children so that we can see how José Carlos Amaringo’s war will be like.” And so, they gave him the children. Then he went to see the man. And the man accepted the deal and gave him ten Dumoulin shotguns. My father took the guns and went to see the [aggrieved] men. He told them: “Now we will have to practice.” And since they were warriors, it was not so difficult for them. After three days he said: “Now we will attack them. We will depart at 3 a.m.” So they went.

The account goes on to describe how Tasorentsi, at the head of thirty-­ five warriors, attacked the gringo’s entrepôt and deceived the slaver’s henchmen in order to ambush and kill them, but the gringo escaped in an airplane. All the captive children were liberated. “Then,” according to Arroyo, “my father told his soldiers, ‘Let’s go to the house. My boys are there.’” They tore down the door and found the house filled with weeping children. After handing the children to their parents, he stayed one more week, preaching the gospel. Afterwards, he told them, “You have got your freedom so I will leave you now to continue preaching the Adventist religion.”42 In this narrative, Arroyo compresses time, conflating events from three different moments in Ashaninka history. He clearly situates the story at the time when the Ashaninka raided each other to capture children, that is, before the 1912–1914 Ashaninka movement, but he also includes references to events that took place much later, to wit, Chief José’s adoption of the Adventist faith, which took place in the early 1920s, and the appearance of airplanes in the region starting in 1927.43 From an Ashaninka point of view, this conflation of events does not diminish the account’s veracity. As Mihas has pointed out, the credibility of Ashaninka conceptions

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of history “does not demand continuity and exactness in the spatiotemporal localization of happenings in the world.”44 The proclivity to compress time in historical narratives has been widely reported in South American indigenous societies. Claude Lévi-­Strauss asserts that Amerindians tend to “conjoin” past and present events, as a result of which they “disrupt and collapse the future into a present already confounded with the past.”45 Jonathan Hill mentions that native Amazonian forms of historical consciousness are characterized by an inclination to “reformulate the chronological sequence of major historical periods.”46 Finally, while examining the use of geographical sites as mnemonic elements among the Nasa of eastern Colombia, Joanne Rappaport notes their tendency to combine and recombine “historical referents occurring at different times [but] having taken place at the same site.”47 Described by Ana Mariella Bacigalupo as the “shamanic logic of temporal dislocation,” the compression of time and conflation of events is said to constitute a means to “construct nonlinear histories of intra-­and interethnic relations and create a moral order where [indigenous people] become history’s spiritual victors.”48 It also serves the purpose, as Lévi-­Strauss has proposed, of coming “to terms with history and . . . re-­establish[ing] a state of equilibrium capable of acting as a shock absorber for the disturbances caused by real-­life events.”49 The fact that Arroyo’s narrative merges semantic elements from diverse historical contexts does not obscure the key point that the actions it depicts take us back to a time when Chief José was still heavily implicated in slave trading. This is the only explanation for the fact that Chief José asked the desperate parents to provide him with ten children in order to exchange them for shotguns, and that the implorers hesitated before doing so because they did not fully trust him. This suggests that the aggrieved parents knew that Chief José was a slave trader and was well acquainted with the patrones who dominated the region’s human traffic. In fact, it was this knowledge that led them to request his help.50 Arroyo’s narrative, however, not only is an account of Chief José’s slaving activities and military prowess, but also seems to depict the juncture in which Chief José decided to quit his slaving activities after experiencing a moral conversion, understood here as the process by which “people may change their deep-­seated convictions, attitudes and patterns of action regarding moral matters in unexpected and surprising ways.”51 Such change often takes place when people become aware, either as a result of introspective examination or external influences, that their views, attitudes, or patterns of behavior are immoral, unreasonable, and, thus, no longer acceptable.

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The fact that the Ashaninka leader accepted the distressed parents’ pleas to liberate their abducted children appears as the first sign of an important change in the way he regarded indigenous slavery. This decision suggests that he no longer perceived the abducted children as chattel to be exchanged for shotguns and other industrial goods, but as distraught and frightened human beings that deserved to be freed. Chief José’s transformation is further expressed by his change of attitude in the narrative’s closing events. When the Ashaninka leader orders his men to break into the gringo’s lockup, he refers to the captive children as “my boys,” even though the abducted children were not related to him. By referring to them as “my boys,” the Ashaninka leader establishes a new kind of relationship between him and the captive children, an affective bond implying care, nurture, and protection, which is radically opposed to the hierarchical and predatory character of the link between captives and captors, especially in its first stages.52 The liberation of the “weeping children,” and the farewell speech in which Chief José proclaimed, “You are now free,” seem to mark the completion of the Ashaninka leader’s moral transformation. But it also signals the beginning of a new stage in his life, a stage that was to end with his recognition as the much-­awaited tasorentsi world transformer. We know little about the cognitive and volitional processes involved in this moral transformation, except that they entailed an observable “before and after” in Chief José’s moral convictions with regard to indigenous slavery. This suggests that Chief José’s transformation corresponds to the first of the six classes of moral conversion identified by Alfredo Mac Laughlin, that is, one that entails a change in content regarding what is judged to be morally right and wrong.53 But we know little else. Did Chief José arrive at the conclusion that indigenous slavery was wrong as the result of a dream/vision or through a process of political reflection? Whatever the case may be, what is clear is that Chief José’s moral conversion also entailed what Jonathan Lear calls an “imaginative transformation,” that is, imagining the possibility of a different world, in this case one without indigenous slavery.54 We likewise know little about when exactly Chief José’s moral conversion took place. There is evidence, however, suggesting that the gringo slaver of Arroyo’s account was Antonio Bezada, a Spanish rubber extractor who lived on the mouth of the Unini,55 “not very far downriver from Atalaya,” as Arroyo would have it, and was also accused of being involved in the “business of human flesh.”56 Since in Peru the term gringo refers not only to US nationals but to any white foreigner,

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the Spanish Bezada would have unquestionably fallen into this category. More importantly, Antonio Bezada is the only gringo attacked by the Ashaninka in that area prior to the 1912–1914 Ashaninka movement, making him the most likely candidate for being Arroyo’s gringo slaver. According to contemporary sources, the attack on Bezada took place on November 13, 1911.57 Like Arroyo’s gringo slaver, Bezada also managed to escape. He had, however, a less happy ending. Accused by the authorities of child trafficking, he was arrested and sent to prison in Lima, where he died soon after.58 His son, the young Bezada, must have left the region after his father’s arrest, for he disappears from the records at around this same time. We will probably never know for certain if the gringo slaver of Arroyo’s account was the Spanish Antonio Bezada. What is clear, however, is that this episode must have taken place not long before 1912 and that it changed Chief José’s life for good. Such processes of moral conversion were not unusual at the time. According to Alcides Calderón, many Ashaninka slavers went through similar existential transformations, fearing reprisals from their enemies and redirecting their war efforts against their former white partners.59 There is little information about Chief José’s activities between the time of his moral conversion—presumably around November 1911—and his reappearance in September 1912 as the tasorentsi envoy announced by Chief Sargento. What we do know, albeit indirectly, is that from then onward he turned the end of indigenous slavery into a central component of his personal dreams and political discourse, and that by September 1913, almost two years after his moral conversion, he had persuaded most of the Pangoa Ashaninka slavers to quit their activities and eliminate their white associates. With Sedlmayer, Fitkau, and the two Bezadas out of business, and with the Pangoa colonists under heavy pressure and pretty much contained, the Lower Perené, Tambo, and Ene River basins were freed from slavers and white patrones, at least for a while. In late 1913, when everything seemed to have calmed down along the Pangoa valley, the Ashaninka renewed their attacks. This time the action moved to the area traversed by the Pichis Trail, which was little more than a muddy dirt road that connected La Merced with Puerto Bermúdez, providing Lima, the capital, with access to a navigable point of the Pichis River and, through it, to Iquitos on the Upper Amazon. It was, however, of great strategic importance both because it was the only land connection between the government’s seat and the country’s Amazon region and because it provided the shortest route between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans before the inauguration of the Panama

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Canal in 1914. On December 21, at 12 noon, a group of forty rebels attacked Azupizú, one of the twelve tambos, or road inns, that existed along the trail.60 At the same time, a group of sixty rebels attacked Puchalini, one of the two existing road maintenance camps.61 Azupizú and Puchalini were 10 kilometers apart, on kilometers 143 and 153 of the Pichis Trail, respectively. The attackers, well armed with bows and Winchester .44-­caliber rifles like the Ashaninka shown in figure 13, killed two men in Azupizú and seven in Puchalini, including the camp’s foreman. Several others were wounded. Additionally, they burned the tambos, stole merchandise and weapons, and cut the telegraph lines in an effort to cut off all communications between La Merced and Puerto Bermúdez.62 In the days that followed, the insurgents attacked three more tambos: Miritiriani,63 close to Puerto Bermúdez, and El Porvenir and La Salud, on kilometers 93 and 33, respectively, on the way to San Luis de Shuaro. Fearing new attacks, the residents of tambo Eneñas, on kilo­ meter 51, moved to the safety of La Merced, the most important town on the Upper Perené region. The tambos along the Pichis Trail were large thatched buildings, sometimes two-­stories high, that provided basic room and board to passengers, postmen, military, and government officials traveling on horse-­or muleback between Lima and Iquitos in both directions (see figure 14). Although their services were precarious, they were instrumental in maintaining a fluid communication between the Amazon and the Pacific coast. For this reason, their destruction by the Ashaninka rebels meant the closure of the Pichis Trail for all practical purposes. Although the local authorities requested help from the central government almost immediately after the December attacks, and the prefect of Junín sent troops to the Upper Pichis to “suppress the Campa movement,” the military and the police were slow in responding. Capt. Pantoja of the Third Gendarme Battalion and Capt. Herrera of the Mounted Infantry of La Oroya, who had been commissioned to suppress the revolt, dragged their feet, doing everything in their power to avoid going to the Puchalini-­A zupizú area, where the rebels were gathered. Pantoja stationed his troops in tambo San Nicolás, around 20 kilometers from Azupizú, and Herrera established himself in the Perené Colony, more than 100 kilometers from the theatre of operations, where he enjoyed the hospitality extended to his troops by Víctor Valle Riestra, the colony’s administrator, and the local Franciscan missionaries (see figure 15). Finally, accused of ineptitude and threatened with being deprived of their command, Herrera and Pantoja marched their respective troops to Azupizú, arriving on January 10, 1914.64 Since they could

First Signs of Indigenous Discon t en t  [ 59 ]

not go on to Puerto Yessup because of the heavy rains and, given that the situation was apparently calm, they were ordered to go back to La Merced on January 12. Taking advantage of their retreat, a week later the Ashaninka assaulted Puerto Yessup. According to government documents, on the afternoon of January 19, 1914, 200 Ashaninka rebels under the command of Chief Gaspar attacked Puerto Yessup, on the Azupizú River, the last tambo of the Pichis Trail before Puerto Bermúdez.65 Not surprisingly, the attackers were mostly from the Gran Pajonal region, where the tasorentsi emissary was said to have appeared.66 But, according to other sources, they also came from Pangoa on the Lower Perené, and even from Ubiriki, Sutziki, and Pichanaki on the Middle Perené.67 If true, this means that the inspirers of the movement had been successful in uniting the diverse Ashaninka subgroups, a formidable task since we know that, at least during the early twentieth century, the Gran Pajonal Asheninka and the Perené-­Pangoa-­Tambo Ashaninka were long-­standing enemies.68 The attackers of Puerto Yessup set the tambo on fire and burned a total of eight mail bags that were in transit.69 The rebels also killed at least fifteen people, according to the last official count.70 Among the dead were the wife and four sons of the tambo’s administrator, Rodolfo Díaz Real; the former police constable of the Upper Ucayali, César Lurquín; one postman; two discharged soldiers; four passengers; and two servants. La Prensa ventured the idea that the attack on Puerto Yessup had been expressly aimed at killing César Lurquín, arguing that it was not the first time that the Ashaninka had tried to kill him.71 The paper claimed Lurquín had suffered three assassination attempts in the past year. Why were the Ashaninka so intent on killing Lurquín? La Prensa suggested (based on Lurquín’s declarations) that it was because the Ashaninka had been incited by the Upper Ucayali “traders in human flesh,” whom Lurquín had tenaciously persecuted as police constable.72 The fact that one of the Ashaninka pinkatsari that pursued Lurquín was Uribe, who, as we have seen, was a well-­known Unini slaver, gave credence to this hypothesis. But why did the Ashaninka hound him with such persistence? And why would they try to kill a former police constable, someone who no longer had power to interfere with their slaving activities? Before being appointed police constable of the Upper Ucayali in late 1912, César Lurquín had been police constable of the Putumayo River. Walter E. Hardenburg, the American railway engineer who denounced the atrocities committed by Julio César Arana’s Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company against the indigenous peoples of the Putumayo valley,

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met him in 1908. Hardenburg described Lurquín as a “rascal” and “miserable wretch” who, instead of carrying out his duties to prevent these crimes and punish its authors, “contented himself with visiting the region four or five times a year—always on the company’s steamers— stopping a week or so, collecting some children to sell, and then returning and making his ‘report.’”73 There is, therefore, no doubt that far from being a harsh enemy of slave trading, as he and his associates claimed, Lurquín had been a slave trader, who probably continued to engage in this kind of commerce after being appointed police constable of the Upper Ucayali. The notion that this is why the Ashaninka sought to kill him seems to be indirectly confirmed by the fact that Chief Uribe had already joined the rebel party by the time he pursued Lurquín.74 In the context of Sargento’s summons to expel the birakochas from the region, it is much more plausible that the Ashaninka killed Lurquín for his connections with the Upper Ucayali slave trade than, as Lurquín would have it, to please the slavers for whom they had previously worked. Chief Uribe and the leaders of the Pangoa attacks—Tsiri, Shora, and Maniaro—were not the only Ashaninka slavers recruited by José Tasorentsi in the Pichis-­Perené region. According to Alcides Calderón, Chief José was able to persuade close to twenty Ashaninka slavers from the Gran Pajonal and the Upper Pichis area to join him.75 The most important among them were Iromano, Shoshokiri, and Shirampari. Iromano was a shaman-­chief and renowned warrior from the Upper Pichis area. He joined the rebels early on and was a crucial figure in the January 1914 attack on tambo Miritiriani (see figure 16). Shoshokiri (also known as Santiago) was the son of Tsonkiribantsi, paramount chief of the Ashaninka groups living on the headwaters of the Anacayali, Neguachi, and Nazarateki Rivers.76 Father and son were also great shaman-­chiefs and brave warriors whose exploits have been preserved in the oral histories of the Pichis and Gran Pajonal Asheninka.77 Finally, Shirampari was also considered to be a great shaman and warrior.78 He lived in the Gran Pajonal and was much feared for his slaving activities. These leaders brought to the rebel camp not only their bravery and warring skills but also their shamanic knowledge, which many considered to be key to defeating the white patrones. It is said that Shoshokiri possessed several ibenki (magical plants) that helped him defeat his enemies.79 One of these plants had the capacity to stun his opponents, making them miss their shots; another was meant to make the arrows of his enemies break whenever they shot him; finally, he had an ibenki that ensured that his shots were always on the mark. Chief Tasorentsi is also said to have been a reputed shaman who used

First Signs of Indigenous Discon t en t  [ 61 ]

magical herbs that protected him in combat.80 These shamanic weapons were thought to be indispensable since, from an Ashaninka point of view, their fight with white people was as much a contest to regain freedom and resources as a mystical struggle for vitality (see chapter 5). It is clear that the attack on Puerto Yessup was not only aimed at killing Lurquín, as La Prensa posited, but formed part of a coordinated strategy to disrupt passage and communications between La Merced and Puerto Bermúdez. In effect, by the end of January 1914 all the Pichis Trail tambos had been affected by the revolt, either burned and sacked or abandoned by their personnel out of fear for their lives.81 Given the inefficiency and failure of the government troops, many claimed that the only way to suppress the revolt was for the government to arm and promote the organization of local militias.82 The alarm increased with news that the Ashaninka, in alliance with the Yanesha, planned to attack the colonist towns of Huancabamba and Oxapampa.83 The attacks on Huancabamba and Oxapampa never materialized, but on May 1, 1914, the Ashaninka started their offensive along the Middle Pichis by attacking fundo Santa Zita.84 Three weeks later, on May 22, they invaded Puerto Cahuapanas and the nearby Franciscan mission of Apurucayali on the Lower Pichis.85 And on June 2 a band of forty rebels assaulted for the second time tambo Puchalini.86 The rebels were successful in burning and sacking Santa Zita, Cahuapanas, and the Apurucayali mission, but they were repelled by government troops in Puchalini, where they suffered ten casualties and many wounded. The attack on the Franciscan mission seems to have been a result of the assault on Santa Zita and Cahuapanas—both of which belonged to Oswaldo Corpancho—rather than a deliberate attack against the missionaries. The rebels’ main objective was to eliminate the rubber patrones living along the Pichis River.87 Commanded by Chief Camaña,88 a band of thirty Ashaninka89 assaulted Santa Zita intending to kill Oswaldo Corpancho, whom, according to the press, the Ashaninka considered “their greatest enemy.”90 However, having heard rumors of the impending attack, Corpancho had moved with his family to Masisea, on the Ucayali River, thus escaping a sure death.91 Knowing that they would be next, other local rubber extractors—including Fernando Ureña and the Irishman Robert (Bobby) Crawford92—took refuge in the nearby Franciscan mission.93 The Ashaninka rebels told the mission’s director, Fr. Ignacio Arana, that they had nothing against him but that he should deliver the patrones to them.94 When Fr. Arana refused, the rebels attacked and burned the mission.95

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These new attacks prompted many extreme reactions from the region’s white elite. A former police constable proposed to arrest and execute all the Ashaninka and Yanesha men that worked for the Perené Colony.96 Capt. Parodi, who had replaced the pusillanimous Capt. Herrera as head of the Mounted Infantry and had been appointed commander in chief of the antirevolt operations, proposed to deport all the Ashaninka to other parts of the country.97 As the controversy mounted, the government appointed Agustín de la Puente Olavegoya, by then subprefect of Junín, as inspector in charge of reporting on the Indian situation in the Pichis-­ Perené region. Fearing that the inspector would be influenced by those who held anti-­Indian views, Víctor Valle Riestra, Perené Colony’s administrator, sent several reports and telegrams to the authorities assuring them that the Ashaninka and Yanesha who worked for the colony were industrious “civilized Indians,” and that any attack on them would constitute an unjustified crime.98 To further neutralize the plan to exterminate the colony’s indigenous peons, Valle Riestra took a group of sixteen Indian men and women to visit Lima to ask the authorities for guarantees. The visit was a success. Valle Riestra held a press conference in which he denied that the colony’s indigenous peons were in any way involved with the attacks to the Pichis Trail.99 The three Ashaninka and Yanesha chiefs who headed the group made a great impression in Lima, and their images appeared in numerous photographs and caricatures (see figures 17 and 18).100 Valle Riestra’s propaganda coup achieved the goal of stopping the authorities from pursuing the Perené Colony’s indigenous peons, but it did little to calm things down. After the attacks to Santa Zita and Cahuapanas, the region’s white inhabitants were sure that the insurgents’ next target would be Puerto Bermúdez, the most important town on the Pichis River.101 In order to protect the town, which was under his jurisdiction, the prefect of Loreto ordered the Bermúdez troops to pursue the rebels. By then, according to intelligence gathered by local colonists, the attackers of Santa Zita and Puerto Cahuapanas “were gathering in the house of a curaca called Sargento Verástegui”—the same chief who, two years earlier, had exhorted the Ashaninka to abandon their patrones to see “their god.”102 On June 4, under the command of a Lt. Espinoza, the Bermúdez troops marched to the headwaters of the Pichis River to punish the rebels. They were not successful. When the government forces arrived at Sargento’s compound on the Nazarateki, they found all the houses deserted and no rebels in sight.103 This was not the only punitive expedition organized by the local authorities. On June 20, Capt. Parodi attacked a rebel camp on the

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Piriatingalini, a tributary of the Upper Azupizú.104 This time the government forces surprised the rebels, killing five of them and wounding many others. Parodi’s Indian guide identified the rebels as those who had attacked Puchalini earlier in June. From then on, government troops were more successful, and by September 1914 it was said that they “had made several searches in the region’s forests, killing as many Indians as they found on their way, resulting in more than fifty casualties and as many burned houses and gardens, and forcing the Indians to hide in remote streams.”105 Oral sources mention other punitive expeditions that caused many more Ashaninka casualties than those reported by the press or registered in official documents. One such source asserts that Chief Tsonkiribantsi and his son Shoshokiri, who had joined other local chiefs to attack the tambos along the Pichis Trail, were pursued by government troops into the Gran Pajonal to a site called Tropaniki, where many were slaughtered for lack of arms.106 Tsonkiribantsi and Shoshokiri saved themselves by hiding in Puchalini. Few Ashaninka rebels were arrested for sedition in those years;107 most were killed, but some, having managed to escape, hid in remote areas until calm was restored. The last Ashaninka action in the Pichis-­Perené region that we know of took place on November 1914 when Chief Gaspar, who had led the attack on Puerto Yessup earlier that year, killed the Ashaninka rubber extractor and boss, Felipe Chichocre. The justification was that the latter “some time ago, had served as a guide for the small party of troops sent to persecute the Campas.”108 Since the killing was in Aguachini, on the Upper Azupizú River, it is more than probable that Chichocre was the man who had guided Capt. Parodi in his expedition against the attackers of tambo Puchalini. Thus, the series of events that began with the killings of a fake godly patrón and a scheming Austrian slaver ended with the murder of an Ashaninka spy and collaborator. After Chichocre’s murder, and due to the increasing pressures of the government troops, calm gradually returned to the region. But by then the rebels had radically transformed the region’s social and physical landscape. They had abandoned their patrones, breaking the ties of debt-­peonage that subjected them. They had chased away most of the local rubber patrones by destroying their fundos and entrepôts. They had killed or forced out the region’s most renowned slavers: Oscar Sedlmayer, Juan Fitkau, César Lurquín, Oswaldo Corpancho, and the two Bezadas. And they had burned and sacked most of the tambos along the Pichis Trail, seriously interrupting the telegraphic and mail communication

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between Lima and Iquitos. Those that were not destroyed had been abandoned. As a result, by November 1914, the Pichis Trail had been rendered useless, precisely at the time when the rebels moved the theater of war to the Upper Ucayali. The region then fell into a state of “complete decadence” until President Augusto B. Leguía came into office in 1919.109 Were the armed actions that marked the period between September 1912 and November 1914 unconnected events or did they respond to a coordinated effort between Ashaninka pinkatsari? The constant mention of Chief Sargento in relation to these events suggests that the latter was the case. We know little about the life of Chief Sargento Verástegui before 1912. Some say that “Sargento” is the Spanish mispronunciation of his Ashaninka name, Shashente,110 but it is not known how he obtained his Spanish surname, which indicates that he was a man well acquainted with white society. Oral sources indicate that he was a sheripiari, or tobacco shaman, from the Gran Pajonal who did not know Spanish well but who “had the knowledge to defend his people and why it was necessary to defend them.”111 We know that he was directly involved with the 1912 flight of peons in the Pichis-­Pachitea area, whom he had summoned to join him in his worshipping house on the Nazarateki River.112 And we know that he was associated with the 1914 destruction of fundo Santa Zita, Puerto Cahuapanas, and the Apurucayali mission, whose attackers were said to have regrouped in Sargento’s compound after the assaults.113 Does this mean that he was the movement’s mastermind, and if so, what was the role of Chief José? To answer these questions we must first understand Chief Sargento’s actions from an Ashaninka point of view. Documentary and oral sources indicate that Shashente was one of those powerful shaman-­ chiefs who, like Chief José, were common in the Gran Pajonal and the headwaters of the Pichis River in the early twentieth century.114 By assuming the dual role of pinkatsari, “the one who commands respect,” and sheripiari, “the one who commands the spirit of tobacco,” such leaders had great power, often extending their political influence over several nampitsi.115 As we have seen, there were numerous shaman-­ chiefs who played an important role in the 1912–1914 Ashaninka movement. One of them, Iromano, proclaimed, like Sargento, the imminent arrival of a tasorentsi emissary. The analysis of his story, collected by Frederica Barclay from the Ashaninka leader Alejandro Calderón, contributes to a better understanding of Chief Sargento’s role in the revolt. According to Calderón:

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In my grandfather’s time, one of our paisanos, Iromano, grabbed a thunderbolt somewhere along the Pichis Trail and with it he set a tree trunk on fire. He said that that fire was going to grow, that it was God. Iromano had his people build him a round house and there he had men and women to tend his fire. He said that God was coming. My grandfather visited Iromano’s house. Then Iromano said that birakochas were children of the white-­lipped peccaries and that, like them, they were going to multiply and many would appear. Then they prepared for war. . . . Iromano went always at the head of his warriors. He made them cut the telegraph wires so that white people could not communicate. Then they burnt one by one all the camps along the Pichis Trail. One day they shot him and he died. Afterwards all his warriors dispersed.116

It is clear from this story that Iromano was considered to be not only a courageous warrior but also a powerful shaman embarked on a quest for a divine revelation. Such shamans, according to John Elick, not only were knowledgeable medicine men but also sought to transcend the barriers preventing communication between the Ashaninka and the higher divinities.117 Through a strict adherence to proper shamanic behavior, they sought salvation for themselves and their followers, an aspiration that in Ashaninka theology is equivalent to the attainment of immortality. Chief Sargento seems to have been one of those shamans. Such powerful shamans used to build large worshipping houses for their followers “to receive Pabá.”118 In some of these houses shamans kept a sacred fire, whose origin they attributed to Pabá, constantly alight.119 They regularly organized large gatherings to celebrate the gods. On such occasions, the faithful drank large quantities of manioc beer, played their drums and panpipes, and sang in honor of Pabá and Tasorentsi in the hope of “seeing” these divinities and persuading them to grant the Ashaninka immortality by taking them to their sky dwellings.120 Some shamans claimed that they could communicate with Pabá by listening to the crackling sounds of the fresh quinilla wood burned on these sacred fires.121 Often this kind of shaman organized gatherings in which participants drank the hallucinogenic vine ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi) as a means of expediting contact with the divinities and good spirits. In such séances, the faithful sang special songs (marentantsi)122 to “bring down” their dead ancestors— those who in the past had ascended to heaven thanks to their devotion and had thus become maninkari, or “hidden” spirits—presumably to

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obtain their help in rising to the gods’ sky home.123 Such powerful shamans used to tell their followers: “If we continue to sing to Tasorentsi we will eventually see him.”124 And, “If we follow Tasorentsi’s path, he will come to take us with him.”125 The newspaper information we have on the ceremonies that took place in Sargento’s worshipping house confirms that they engendered the kind of collective world-­transforming expectations that have been recurrent among Ashaninka people since at least colonial times. According to the press, attendants at the ceremonies held at Sargento’s compound drank much manioc beer but ate very little, which in time led them to succumb to dysentery and other diseases.126 Similar negative effects of religious fervor have been observed in more recent Ashaninka utopian movements.127 Many of the shaman-­chiefs that have inspired movements of this kind were attributed the status of itomi Pabá, or son of the Sun god. In this particular case, however, Chief Sargento called the Ashaninka to join him in order to see “their god,” suggesting that he did not claim to be the expected god but simply an “announcer” of his arrival, very much as Chief Iromano. There is much evidence indicating that the tasorentsi emissary that Sargento invited people to see was Chief José. We know that from the very beginning of the Upper Ucayali uprising, the press referred to the Ashaninka chief as “the famous curaca Tasolinche.” The use of the name Tasolinche (a misspelling of Tasorentsi) suggests that by 1915 his followers already considered him to be a tasorentsi world transformer. In turn, the use of the qualifier “famous” indicates that his reputation as a great Ashaninka pinkatsari had preceded him. The recognition of his status as a godly chief could have only taken place in previous years, that is, in the context of the 1912–1914 armed actions that preceded the Upper Ucayali uprising. Oral sources agree that Chief José was not only a brave pinkatasari but also a powerful sheripiari. They do not agree, however, as to the nature of his shamanic activities. Some assert that he was a knowledgeable healer or medicine man, much like his friend and ally Shoshokiri.128 Others, however, claim that he held ayahuasca sessions but was not a practicing healer.129 Alcides Calderón seems to adopt a middle position, stating that although Tasorentsi had the power to heal, as all shamans do, he drank ayahuasca mostly to train and strengthen his spirit in order to know “what to do” and to “obtain strategies.”130 In other words, to gain the kind of supernatural knowledge necessary to better design his politico-­military strategies. This coincides with what we know about

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Ashaninka shamanism. According to Weiss, there are two kinds of shamans in Ashaninka society.131 The most common is the sheripiari, a shamanic specialist who possesses curing and bewitching capacities thanks to the supernatural powers obtained from spirit beings through the consumption of tobacco syrup (sheri). The second kind of shamans are leaders of collective ayahuasca (kamarampi) ceremonies, who display certain traits more commonly associated with priests. Chief José seems to have been the latter kind of shaman-­priest. He was not a practicing sheripiari, but he drank ayahuasca to seek supernatural advice. Other sources indicate that he continued to consume ayahuasca long after embracing Adventist doctrine and ritual practices.132 At least one source also claims that, like shaman-­chief Iromano, Chief Tasorentsi had a ceremonial house where he worshipped a sacred fire.133 There, according to this source, participants sang and danced in honor of the fire god to ask him for good health, and in the hope that the divinity would speak to them. Weiss confirms that in older times—before the 1960s—fires were worshipped “everywhere among the Campas,” and that it was through these sacred fires that worshippers expected to communicate with the Sun god, Pabá.134 Tasorentsi was not, however, just one more among the many shaman-­chiefs that participated in the 1912–1914 Ashaninka movement. Oral sources confirm that he was both the inspirer and main leader of the rebel movement. Adolfo Gutiérrez recounts: Tasorentsi already lived there, in the Gran Pajonal. By then there was a guerrilla warfare going on between our paisanos and those who were building the Pichis Trail. There was a guerrilla (war) going on between those who walked along the Pichis Trail and our paisanos. . . . Those guerrilla wars took place before I was born [in 1938]. Tasorentsi was already there fighting. He moved to the Nazarateki River, where he built his house a little further upriver from the mouth of the Neguachi, in a small stream known as Kapirunkarini. . . . And then, as there was this movement against the Ashaninka in the Pichis region, the people from the Gran Pajonal came down. This is why Chiefs Shoshokiri and Baincoshi were there;135 all of them were from the Gran Pajonal. Then, as they knew Tasorentsi, they joined the struggle. This is why they were there.136

Gutiérrez’s account is of great importance and must be analyzed in detail in order to understand Tasorentsi’s role in the 1912–1914 Ashaninka revolt.

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Gutiérrez states that Tasorentsi was living in the Gran Pajonal before the war broke out between the Ashaninka and the birakochas. The war was waged against the people who “were building” and “walked along” the Pichis Trail, in reference to the workers of the road-­maintenance camps that existed along the trail, and the many muleteers that transported people and cargo back and forth from San Luis de Shuaro to Puerto Yessup. Before the war broke, according to Gutiérrez, Tasorentsi moved to the Nazarateki River, and it was from this area that he began to fight against the birakochas. The fact that both Tasorentsi and Sargento had their center of operations on the Nazarateki suggests that they were associated and worked in unison to persuade the Ashaninka to join them in their fight against white people and their quest for immortality. This is confirmed by other oral sources, which claim that Sargento was one of Chief José’s “companions.”137 However, the fact that Gutiérrez asserts that the Gran Pajonal chiefs joined the rebels only because they “knew” Tasorentsi suggests that it was Chief José, rather than Sargento, who persuaded them to join the rebel cause. By then, according to Gutiérrez, Chief José was already called “Tasorentsi,” suggesting that by 1912 the Ashaninka chief was already recognized as a tasorentsi emissary by many Gran Pajonal pinkatsari, and that it was this status that conferred so much weight to his words. It is thus more than probable that the godly emissary announced by Sargento was Chief José. If this was so, then Chief Sargento was not the mastermind of the 1912–1914 movement, but only an “announcer,” Chief José’s herald and spokesman. In which case, the words quoted by the journalist of La Voz del Ucayali as expressing the rebels’ main aspirations—“to expel white people from their properties, burn their bones, and seize their children as servants”—must be attributed to Tasorentsi rather than to Sargento. We may therefore conclude that the armed actions that punctuated the 1912–1914 period were not isolated events but the result of a joint effort responding to common lines of action. This does not mean, however, that Tasorentsi was the rebels’ paramount chief. The 1912–1914 Ashaninka movement does not seem to have ever had one. Rather, as Sargento’s announcement came to be accepted by an increasingly larger number of people, and with it Chief José’s condition as a world transformer, the latter came to be regarded as the movement’s main guide and inspirer. The 1912–1914 period could thus be characterized as one of personal development in which Chief José, after experiencing a radical process of personal transformation that led him to quit his slaving activities, gradually shaped his political and theological agenda. At the same time, he perfected his

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skills as a diplomat and war leader. It was from this foundational period that Chief José emerged as “the famous curaca Tasolinche.”138 The experience he gained during this movement became crucial when he began to plan the more complex set of actions launched in the dawn of September 3, 1915, actions that required consensus among the members of four very different ethnic groups. We have already examined the 1915 uprising and Tasorentsi’s role in it. Further on we will discuss how Tasorentsi managed to persuade these traditional enemy groups to join forces against their common enemy. But before doing so we must examine the conditions that led shaman-­chief José to become the inspirer and, in due course, the paramount leader of what was unquestionably the largest native Amazonian uprising of twentieth-­century Peru.

Four

Early Years of an Indian Slaver, 1875–1897

He could be as fatal as Santos Atahualpa. Fr. Ga briel Sa l a

A

s is often the case with personages hailed by Ashaninka people as godly messengers or powerful world transformers, the origins of Chief José are quite obscure. His youngest son, Segundo Arroyo, claims that his father was the child of a mixed marriage between a Yine man and an Ashaninka woman, and was born on the faraway Manu River.1 Others agree on Chief Jose’s filiation but maintain that the he was born in Tsomabeni, on the Ene River.2 Still others assert that he was a Matsigenka from the Urubamba River, with a mix of Ashaninka and Yanesha blood.3 A few, however, claim that he was a paisano, a fellow Ashaninka born in the Gran Pajonal,4 more specifically in a place called Kipitoni, on the headwaters of the Unini River.5 It is quite possible that the confusion around his ethnic origin and place of birth was fostered by Chief Tasorentsi himself, in an effort to avoid being attributed specific affiliations, thus making it easier for his multiethnic followers to identify with him. It is also conceivable that he descended from the so-­called Mochobo, a mixed group of Pano-­ized Yine and Ashaninka which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries lived on the left banks of the Tambo and Upper Ucayali Rivers—precisely in the area in which Chief Tasorentsi spent most of his youth.6 In any case, what all these sources seem to agree on is that from his youth, Chief José lived among the Ashaninka and spent most of his adult life never too far away from the Gran Pajonal region. They also agree that he was multilingual, knowing at least Yine, Ashaninka, and Spanish, a trait that [ 70 ]

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supports the notion of his ethnically mixed background. To all practical effects, however, he acted as an Ashaninka chief. A similar uncertainty surrounds the date of his birth. According to Segundo Arroyo, when José Tasorentsi, his father, died, in 1958, he was around sixty to sixty-­five years old.7 This suggests that he was born between 1893 and 1898, in which case when he initiated the 1912–1914 Ashaninka movement, he would have been between fourteen and nineteen years old, too young, even by indigenous standards, to be recognized as a tasorentsi emissary and leader of such an important rebellion. Adolfo Gutiérrez asserts that when he met his uncle José Tasorentsi for the first time, in 1947, the latter was around fifty to fifty-­five years old.8 This would mean that he was born between 1892 and 1897 and thus was between fifteen and twenty years old when he inspired and headed the 1912–1914 Ashaninka movement—again, too young to assume such a huge responsibility. These miscalculations can be attributed to Segundo’s and Adolfo’s youth at the time they estimated Chief José’s age. Arroyo says that he was twelve when his father died, whereas Adolfo declares that he was nine when he first met his uncle. Being so young, they probably had little sense of what being “old” meant in terms of actual age. There is, however, other evidence that provides us with a more plausible estimate of Chief José’s birthdate. Gutiérrez claims that his father, Andrés Gutiérrez, and his uncle José were cross-­cousins who shared many youthful experiences. He was told that when he was born, in 1938, his father was an old man with white hair—the latter died shortly after, when Adolfo was still a baby. Ashaninka people rarely grow white hair before they are sixty or over. If we assume that Adolfo’s father was sixty-­five years old in 1938, this means that he would have been born in 1873. Adolfo further asserts that his father was the oldest of five brothers and slightly older than his cross-­cousin José. If we agree that the future Tasorentsi was born a couple of years after Andrés, in 1875, by 1912 he would have been thirty-­seven years old, a mature enough man to be the inspirer of a large regional movement. Such an estimate is corroborated by the testimony of an old Ashaninka leader, who claims that when he met José Tasorentsi in the early 1940s the latter was already an old man.9 The man that came to be recognized as a tasorentsi envoy was born in a rapidly changing world. Until the 1870s and for more than one hundred years previously, the Ashaninka had lived relatively unmolested in the Apurimac, Ene, Perené, Tambo, Pichis, and Pachitea valleys, a vast territory at the center of which was located the Gran Pajonal. Only the Chanchamayo valley had been wrested from their hands in 1847 and

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was occupied by a mix of Peruvian, European, and Chinese settlers centered in the towns of San Ramón and La Merced.10 The same can be said of their indigenous neighbors, the Yine, Conibo, and Matsigenka. Two unconnected, quite disparate events came to change this situation: the ultimatum given to Peru by its British bondholders in 1886 and the invention of rubber bicycle tires in 1884. The future Tasorentsi’s early life cannot be fully grasped without understanding the manifold effects caused by these two fortuitous events. After a long and disastrous war with Chile that lasted from 1879 to 1883, Peru was devastated. The country had lost the provinces of Tacna and Arica and, with them, its rich nitrate mines, which provided a large proportion of the national income. Its fiscal revenues had shrunk to a minimum, its currency was strongly devalued, and it had a huge external debt with its European creditors. In 1886, the British, French, and Dutch holders of Peruvian bonds, organized as the Peruvian Corporation of London, gave Peru an ultimatum, forcing the country to sign, in 1889, what came to be known as the Grace Contract.11 By the terms of this contract, the Peruvian Corporation agreed to cancel Peru’s debt in exchange for thirty-­three annual payments of £80,000, the right to exploit all the guano in Peruvian territory for up to two million tons, and ownership of the Peruvian railway system for sixty-­six years. More importantly for our story, Peru also agreed to grant the Peruvian Corporation a two-­million-­hectare concession, a quarter of which was to be located along both banks of the Perené River, an area that made up a large portion of the Ashaninka and Yanesha traditional territories.12 In 1891, the corporation turned this concession into the Perené Colony with the intention of growing coffee for the international market. In little more than ten years, and after heavy investment in forest clearing and the importation of European settlers, the colony managed to establish around 400 hectares of high-­premium coffee. This could not have happened without the labor force provided by the Ashaninka and Yanesha people who lived within the colony’s boundaries. Around the same time, the Peruvian government decided to construct a road between La Merced and a navigable point on the Pichis River in order to have easier access to the country’s Amazon region.13 Construction began in 1891 and, after a myriad of financial and technical problems, what came to be known as the Vía Central del Pichis (Pichis Central Trail) was finally inaugurated in 1896. The road was paved in part with stones or logs, and had two large steel suspension bridges, one large wooden bridge, and close to two hundred smaller rustic bridges

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between 1 and 10 meters long to cross the region’s many streams.14 In addition, there were twelve tambos, or inns, along the road, which provided room and board for passengers and pasture for their animals. The opening of the Pichis Trail and the establishment of the Perené Colony promoted greater traffic of people and goods between Lima and the Amazon region. In the following years, some of the indigenous people living along the Perené valley agreed to work for the Perené Colony and the tambo owners on a temporal or seasonal basis. Others rejected working for the birakochas and withdrew further into the interior. This facilitated the gradual occupation of their lands. It also generated the conditions for the emergence of numerous conflicts with the incoming colonists and passing travelers. The second event that changed Tasorentsi’s world occurred in 1884, when Charles Macintosh produced the first rubber tires for bicycles, initiating a craze that swept Europe and the United States.15 The new invention increased the international demand for rubber, which until then had been used mainly in roofing, paving, cabling, and the manufacture of surgical instruments and steam-­machinery parts.16 The demand for rubber grew even more after 1895, when cars started using rubber tires. This rise had an immediate impact on the economy of Loreto, which became the country’s most important rubber-­producing region. In 1884, Loreto exported 500 metric tons of rubber;17 one year later it had doubled its production.18 Shortly after, rubber became the region’s single export, radically transforming Loreto’s social, economic, and physical landscape. The revenues generated by the rubber exports allowed both the departmental authorities and leading merchant houses to expand throughout the region. The sudden prosperity attracted large numbers of men and women from the small towns located on the eastern slopes of the Andes and along the Huallaga basin, and from the Andean highlands and the Pacific coast. The frantic search for rubber—both caucho (Castilla sp.) and jebe (Hevea sp.)—also promoted the exploration, exploitation, and transformation of the region’s remotest confines.19 This chain of events had profound effects on the world in which the future Tasorentsi grew up. During the boom’s early stages, rubber entrepreneurs depended mostly on catechized Indian laborers, the descendants of indigenous people who had been Christianized and resettled in riverine missions during colonial times. The patrones uprooted them from their areas of origin in western Loreto and moved them to the east, were rubber was more abundant.20 However, as the international demand for rubber increased and catechized Indians became scarcer, rubber patrones

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were faced with the challenge of recruiting tribal Indians, those who had withdrawn to remote interfluvial areas. This they did by two means. Whenever indigenous groups showed an interest in entering into trading relations, rubber entrepreneurs offered them advances of goods in exchange for future deliveries of rubber—a system known locally as habilitación, or “outfitting”—thus drawing them into permanent relations of debt-­peonage. If, on the contrary, an indigenous group was reluctant to engage in mercantile relations with the rubber extractors, or in any way attempted to hamper their work, the latter resorted to slave raiding (correrías). The aim of such incursions was not to capture men and women to work as slaves, but rather to kill those who resisted a white presence and abduct children and young women, who, after being raised and “civilized” by their patrones, would become docile servants and workers under a debt-­peonage regime.21 The Ucayali region did not escape the spread of debt-­peonage. Rubber extraction began in the 1860s, mainly along the Lower and Middle Ucayali.22 In the 1870s, rubber tappers gradually began to move into the Upper Ucayali and Lower Urubamba areas. During their first years, the rubber patrones depended mostly on Conibo and Yine laborers, indigenous peoples that had been missionized on and off since the seventeenth century, and were thus acquainted with the language, religion, and customs of the national society. By the mid-­1880s, however, as demand for rubber increased exponentially and Castilla trees became scarcer along the Ucayali and Urubamba, rubber entrepreneurs opted to move with their workers into these rivers’ tributaries. By 1884, as many as 1,500 caucheros were reported to have entered into the Pachitea River area.23 Three years later, the first rubber entrepreneurs had reached the Pichis River basin,24 and shortly after that, they started penetrating the right-­ bank tributaries of the Upper Ucayali/Lower Urubamba axis. These movements put rubber gatherers into direct contact with the region’s tribal Indian groups. Some of them, like the Pichis Ashaninka, enticed by the offers of industrial goods, agreed to gather rubber for the newcomers. Most did not. These were the ones who became the targets of co­r rerías, which, in this region, were not only organized by white-­mestizo agents, but most often led by indigenous chiefs outfitted and armed by white patrones. It was in this context of gradual movement toward the east that rubber baron Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald discovered, in 1893, a portage between the headwaters of the Mishagua River—a tributary of the Lower Urubamba—and the headwaters of the Manu River—a branch of

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the Madre de Dios. This event encouraged rubber tappers to move with their peons even farther south and east, a geographical and economic movement that was to have a profound impact on the region’s indigenous peoples. The drastic changes induced by this general movement become apparent when contrasting the observations recorded by two notable government officials: Benigno Samanez y Ocampo, who visited the Upper Ucayali in 1884, and Hildebrando Fuentes, who described the region twenty years later. When Samanez y Ocampo, former prefect of Ayacucho, visited the region in 1884, the Conibo and Yine still occupied much of the Upper Ucayali and Lower Urubamba Rivers. Conibo people lived along the Ucayali in a vast area that extended from Seboya, a minor tributary of the Ucayali, downriver to Pucallpa (see map 1.1) and along the Lower Pachitea.25 Yine people lived on both banks of the Lower Urubamba/ Upper Ucayali axis, from the mouth of the Camisea on the Urubamba to that of the Seboya on the Ucayali, and around the mouth of the Tambo River.26 Samanez describes the Conibo as great warriors that engaged in large-­ scale, long-­ distance expeditions upriver along the Ucayali, Urubamba, and Tambo Rivers with the aim of gathering rubber and taking captives.27 Their main targets were the Amahuaca, but they also raided the Tambo Ashaninka. Once their canoes were filled with rubber, booty, and captured enemies, they returned home, where they sold most of the captives to local patrones. According to Samanez, Yine people were also proud warriors who showed no fear of whites. They were quite cosmopolitan, “speaking Yine, Ashaninka, bad Quechua and even Spanish,” often dressing in Western clothes, hats, and caps.28 Samanez asserts that they loved their freedom and independence so much that they did not tolerate being enslaved or subjected to prolonged service.29 They were, however, involved in rubber gathering for local patrones, mainly as a means of obtaining clothes and iron tools, partly for their own use and partly to trade with other indigenous peoples. Like the Conibo, they also engaged in slave raiding, their preferred victims being the Ashaninka, Amahuaca, and Cashibo. Some of their captives they sold to local patrones; others they kept for their own service. Yine and Conibo dominion was based on their riverine location and possession of firearms, which they obtained from the rubber patrones in exchange for rubber and captive slaves.30 In contrast, the Ashaninka and Amahuaca lived mostly in the interior, far away from the shores of the main rivers. The Amahuaca occupied the headwaters of

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the right-­bank tributaries of the Lower Urubamba and Upper Ucayali, from the Pacría to the Tamaya,31 and the nearest Ashaninka inhabited the lands between the Ucayali and Pichis Rivers, including the Gran Pajonal, and both banks of the Tambo and Perené Rivers. The only Ashaninka that lived along a main river were those who had settled on the mouths of the Sapani, Unini, and Chicotsa, minor left-­bank tributaries of the Upper Ucayali. These Ashaninka had undergone significant processes of transethnic change32 that had resulted in their adopting many of the practices of the riverine Conibo and Yine, including slave raiding.33 Unlike the riverine peoples, most Amahuaca and Ashaninka did not participate in the rubber trade and, thus, possessed little in terms of manufactured goods or firearms with which to defend themselves. Although they were the region’s largest ethnic groups, they were constantly harassed by the Yine and Conibo, whom the Ashaninka called obantsinkari, or “those who exist to kill.”34 They were also hounded by the Ucayali Ashaninka, who, according to Samanez, were the ones that most frequently raided the Gran Pajonal in order to take captives, or buy them in exchange for iron tools and other merchandise. Twenty years later, when in 1904 Loreto’s prefect Hildebrando Fuentes reported on the region’s situation, things had changed dramatically. The Conibo continued to live on both margins of the Upper Ucayali but, according to Fuentes, “they stand out for their meekness, for they are all civilized.”35 By then they had specialized in the salting of fish, the construction of canoes, and the fabrication of fine ceramics. They also served local patrones and passing travelers as rowers and porters along the Cumaría–Sepahua route. According to Fuentes, however, they refused to go farther upriver along the Urubamba “for fear of the other tribes, since they are cowardly.” As to the Yine, none were left in their ancient territory.36 According to Fuentes, they had been conquered by sword and fire by rubber baron Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald at the time he discovered the portage connecting the Urubamba and Madre de Dios Rivers. After Fitzcarrald’s death, in 1897, many Yine took refuge in remote areas, while others were taken by their new patrones to extract rubber in the Madre de Dios region. They now inhabited the headwaters of the Mishagua River, a right-­bank tributary of the Lower Urubamba, but were mostly located along the Manu River, a branch of the Madre de Dios. In contrast, the Ashaninka occupied more or less the same area as they did twenty years earlier.37 But now they had replaced the Conibo and Yine as the rubber extractors’ preferred companions. Fuentes notes that “this tribe is, generally, well disposed, since most are civilized and

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are the ones who accompany rubber extractors.” The Ucayali Ashaninka had also replaced the Yine and Conibo as the main suppliers of captives for the region’s slave market. By 1904, according to Fuentes, the Ucayali Ashaninka had become the main enemies of the Amahuaca,38 and, as we know from other sources, they continued to raid the interior Ashaninka located in the Tambo valley and Gran Pajonal region. In those twenty years, according to Franciscan missionary Fr. Agustín Alemany, the region’s indigenous population had decreased by two-­thirds as a result of the spatial dislocations caused by the rubber economy.39 The proud Conibo, who had once been considered “Lords of the Ucayali,” had been reduced to a meek shadow of their former selves. Yine people suffered even more, having been totally uprooted from their areas of origin. They would not be able to go back to the Urubamba until around 1912.40 The Ucayali Ashaninka were the great winners at this juncture, having replaced the Conibo and Yine as the rubber entrepreneurs’ preferred partners. This would explain, among other things, their leading role during the 1915 uprising. Their new, dominant position came, however, at a cost: they were forced to become enemies of their own people. Tasorentsi was one of those interior Ashaninka whose lives were totally disrupted by the rubber boom. According to Adolfo Gutiérrez, his father, Andrés, and his uncle, José Tasorentsi, grew up in Kipitoni. Since Andrés and José were cross-­cousins, they spent much time together. When they were young boys—around twelve years old—they used to go to the mouth of the Unini River to fish.41 On one of those occasions they were enticed to work as peons by a local patrón named Jaime Morón de la Fuente. They started working for him as criados, or “servants,” around 1887, precisely at the time when the region was about to experience great changes. According to Gutiérrez, they worked in order to obtain “something to dress,” an argument that reveals the great attraction that Western clothes exerted at the time over tribal Indians. Gutiérrez’s account is partly confirmed by Capt. Lepecki, who claimed that “Tasulinchi himself used to be a slave to one of them [a white patrón] who lived near the mouth of the Unini.”42 Lepecki’s use of the term “slave” suggests that the boy who came to be recognized as Tasorentsi was a slave captured in a raid or bought from a third party, rather than having been simply engaged as an habilitado peon. However, when asked if his father and uncle had been captured and sold to Morón when they were children, Gutiérrez denied this, affirming that they had become Morón’s criados of their own free will.

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This might have well been the case. The method of enticing young indigenous boys to work as peons mentioned by Gutiérrez was well known in the region. In 1911, Augusto Martínez, subprefect of Ucayali, reported, “When Indians turn fourteen, they know how to fish and hunt but in order to do this they need harpoons, ropes, shotguns, ammunition, etc.; given this need they resort to a patrón . . . and from him they obtain whatever they need, always at inflated prices. It is then that the Indian’s indebtedness begins; a debt that is only cancelled with death.”43 Whether as indebted peon or captive slave, what is clear is that the future Tasorentsi grew up as a servant in Jaime Morón’s household. This experience must have marked Tasorentsi profoundly, giving shape to his dream of expelling white people from the region. But it also provided him with new cultural tools that became instrumental in the process of organizing and leading the 1912–1914 Ashaninka movement and the 1915 multiethnic revolt. In effect, it was during this stage of his life, according to Lepecki, that the future Tasorentsi learned Spanish and became acquainted with the “Ucayali tribes.”44 Later sources suggest that he was more than acquainted with these tribes. Barbara Osborne, wife of Adventist missionary Henry Westphal, reports that when she visited the Upper Ucayali mission of Santaniari in 1929, “Chief Tasolinchi” acted as interpreter for the local pastor, translating what the latter said in Spanish into either Ashaninka or Yine.45 Chief José’s knowledge of these three languages is confirmed by Nata­niel Sarmiento, an Ashaninka man who knew him personally while living in Shahuaya, on the Upper Ucayali, during the 1930s.46 It is quite probable that during those years Tasorentsi also learned some Conibo, for the Unini was a site of encounter of Ashaninka, Yine and, Conibo people. Such linguistic skills must have served him well to understand his people’s oppressors and to persuade the Yine, Conibo, and Ashaninka—old-­ time enemies—to join efforts to oust white people from the region. It was during this stage of his life that Tasorentsi must have obtained his Spanish name. It is quite likely that when he started working for Morón, the young Ashaninka boy did not have a Spanish name yet. There were no Catholic missions in the Gran Pajonal at the time, and thus no tradition of naming children with Spanish names. We know that Andrés, Tasorentsi’s cross-­cousin, obtained his name from one of Jaime Morón’s concubines, a woman called Teresa Gutiérrez.47 It was she who decided to “adopt” the boy as a “son,” naming him Andrés and conferring on him her surname. Tasorentsi must have gained his Spanish name in a similar way, but the issue of what

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exactly was his name is much more complex and obscure to unravel. The man whom Capt. Lepecki called Tasulinchi appears in documents and oral narratives as Tasorentsi, Tashuninki,48 or any of its variants,49 but also as José, José Carlos, and José Carlos Amaringo Chico. Names, like physical features, tone of voice, or mannerisms, are all elements of a person’s identity. In societies where names are not fixed at birth, the analysis of the evolution of an individual’s names can tell us much about their personal circumstances and trajectories. A brief examination of the occurrence of the names of the boy who was to become Tasorentsi is, therefore, indispensable not only to show that all these characters were one and the same person but also to identify the turning points in T ­ asorentsi’s life. As we have seen, the Ashaninka leader is not mentioned by name in any of the documentary sources on the 1912–1914 Ashaninka movement. However, when discussing these events, both Carlos Pérez Shuma and Adolfo Gutiérrez mentioned Tasorentsi as the movement’s inspirer and most important leader. Given that Pérez Shuma called him “my uncle Tasorentsi,”50 and Gutiérrez referred to him as “my uncle José Tasorentsi,”51 this suggests that by 1912 the Ashaninka chief had already acquired the name of José, and had already been acknowledged as a tasorentsi world transformer. His Spanish name, however, was still José and not José Carlos, as he came to be known later on. In the documents and news reports relating to the 1915 Upper Ucayali uprising, the Ashaninka leader is always mentioned as “Tasolinche,” without any reference to his Spanish name. This could indicate that by then his followers referred to him only as Tasorentsi in order to underscore his status as a godly world transformer. The first time that the name José Carlos appeared in print was many years later, in January 1929, in the caption of a photograph illustrating an article by Adventist missionary V.  E. Peugh.52 The caption read: “Chief José Carlos (fourth man standing, from left to right) and his people who followed us down the Tambo River.” We would have no way of knowing that the José Carlos mentioned by Peugh was José Tasorentsi if it were not for the fact that Mariano Bautista, one of John H. Bodley’s Conibo informants, told him in the 1960s that the founder of Shahuaya, on the Upper Ucayali, had been Chief José Carlos, “better known by his Ashaninka name Tasorinchi.”53 The connection between these two names was confirmed by some of Bodley’s other informants,54 and also by Adventist pastor Alejandro Bullón Páucar,55 leaving no doubt that Chief José Carlos and José Tasorentsi are one and the same person.

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Given that Shahuaya was founded in 1930, and that Peugh wrote his article in early 1929, this would indicate that the Ashaninka pinkatsari began to call himself José Carlos at around this time. Why did he add a new name to the one he already had? And why “Carlos”? Even today, when the possession of official identity documents has tended to stabilize the use of personal names, the practice of adopting new names is still quite common among Ashaninka people.56 Men and women often change their names “according to place and circumstances.”57 New names are often associated with a life-­transforming personal experience, a traumatic event (such as grave illness or the death of a beloved child), or the establishment of friendly relations with someone considered to be important.58 In this particular case, the adoption of the name Carlos seems to have been connected to Tasorentsi’s activities as an Adventist preacher in the late 1920s. We know that in October 1928, Adventist missionary Ferdinand Stahl abandoned the idea of founding a mission in Cheni, on the Tambo River—where Capt. Lepecki had met Tasorentsi in May 1928—in favor of Santaniari, on the Upper Ucayali.59 He asked Tasorentsi and the other Ashaninka chiefs gathered in Cheni to move with their followers to Santaniari. This they must have done almost immediately, since the Ashaninka people were anxious to witness God’s return to this earth. Santaniari was located on lands leased by Carlos Lehman, a rubber patrón of German descent.60 Lehman was a great defender of the Adventist missionaries, to the point that he was accused of being an Adventist agent himself.61 He was also accused of sending his peons to attack Jaime Morón de la Fuente, José Tasorentsi’s former patrón and erstwhile enemy, and of inducing Morón’s peons to abandon him.62 It is also possible that among the peons Carlos Lehman helped escape was Lucrecia Pérez Noriega, the woman who became Chief José’s second wife.63 In addition, we know that while living in Santaniari, Lehman offered to pay a debt Tasorentsi owed to a former patrón—Jaime Morón?—if the Ashaninka chief and his men would clear and plant a large garden for him.64 Since we are told that the debt amounted to 770 soles—“a price that no Indian can hope to pay even in a lifetime,” according to Barbara Westphal—this was no mean offer.65 Were these events mere coincidence, or the expression of the deep friendship and alliance that had emerged between the Ashaninka chief and the German patrón? If the latter were true, it is quite plausible that Chief José adopted the name Carlos in honor of Carlos Lehman. In any case, what is indisputable

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is that Chief José added the name Carlos to his original name around 1928–1929, if not earlier. Around this time, Chief José must also have added surnames to his name, since his youngest son asserts that his father’s full name was José Carlos Amaringo Chico.66 Amaringo is a common Ucayali surname used by Ashaninka, Conibo, and Shipibo people. Chico—“Small” in English—is less common as a surname. One of the most famous bearers of the first surname was Venancio Amaringo Campa,67 an Ashaninka chief who, at the turn of the nineteenth century, ruled over a large indigenous settlement located at the mouth of the Unini River (see figure 19).68 He had lived for some time with the Franciscan missionary Fr. Agustín Alemany 69 and is said to have spoken Ashaninka, Quechua, and Spanish.70 In the late 1800s, Venancio Amaringo and his people worked as rubber extractors for Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald.71 He was also a ruthless slaver who made frequent raids into the Gran Pajonal.72 Venancio Amaringo was so powerful that, in 1901, he was listed as one of the “owners” of the Upper Ucayali region.73 Chief Venancio died in 1911,74 so he and Chief José were contemporaries for quite a while and shared many traits, including the fact that both were powerful chiefs and renowned slavers. I suggest that given the many similarities between the two great chiefs and the fact that Chief José was younger than Venancio, the Upper Ucayali Ashaninka started calling José “Amaringo Chico,” meaning “the small or younger Amaringo.” If this was the case, originally Amaringo Chico was more of a nickname than a proper surname. Be that as it may, what is important to keep in mind is that the man who died as José Carlos Amaringo Chico began his life in the white world as a boy simply known as José. This is of crucial importance for reconstructing the formative years of the future Tasorentsi. According to Adolfo Gutiérrez, his father, Andrés, and his uncle José spent most of their youth in the service of Jaime Morón de la Fuente. Like many other Unini bosses, Morón was also involved in slave trading.75 When Andrés became a man, Morón assigned him the task of procuring captive slaves for him. This is how Gutiérrez recounts the event: So my father was there [on the Unini] working. As a servant. All the time working, working. And so his patrón ordered my father to go robbing or trading [in slaves]. His boss gave him shotguns, pans, machetes, cotton cloth, and blankets to exchange, to trade, for a boy or an adult, whichever. And my father handed them over to his boss. And so on

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and on. He went someplace and if people did not allow themselves to be caught, then they fought to the death, with arrows. They killed the father and took the children to his boss. . . . He was sent to do this so that he could work for the patrón; so that he could do something for the patrón.76

Andrés Gutiérrez continued supplying Jaime Morón with captive women and children for many years. Some he obtained through raids, mainly along the Perené River, and some through barter with established commercial partners. In these correrías he was accompanied by three of his brothers: Irantis, Lucas, and Kirebo. The latter, as we have seen, joined Chief José in the 1915 Upper Ucayali uprising and became an important leader on his own. When asked if his uncle, José Tasorentsi, participated in these slave raids, Gutiérrez replied that he did not and that by then he had gone back to the Gran Pajonal. According to Gutiérrez, his father, Andrés, began supplying Jaime Morón with slaves “when he became a man.” If we take this to mean that Andrés began his career as a slave raider when he turned twenty— the age when Ashaninka men start traveling around to know the world, to work for white people, and to search for a wife—then this must have occurred around 1893. Gutiérrez also claims that by the time his father engaged in slave trading, his father’s cross-­cousin, José, had already returned to the Gran Pajonal. This suggests that by 1893, José had either been freed by paying all the debts he owed to his patrón or, more probably, escaped from his boss without paying his debts, taking refuge in the Gran Pajonal, where few birakochas dared enter. Four years later, when Fr. Gabriel Sala, a renowned Franciscan missionary and explorer, was crossing the Gran Pajonal in search of a shorter railway route between the Perené and Ucayali Rivers, he met an Ashaninka chief named José. Sala describes this man as being astute, knowledgeable of the ways of the whites, and a potential Juan Santos Atahualpa—the eighteenth-­century world transformer that helped the Ashaninka shake off Spanish domination.77 I suggest that the Ashaninka chief that Sala met in the Gran Pajonal was the man later known as José Carlos Amaringo Chico. Because of its importance in unveiling the Ashaninka chief’s identity, I reproduce in full Sala’s account of his encounter: After walking for close to an hour, we arrived at the house of curaca José, in Inguiribeni. I attribute to this man the title of curaca, because he is more educated and craftier than the other Indians that we have

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encountered up until now. He cuts his hair like friars do: he is of regular height and has good features. He has four houses close to each other with a great deal of pans, drums, horns, fine machetes and even several shotguns. As soon as we arrived, they hid in the forest as is usual, and after spying on us for close to an hour, José and his escorts, all of them armed with shotguns, came out in an orderly manner, without shouting, and presented themselves with a serious countenance before us. It was this that persuaded me that this man had some sort of influence over the rest, as much because he was politic as because of the good ways he had to attract them. For this reason I tried to become very good friends with him, so as to profit as much as possible from his guile. I gave him powder, ammunition, percussion caps and other curiosities, and I told him that if he accompanied us to Chanchamayo or San Luis de Shuaro, I would give him knives, scarves and other things. He accepted willingly and now serves us as a guide in all circumstances and trails, explaining and showing us all the mountains, streams and even the bones and skulls of those who have perished in their combats. He demanded everything we had, even our breviary and our saintly habit and seeing that I was accompanied by another friar, he asked me to leave him in Inguiribeni so as to erect a chapel like that of San Luis de Shuaro. I told them that if they behaved well and managed to attract many people, there was a chance that, later on, we would found a town there. It seems that he liked my vague offering, and he now continues in our company quite happily. This man knows the people and customs of Chanchamayo very well, and because of this, he puts on airs and imitates the wiles of civilized people. If this man knew how to read and write, he could be as fatal as Santos Atahualpa; so, we either have to improve him or, if it were convenient for society’s civilization and the general good, exterminate him. Since José has a first class hen house, it was not too hard for him to sell us two cocks; we were, thus, able to have some broth and take courage to proceed with our journey. It seems that José’s house serves as resting place and commercial establishment that supplies salt and iron tools to all the poor Pajonal Indians; otherwise it would be hard to explain how he has managed to gather in his house as many goods as he has, not only Indian merchandise but also white people’s goods.78

Sala’s narrative contains many clues suggesting that the man he met in Inguiribeni, or Inkiribeni, as the name of this place should be spelled, was the future Tasorentsi. For this reason, a step-­by-­step deconstruction of his account is necessary.

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The first clue is that Sala met the curaca José in Inkiribeni, on the headwaters of the Nazarateki River, not far from Kipitoni, where the future Tasorentsi spent much of his childhood. We know through oral sources that prior to 1912 José Tasorentsi resided on the headwaters of the Nazarateki, from where he later relocated to the Lower Nazarateki.79 The fact that both men lived in the same general area prior to the 1912– 1914 Ashaninka movement seems to be more than a mere coincidence. A second clue is the age of the two men. It is clear from Sala’s account that he had doubts about whether the man he had met in Inkiribeni was a “real” chief, as denoted by the way he starts his account: “I attribute to this man the condition of curaca, because he is more educated and craftier than the other Indians that we have encountered up until now.” Sala’s misgivings could not have been because the man lacked followers, since the missionary mentions that José had a large armed escort. Neither could it have been because of his lack of leadership skills, since Sala states that it was the man’s diplomatic abilities, his being “politic,” and also his capacity to attract followers that persuaded him that José “had some sort of influence over the rest.” If Sala suspected that José was not yet a real curaca, and this was due neither to lack of followers nor to leadership skills, the only explanation left is that he considered him to be too young to be a proper leader. This would fit with what we know of the future Tasorentsi, who at the time must have been twenty-­two years old—too young to be a proper Ashaninka pinkatsari, but old enough to begin to display his qualities as a leader. The third element suggesting that curaca José was the future Tasorentsi is their knowledge of Spanish. Sala states that the man he met was “more educated” than the other Ashaninka he had found on his way. The term “educated” in this context must be understood as meaning that José could communicate properly in Spanish. This coincides with what we know about the future Tasorentsi, who, as we have seen, spoke Spanish fluently80 to the point that he was able to translate Spanish into Ashaninka and Yine.81 There are other interesting parallels between José Tasorentsi’s personality and that of Sala’s José. Sala describes the man he met in Inkiribeni as being “crafty” and “guileful,” adjectives that resonate strongly with Lepecki’s description of Tasorentsi as possessing a “foxlike cunning.”82 In addition, Sala notes that José was quite knowledgeable of the white people’s world, and because of this “he puts on airs and imitates the wiles of civilized people.” Lepecki, in turn, reports that Tasorentsi knew Spanish well, “though he used sumptuous words which did

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not always have anything to do with the matter at hand.” Both Josés were clearly proud of their familiarity with Spanish and the ways of white people, and enjoyed showing off such knowledge—even to the point of seeming affected. After establishing the intellectual capacities and moral disposition of the man he met in Inkiribeni, Sala goes on to describe his physical appearance. Interestingly, the first trait he points out is that the man “cuts his hair like friars do.” From photographs taken in the 1920s, we know that José Tasorentsi also favored the bowl-­like friar cut (see figures 4 and 34). This was quite unusual at the end of the nineteenth century, when in remote areas such as the Gran Pajonal most Ashaninka men still sported long hair. This trait must have impressed Sala, for in one of the watercolors that he painted to illustrate his account of the Gran Pajonal trip, he depicts his guide, José, shown at the head of Sala’s party deliberating with a group of hostile Ashaninka, as the only Ashaninka man with short hair (see figure 20). It is possible, of course, that the future Tasorentsi adopted the friar cut much later. But the fact that both Josés favored this haircut is not without significance. There is less coincidence as to José’s height. Sala claims that the man he met was of “regular height,” whereas Lepecki described Tasorentsi as being “short.” Height descriptions, however, are always a relative matter, so the divergence may very well derive from the fact that Lepecki—though not particularly tall—was taller than Fr. Sala—who was rather short if we are to trust contemporary photographs.83 Sala and Lepecki coincide, however, on a more relevant point. The Franciscan states that the man he met in Inkiribeni “knows the people and customs of Chanchamayo very well.” Further on, he reports that curaca José had asked him to leave his Franciscan companion in Inkiribeni “so as to erect a chapel like that of San Luis de Shuaro.” This indicates that the young Ashaninka chief knew well the Franciscan mission of San Luis de Shuaro, which was located in the general area of Chanchamayo. This was something quite unusual at the time, when the Gran Pajonal Ashaninka shunned contact with white people. Many years later, in 1928, Tasorentsi told Capt. Lepecki, “You must be a gringo. I knew those people in San Ramón, where I lived years ago.”84 The colonist town of San Ramón, like the Franciscan mission of San Luis de Shuaro, was in the area of Chanchamayo. Did the future Tasorentsi live there for a while after escaping from Jaime Morón? Or did he visit the town on commercial trips? In the 1890s, Chanchamayo was inhabited by Peruvian, Chinese, and European settlers. Among the latter, there were

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many Italian, French, and German people. These must have been the gringos—foreign white persons—referred to by Tasorentsi in his conversation with Lepecki. Fr. Sala reports that Inkiribeni was a settlement composed of four houses in which its owner stored large amounts of indigenous and white people’s goods. Among the indigenous objects, he mentions drums, horns, and salt; among the industrial goods, he lists pans, iron tools, machetes, and shotguns. At a time when there were no white people in the Gran Pajonal, the possession of such large amounts of industrial goods as Fr. Sala saw in curaca José’s compound would have been quite uncommon. Whoever owned them would have had great personal and political influence. It is thus clear that Sala’s José was not any young, up-­ and-­coming Ashaninka chief. He was already a man with an important dose of power. But was the compound visited by Sala simply a place to rest, meet people, and engage in barter? The large number of drums and horns mentioned by the Franciscan missionary seems to indicate otherwise. Drums, together with panpipes, are the main musical instruments of Ashaninka people. In turn, cow horns and the conchs of a large forest snail (pomporo) were used as trumpets—known as tiorentsi or tiborentsi85—to communicate with neighbors,86 announce one’s arrival to a village,87 emit war calls,88 and summon people to a meeting, collective work, or celebration.89 Cow horns were also used to carry embers in long trips,90 and as late as the early 1950s, they were still important trade items in the Upper Pichis valley.91 All this suggests that curaca José’s compound was not only a free lodging and trading place, but also a place where large gatherings were held. What kind of gatherings, we do not know. The only sure thing is that these were gatherings where music was played. Chief Tasorentsi was also known to organize large celebrations during his youth. Gutiérrez claims that after his uncle José abandoned Jaime Morón and settled in the Gran Pajonal, the only times in which he came down to the mouth of the Unini were to organize large celebrations.92 On such occasions, according to Gutiérrez, his uncle brought his pomporo trumpet, which he blew to call people to join him in the celebration. Since the organization of large gatherings to drink manioc beer and rejoice with music and dancing is one of the functions expected of Ashaninka pinkatsari—and even more so of prospective chiefs—it is not surprising that the two Josés would have engaged in such activities. There is one last similarity between Sala’s José and the future Tasorentsi that is worth noting. The man Fr. Sala met in Inkiribeni tried to persuade the Franciscan missionary to send him a priest that would erect

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a chapel and preach to his people. Despite his “vague offering,” Sala never complied with this request. The first missions that the Franciscans opened in the Gran Pajonal were established almost forty years later, in 1935.93 A similar interest in the religion of the birakochas was manifested by José Tasorentsi, who, many years later, in 1928, asked Adventist missionary Ferdinand A. Stahl to send him a preacher to teach his people the word of God, and to read and write. This interest in the religion and schools of the birakochas was quite unusual at the time and adds another element to support the notion that the two men were one and the same person. There is clearly no way we can be absolutely certain of this identification. However, the parallels that exist between the man Fr. Sala met and the one who told Capt. Lepecki that he was son of the Sun god do not seem to be mere coincidences. None of these similarities are conclusive in themselves, but taken together they provide enough evidence to posit that the José of Inkiribeni was indeed the man who stirred the 1912– 1914 Ashaninka movement and who, later on, in 1915, became the paramount chief of the Upper Ucayali uprising. Fr. Sala provides us with the ultimate evidence connecting these two characters: “If this man knew how to read and write, he could be as fatal as Santos Atahualpa; it is, thus, necessary to improve him or, if it were convenient for society’s civilization and the general good, exterminate him.” 94 Sala was right when he sensed curaca José’s great potential as a leader, but he also knew the enormous threat that someone like him could pose to “civilized” people. I would argue that Sala’s predictions came true. With the passage of time, the young José of Inkiribeni came to be recognized as a tasorentsi emissary, a man who, like the eighteenth-­century Juan Santos Atahualpa, claimed godly filiation, led the Ashaninka in a prolonged war against the abuses of white people, and reaffirmed his people’s hopes of reuniting with the creator gods. If the two Josés are the same person, there is one last question that needs to be answered: How did José manage to accumulate such a large amount of indigenous and industrial goods in such a brief period? We know that the future Tasorentsi left Jaime Morón at around the same time that his cross-­cousin, Andrés Gutiérrez, started to procure slaves for Morón—that is, when Andrés was around twenty and José was eighteen years old. When Sala met curaca José, he must have been twenty-­ two. This would mean that José was able to amass his wealth in only four years or so. How could this have happened? Until then, José had been a habilitado peon, and debt-­peonage was a system expressly created to ensure that workers were permanently indebted. Even if José

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had managed to somehow pay his debt to Morón—which he probably never did—he would have left Morón’s entrepôt empty-­handed. By then there were only two ways an Ashaninka man could acquire white people’s merchandise: working as a debt-­peon or engaging in the slave traffic. José had precluded the first option when he escaped Morón. The only other possibility open to him was to become a comprador de niños, a “buyer of children,” or slave trader, which, as we have seen, was precisely the path he followed before becoming a charismatic world transformer. It is, thus, possible that he may have acted as a middleman for his cross-­ cousins, Andrés, Kirebo, Lucas, and Irantis. In that case, he would have used the merchandise that his cousins obtained from Morón in payment for the captives they furnished him as a means to acquire further captives through the vast Gran Pajonal trading networks. According to oral sources, this was a common practice throughout the Gran Pajonal, Pichis, Perené, and Pangoa regions. According to Carlos Pérez Shuma, “The Ashaninka warrior chiefs had associates in these places. The former commissioned their partners to procure women and children for them in exchange for rifles, shotguns, and machetes. So their partners went to the Perené region or the Upper Nazarateki to kill people. They killed the people and took with them their children.”95 Slave trading was a very profitable business for both white patrones and their indigenous associates. In 1911, according to the subprefect of Upper Ucayali, the “civilized” Ashaninka men who worked as slave raiders for the Upper Ucayali patrones obtained for each captive boy they delivered “a shotgun or carbine, four pounds of powder or 100 rifle bullets, two or more knives, half a dozen handkerchiefs, a bowlful of glass beads, a few small mirrors, and other trinkets.”96 These goods, which might have cost patrones 80  soles at the very most—the equivalent at the time of 8 pounds sterling—constituted a veritable fortune for their Ashaninka associates. Given the intensity of slave raiding in the region—in 1911 the Tambo River valley alone produced an average of sixty to seventy captive slaves per year97—Ashaninka slavers must have accumulated large amounts of commodities. This is confirmed by Pérez Shuma: “With this business of selling their own paisanos the Ashaninka warrior chiefs made lots of money. This is why they could buy rifles, bullets, shotguns and other things, such as machetes, knives, axes, and cotton cloth.”98 However, given the Ashaninka reluctance to accumulate material goods and their proclivity for transforming commodities into social relations, the increase in available goods must have reinforced local leaderships and intensified traditional trading networks. If Chief José became a middleman for his

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cross-­cousins, this would explain his rapid rise as a leader, his unusual material wealth, and the fact that his men were well armed. Given the constrained economic possibilities indigenous men had at the time, it is not surprising that the future Tasorentsi chose to become a slaver. What is surprising is the fact that at a certain point he decided not only to quit this activity but to persuade other indigenous slavers to do the same and pursue his dream of putting an end to indigenous slavery. We know little, however, about why the end of indigenous slavery became such an essential component of Tasorentsi’s dreams. Was it simply a political reaction to the chaos and misery engendered by chronic slave raiding? Was it a utopian response to white people’s oppression and discrimination? Or was it a desperate move triggered by the perception that the survival of indigenous people was being seriously threatened? An analysis of the causes of the 1912–1914 Ashaninka movement and the subsequent 1915 Upper Ucayali uprising as perceived by indigenous and nonindigenous actors should provide us with a clearer idea of the diverse factors that might have turned the self-­serving José into the dissenting world transformer he eventually came to be.

Five

A Struggle for Vitality, 1912–1914

Expel white people, burn their bones, and seize their children as servants. Chief Sa rgen to

D

uring the 1912–1914 Ashaninka movement and even more strongly after the September 3, 1915, Upper Ucayali uprising, the authorities, the public, and the press offered all kinds of arguments to explain what many regarded as particularly vicious bursts of indigenous violence. The debates that ensued reflected the deep polarization—even fracture—of Peruvian society with regard to what was called “the Indian problem.”1 Supporters and vilifiers of indigenous peoples were forced to pay closer attention to the Amazon region’s problems and take a clearer stance with respect to native Amazonian peoples. This led to numerous debates as to the causes of Indian violence; the state’s responsibility for the situation of indigenous people; the measures to be taken to put an end to, or prevent, Indian hostilities; and the degree to which native Amazonians should be judged as criminally responsible. The media, by publishing the opinions of a wide array of social activists, became the main arena where these debates were played out. However, the various newspapers, weeklies, and magazines also became themselves engaged in the debates as they gradually adopted and defended their own points of view on the legitimacy of Indian violence. Most of the region’s colonists and rubber extractors played down the importance of chronic exploitation and abuse as the main sources of indigenous outbursts.2 Some went even further, placing the blame squarely on the alleged savagery of native Amazonians and their “irrational” hatred [ 90 ]

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for white people.3 But not all of them were as blind or self-­interested. Some were aware that the raids were not solitary incidents and responded to a campaign “held by native priests” to avenge the abuses of white people and reconquer the montaña.4 Social actors less dependent on indigenous labor to make their living and, thus, less directly affected by indigenous violence, were more open and forthright as to its causes. The Franciscan missionary Francisco Irazola asserted that the Ashaninka had “declared war on white people” in response to the “extortions” of rubber patrones, by which he meant the abuses derived from debt-­peonage and slave raiding.5 The military were also aware that the Ashaninka attacks were not isolated events. Capt. Parodi’s radical proposal to expel the Ashaninka from their lands and extradite them en masse to other parts of the country indicates how widespread the army felt the problem had become.6 The September 3, 1915, attacks on Chicotsa, Cumaría, Casa Fitzcarrald, and Sepa polarized the general public even further, intensifying the hostility between those who viewed Indians as an obstacle to modernity and those who regarded them as potentially important components of the national body. Whereas La Razón7 called the prefect of Loreto to reestablish the correrías, which had been prohibited in 1905,8 El Oriente and the Iquitos edition of El Comercio9 condemned those who advocated “the annihilation of the Indians” without “studying the causes that gave rise to the revolt.”10 The editor of the Lima edition of El Comercio was even more radical. He argued that the use of force would be insufficient to put an end to the hostilities, since the latter “have deeper and more remote causes.”11 He then asserted that, according to well-­informed persons, the main cause of Indian violence was slave raiding. It is this criminal practice, he added, that explains the “terrible and constant hatred” of Upper Ucayali Indians for white people. For this reason he concluded that if the authorities applied the coercive measures to the Indians proposed by the prefect of Loreto, they should at the same time “pursue and punish, with all rigor, the inhuman pillaging of them practiced by a few conscienceless people.” The social ailments enumerated by pro-­Indian activists, and by the country’s more progressive journalists and observers, were certainly decisive in bringing about the Ashaninka movement of September 1912. The excesses of debt-­peonage; the social havoc engendered by slave raiding; the economic and sexual abuses of white-­mestizo patrones, who viewed themselves as being morally and racially superior to their Indian peons; the complicity or opportunistic blindness of corrupt authorities; and the indifference of a state that was more interested in collecting taxes than

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in securing the welfare of its indigenous populations were all important factors in generating widespread discontent among the Ashaninka and other native Amazonian peoples. And yet all these conditions had been in force throughout the rubber era and had never led to anything more than isolated attacks on small rubber-­extracting teams,12 the theft of industrial goods from poorly guarded rubber camps,13 or the occasional murder of a particularly nasty rubber patrón or overseer.14 A few, knowledgeable observers were aware that things had somehow changed and that now they were faced with a new kind of violence. They saw that the indigenous hostilities taking place in the Pichis-­ Perené and Upper Ucayali areas were not isolated incidents but were part of a broader phenomenon affecting the entire Amazon region. The correspondent of the daily La Prensa, after noting that the indigenous violence of 1912 had involved seven different native peoples in eleven different Amazonian river basins, advanced what proved to be a bold, if somewhat misguided, conspiracy theory: “It seems as if the infidels from the different fluvial basins of the oriental region have a preconceived plan; as if there is a tacit agreement between them to exterminate white people; as if the idea of reigning sovereign along the rivers and forests, whose untamed wildness was conquered by the incomparable courage of civilized man, has germinated simultaneously in all of them.”15 La Prensa was not alone in remarking that the indigenous violence of 1912 was highly unusual. After the second Ashaninka attack to the Puchalini road camp in June 1914, La Crónica noted, “It is unquestionable that a formidable and general agitation is shaking the vast region of our eastern jungles. One only has to remember the killings that took place in the north in the area disputed with Ecuador, and in the Upper Purus, from where all rubber extractors . . . have migrated, to understand the seriousness of the situation.”16 Neither La Prensa nor La Crónica had a clear idea, however, of what was generating such widespread hostility. Both newspapers suggested that the main cause of indigenous aggression was “a feeling of revenge for the abuses [Indians] suffer at the hands of rubber extractors, who seduce them in a myriad ways, exploit their labor, do not pay them justly, but rather inflict on them barbarous punishments, take away their wives and children, and even cruelly mutilate them when they try to escape from their iniquitous estates.”17 La Prensa’s correspondent added, quite shrewdly, that the situation of generalized indigenous hostility seemed to have been aggravated by the increasing scarcity of rubber tree stands, and the extraordinary drop in rubber prices in the European and US markets.18 But neither he nor his

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colleague of La Crónica connected this new kind of indigenous violence with the collapse of the rubber economy. The possibility of such a downfall had been discussed by a few experts and government officials as early as 1903, when it became public knowledge that the British and Dutch were growing Hevea rubber in their Southeast Asian colonies.19 Despite the many warnings about the potential threat posed by cultivated rubber, neither the Peruvian state nor the rubber merchants and extractors had done anything to prevent the impending catastrophe. They were convinced that the quality of wild rubber was superior to that of cultivated rubber, that rubber plantations would be more prone to pests and other diseases than wild rubber stands, and that the production costs of plantation rubber would always be greater than those of wild rubber. Time was to prove them wrong. But for a while, the behavior of the international markets seemed to confirm their arguments and forecasts. With a few ups and downs, the prices of the various qualities of Hevea and Castilla rubber rose steadily throughout the first decade of the twentieth century.20 In 1910, prices peaked, bringing unequalled prosperity to Loreto. As a consequence, the merchant houses of Iquitos significantly increased both the importation of basic commodities and the volume of credit in goods extended to rubber patrones.21 These two elements generated an unprecedented economic bubble, flooding the market with imported merchandise and increasing everybody’s profit expectations, from the most powerful city merchants to the most humble tribal Indian peons. The feast, however, did not last long—1911 was to become Loreto’s annus horribilis.22 The armed clashes with Ecuadorian forces, the lack of workers, and an exceptionally wet rainy season conspired to hinder rubber extraction and reduce rubber stocks throughout the region. All of this could have been overcome eventually if it had not been for the sudden and steep drop in rubber prices resulting from the massive introduction of cultivated rubber into the international market. Between January 1910 and December 1911, fine Hevea rubber went down from 89 to 54 soles per arroba (15 kilograms), weak Hevea from 63 to 35.40, and Castilla from 45.50 to 37.23 Combined with decreasing production, high production costs, and high export taxes, the 20 to 40 percent drop in prices plunged the region into its most serious economic crisis ever. In 1912, when the prices of all qualities of rubber fell even further, Loreto’s economy contracted as quickly as it had expanded,24 the volume of imports diminished significantly, and the effects were felt throughout the region. Since most of the labor force was engaged in

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rubber extraction, and local food production was minimal, the subsistence of the region’s population depended almost entirely on its transatlantic imports. The abrupt halt to the flow of importations led very quickly to a shortage of many basic goods, which affected not only the Iquitos market but the entire fluvial trading system on which the rural population depended.25 The continuing overall decline of rubber prices did not help. That year, British consul V. Huckin reported that ­Loreto’s merchant community believed that the crisis had bottomed out, and that the region’s economy would soon start recovering.26 Some even regarded the crisis as a positive factor, insofar as it would force merchant houses to stop granting exaggerated credits, thus creating conditions for a healthier economic system. Their optimism was to no avail as the economy did deteriorate further, having “a demoralizing effect on both the trading firms and their clients.”27 In effect, rubber extractors had received unprecedented higher prices for their rubber, and in turn had acquired extravagant habits, which they sought to fulfil by demanding substantial advances in goods from the largest firms. As a result, the merchant houses had extended credit ranging from 20,000 to more than 100,000 pounds sterling. When the price of rubber fell, rubber extractors found themselves heavily indebted and with little possibility of repaying their debts, while merchant houses were left with strong debit balances on their books and little hope of recovering their investments. Many went broke. Only the largest firms survived, albeit, as British consul Huckin put it, in a state of “suspended animation.”28 By the end of 1914, rubber prices had plummeted. Fine Hevea sold for a mere 27.50 soles per arroba, weak Hevea for 19, and Castilla for 21.29 El Comercio of Lima claimed that the region’s economic situation was “unsustainable.”30 The revenues of Loreto’s custom office had decreased by more than 80 percent. As a consequence, the department’s treasury owed almost one million soles (equivalent to 100,000 pounds sterling) in salaries, drafts, and nondeferrable obligations. For all practical purposes, the region’s government was broke. With the breakout of World War I on July 28, 1914, the situation worsened. The contraction of the import trade and the lack of credit generated greater scarcity, while the increasing shortage of coinage due to speculation and the closure of the two banks that existed in Iquitos31 deprived rubber traders and shipping companies of the necessary capital to mobilize their ships in order to collect rubber loads or provide basic foodstuffs for their riverine clients.32 As a result, commerce along Loreto’s rivers almost came to a halt.

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This caused serious problems for provisioning, especially in the remoter rubber-­extracting fronts. Discouraged by the decline in wages, many workers slowed down33 or abandoned the rubber camps and estates.34 Even tribal Indian peons were reluctant to extract rubber under the new conditions, opting to abandon their patrones at a time when, weakened by the economic crisis, the latter could not retrieve them by force. It was at this financial juncture that the Pichis and Pachitea Ashaninka started deserting their bosses in response to the summons of Chief Sargento to join him in order to see “their god.”35 The authorities were well aware of this widespread financial problem. In a report listing the causes of the 1915 Upper Ucayali uprising in order of importance, César A. Castañeda, subprefect of Ucayali, put the region’s financial crisis in third place, after “racial hatred” and slave raids. “If yesterday,” Castañeda asserted, “patrones advanced thousands of soles to their peons, today they don’t give them a penny; Indians were accustomed to this system, so today, when they receive nothing, they perceive this as an act of hostility on the part of white people” (my emphasis).36 Camilo Habert, a writer and occasional journalist who specialized in Amazonian issues, summarized the Ashaninka situation as follows: “While rubber obtained high prices, patrones did not haggle over the iron tools, foodstuffs and gifts that composed the Indians’ earnings; but when scarcity began they started deceiving the Indians with promises they never kept.”37 To make things worse, according to Habert, Bobby Crawford, one of the first rubber extractors in the Pichis-­Pachitea region, had accustomed his Ashaninka peons to a largesse that his successor, Oswaldo Corpancho, was unable to keep up. It was this together with the maltreatment to which Corpancho subjected his Ashaninka peons that explains why the Ashaninka considered him “their greatest enemy.” The Ashaninka and other tribal Indians who were engaged in rubber extraction could not understand the sudden shift in the terms of exchange with their longtime patrones: the deceit, the unpaid rubber, and the empty promises. The rubber economy had not only been quite stable, but had grown steadily until the 1910 peak. In the thirty or so years that the Ashaninka had worked extracting rubber, they had become used to having access to an abundant supply of industrial goods, including iron tools, weapons, clothes, textiles, and processed foods. Given that indig­ enous peons were often taken to faraway places to extract rubber, they seldom had time to clear new gardens. As a result, their families’ subsistence depended almost entirely on the imported foodstuffs they received as advances for future deliveries of rubber. The abrupt and inexplicable

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stop in the supply of foreign goods deeply affected their households’ economy. Attempts to explain the reasons why the flow of goods had contracted were not grasped by indigenous workers. It was this, according to Franciscan historian Bernardino Izaguirre, that “led them to execute their plan of revenge and extermination.”38 What Izaguirre and other contemporary observers did not understand is that the patrones’ refusal to pay their peons as amply as before—or to pay them at all—was regarded by the peons as a breach of the rule of reciprocity that had, up until then, characterized patrón–peon relations. In other words, it was perceived as a break of what I would call the “rubber compact,” that is, the unwritten agreement by which indigenous people were willing to work for rubber patrones, bear the hardships of rubber extraction, and put up with their bosses’ abuses as long as they were given what they regarded as fair advances in goods for their work. This may seem to contradict the historical record. Most authors agree that during the rubber era, debt-­peonage was an extremely asymmetrical and exploitative relationship. So was this how indigenous peons perceived the system? We do not know for certain how tribal Indians felt about the habilitación system during the rubber era, except that they did not always think of it as an external imposition. They were often persuaded to engage in debt-­peonage through equal doses of seduction and coercion.39 However, thanks to a surge of recent historical and ethnographic works, we do know how tribal people perceived the system in post–­rubber boom times.40 Given that the built-­in exploitative mechanisms characteristic of debt-­peonage have remained basically unchanged since the rubber boom, we can safely assume that indigenous perceptions of the system have not changed substantially either. One of the central conclusions of these works is that far from being reluctant or unwilling participants in the habilitación system, indigenous people are often the most interested in initiating the relationship.41 The same holds true of contemporary Asheninka, who, according to Evan Killick, seek to draw outsiders into debt relations in order to have “access to otherwise unavailable outside goods.”42 In fact, the interest in establishing debt relations with outsiders was so strong after the rubber boom period that indigenous peons would promptly abandon patrones who for some reason or other could no longer provide them with industrial merchandise in order to seek out and attach themselves to a new boss.43 Such interest in engaging in debt relations was also present during the rubber era when, according to Augusto Martínez, subprefect of Ucayali, as soon as they reached manhood Ashaninka boys used to

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approach local patrones to request harpoons, ropes, shotguns, and ammunition in exchange for future cargos of salted fish, game meat, or rubber.44 Martínez is clear in stating that rubber patrones provided these goods at inflated prices, and that this gave rise to a state of indebtedness that Indian peons could only cancel with death. This suggests that he was well aware of, and condemned, the coercive aspects of debt-­peonage and, thus, that he had no reason to lie when asserting that young indigenous men often entered into debt relations voluntarily. This suggests that indigenous people regarded habilitación as a system based on advances, balanced reciprocity, and deferred exchange that could be used to their advantage. By engaging in habilitado relations, tribal Indians sought to “pacify white people,” a widespread native Amazonian strategy aimed, according to Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, to domesticate white people by depriving them of their aggressiveness, malignance, and deadliness, but also “to enter into new relations with them and reproduce themselves as societies, this time not against them but through them; in sum, to recruit white people for the Indians’ own continuity.”45 This, as the authors just mentioned have observed, does not mean that habilitado relations were or are “free from marked power inequalities” or that they do not entail an exploitative dimension.46 They often do. But what is important here is that, despite occasional disagreements between partners, from an indigenous point of view such relationships are reciprocal, and constitute the only means of satisfying their desire for foreign goods. For this reason, indigenous people often view themselves not as passive victims of greedy and unscrupulous patrones and traders, but as shrewd agents capable of persuading wealthy outsiders to engage in mutually beneficial exchange relations.47 If the Ashaninka and other native Amazonian peoples viewed habi­ litación as a relationship of balanced reciprocity characterized by trust, loyalty, and fairness, it is only understandable that they felt deeply betrayed when, as a consequence of the region’s financial crisis, rubber patrones started paying them less or not at all. By revealing its stark asymmetries, the sudden stop in the flow of industrial goods broke the illusion that habilitación was a system based on fair exchange between trustworthy, if not equal, trading partners. It was this that put an end to the rubber compact and acted as the catalytic element that triggered both the 1912–1914 Ashaninka movement and the subsequent 1915 multiethnic uprising. Contemporary observers noted, as we have seen, that the Ashaninka regarded the violation of the reciprocity characteristic of the habilitación

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system “as an act of hostility on the part of white people.”48 But was this it? Did the Ashaninka understand the breakdown of the rubber compact as a mere instance of economic aggression? Oral narratives and what little was published about why the rebels rose up in arms suggest that the Ashaninka perceived the rubber crisis and its sequels as something infinitely more serious. They regarded the abrupt and unexplained scarcity and famine, which contrasted so much with the abundance and prosperity of previous years, as a sign that white-­mestizo people were set on exterminating them. From their perspective, birakochas sought to achieve this not only by refusing to grant further advances of goods to their workers, thus condemning their families to starvation, but also through more insidious magical means. The written and oral evidence suggests that the Ashaninka conceived of their confrontation with white people in the wake of the rubber crisis as a struggle for vitality, a struggle inherent to their political economy of life, which, at this particular juncture, could only end with the annihilation of one of the conflicting parties.49 In this life-­and-­death struggle for life force, the Ashaninka resorted not only to military action but also to a variety of shamanic strategies meant to neutralize, if not overcome, the birakochas’ powerful magic. Chief Sargento’s call to all the Ashaninka to join him to see “their god” at his Nazarateki River sanctuary is the only verbatim statement expounding the rebels’ goals that we know of. Made in September 1912 on behalf of shaman-­chief José, who was by then in the process of being acknowledged as a tasorentsi emissary, this summons synthesizes the rebels’ political and theological agenda. It also reveals how the Ashaninka people perceived the grim situation that followed the collapse of rubber prices. According to La Voz del Ucayali, Chief Sargento called the Ashaninka “to expel white people from their properties, burn their bones, and seize their children as servants.”50 The first part of the call seems to be quite straightforward, beckoning the Ashaninka to recover that portion of their traditional lands that had been occupied by the birakochas. This aligns with other contemporary sources that report that the Ashaninka rebels claimed as theirs, and intended to regain, all the lands between the Pachitea River and the colonist town of San Ramón.51 Given that the Ashaninka depended on the forest and its resources for their livelihood—even more so after the rubber crisis, when they no longer had access to imported foods—the occupation of their lands by white people came to be regarded as a direct threat to Ashaninka survival. Evicting white people from their traditional territories was therefore an imperative in the Ashaninka fight for vitality, since it deprived

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white people of the marketable forest resources they depended on, while it regained for the Ashaninka important means of subsistence. The last part of Sargento’s statement seems to be equally unambiguous, demanding that Ashaninka people avenge themselves by doing to birakochas what the latter had so often done to them in the past. White people had for years stolen Ashaninka children either directly or through the mediation of their indigenous partners. The large number of burned huts, abandoned gardens, scattered bones, rotten corpses, and fugitive Indians that travelers found along their way gave horrifying witness to the extent of the disaster in the Gran Pajonal, Pichis-­ Pachitea, and Perené-­ Pangoa regions.52 The capture and removal of children and young women, plus the killing of the adults that resisted or could not escape in time, was a constant drain of Ashaninka vitality that had resulted in a dangerous demographic imbalance. As long as the slave trade continued to stimulate the flow of large quantities of foreign goods into Ashaninka commercial networks, its negative effects were downplayed or disregarded. But when the flow of merchandise stopped, revealing the effects of slave raiding in all its crudeness, Ashaninka people came to the realization that it was time to reverse the trend by depriving birakochas of their children, that is, by taking away their vitality and generative potential. Although there is no documentary evidence that the Ashaninka rebels took with them white-­mestizo children and young women during the 1912–1914 attacks in the Pichis-­Pachitea and Perené-­Pangoa areas, this was a widely reported practice during the 1915 Upper Ucayali war. During that period, the rebels kidnapped the wife of Julio Acosta, owner of the rubber post Lagarto;53 they took several “civilized women” in fundo Tahuanía, including the owner’s adolescent daughter;54 they abducted the wife and children of the proprietor of fundo Maquinaria;55 they took the wife, children, and a female servant of Eduardo Rothmund, owner of fundo Anaquiría;56 and on the Pacaya River they “seized six whites,” presumably also women and children.57 There were probably many other cases of white-­mestizo women and children carried off by the rebels whose seizure did not make the headlines because they did not belong to the upper echelons of the Upper Ucayali society. This may also explain why no cases were reported in the Pichis-­Pachitea and Perené-­ Pangoa areas. In any case, these white captives were far fewer than the hundreds—perhaps even thousands—of Ashaninka children who were taken away from their families and incorporated into the regional society as cholos or moza gente.58

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The second part of Chief Sargento’s call, by contrast, not only is enigmatic but seems to be almost out of place. Why would the Ashaninka want to burn the bones of their enemies? And why would this be as important in their struggle for vitality as recovering their lands or depriving white people of their women and children? To answer this question we must first make a short detour through Ashaninka funeral practices. Cremation is an unusual way of disposing of the remains of a dead person among the Ashaninka. Until at least the 1960s, dead people were wrapped in a large cloth or mat, tied up with vines, and buried or abandoned in a place at some distance from the dead person’s home.59 Less often, the body would be carefully wrapped, tied up, and ritually thrown into a nearby river. Cremation was reserved for two special situations: the burning of the body of a dead sorcerer (matsi) or that of a dead person whose detached soul (shiretsi) was believed to be haunting the living. In the first case, it is said that after the sorcerer was killed his or her corpse was “cremated [and] thrown into the river with a stone weight attached to its neck.”60 In the second case, people dug up the corpse of the person whose detached soul was haunting them and burned it with powerful magical plants (mostly Cyperus sp.) and hot peppers.61 They could also unbury the corpse, burn it on a large pyre, and throw the ashes into the river, or wrap the disinterred corpse, tie it to a raft, and float it downriver so that the corpse would be eaten by vultures.62 The purpose of these practices was to destroy the sorcerer’s soul or the dead person’s malevolent ghost once and for all. Ashaninka people think that sorcerers can survive torture and starvation, for they are believed to feed on the spirit flesh they obtain from their victims.63 They are also thought to be immune to death, for it is said that if a matsi is buried in the usual way, or simply thrown into the bush, its demonic teacher would blow on it and it would revive.64 The only way of eliminating an established matsi or a malevolent shiretsi ghost, according to Ashaninka tradition, is through cremation, a practice that is thought to destroy the soul forever. Sometimes, however, the Ashaninka preferred to throw the bodies of demonic individuals into the river, with the aim of sending their evil souls as far away as possible. In such cases, the bodies were plunged into the water without any ritual formalities. In addition, they burned the sorcerers’ or malevolent ghosts’ possessions, presumably because these were thought to be contaminated by their owners’ soul stuff and evil nature.65 Given these beliefs, the rebel leaders’ call to burn the bones of white people can only mean that, in the wake of the rubber crisis, the

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Ashaninka perceived birakochas as demonic beings determined to annihilate them. This is confirmed by Ashaninka oral tradition. Asked about Juan Santos Atahualpa, head of the 1742 multiethnic uprising in which the Ashaninka played a central role,66 Carlos Pérez Shuma told anthropologist Jeremy Narby a story of Ashaninka resistance against white people’s mystical attacks. In this story he compressed time by placing the eighteenth-­century rebel as leader of both the 1890s Ashaninka opposition to white colonization and the 1912–1914 Ashaninka attacks along the Pichis Trail.67 According to Pérez Shuma: Juan Santos appointed Ignacio, one of my uncles, as his deputy chief . . . to fight the colonists that were invading Yurinaki, Mariscal Cáceres, and Metraro. . . . In those combats many colonists died shot with ­arrows by the Ashaninka, but also many paisanos died shot by the colonists’ rifles. And so it was all along the Pichis Trail, also in Shimaki, Pucharini, and Cerro de la Sal, the salt mine. Many people died there and also many colonists, shot with arrows, for the Ashaninka warriors killed, slashed, and quartered the mestizos, or people like you, and then they threw the body parts to the bush, so that they would turn into sajinos and huanganas [white-­collared and white-­lipped peccaries] and multiply in the forest to serve as our food. This is what the ancient people believed. . . . Colonists, in turn, took the Upper Perené Ashaninka, from Pampa Michi to Pichanaki, to work in La Merced. At the Kimiri Bridge they placed in a pit more than fifty natives killed by pishtacos. . . . Also in Pampa Whaley, where the hanging bridge is, they buried many dead paisanos. Many paisanos died there. . . . Pishtacos are those who extract fat from people. They cut people’s heads and send them abroad, where they extract their fat. They also call them throat cutters.68

By compressing time, Pérez Shuma depicts a series of historical conflicts between the Ashaninka and their white-­mestizo enemies as if they were a single paradigmatic event in which birakochas, under the guise of pishtacos, murdered the Ashaninka to extract their fat and support their newly constructed bridges, while the Ashaninka killed and butchered white people in the hope of transforming them into peccaries, the most valued and productive game animals. An examination of these magical operations, which appear as mirror images, is indispensable to fully understand Ashaninka views of the competition for vitality that typifies their political economy. In Andean folklore, pishtacos are evil beings with Caucasian features that attack

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people walking in solitary places in order to extract their fat and use it for several industrial, medical, or technological purposes. They were first mentioned in colonial times, and since then pishtaco lore has adapted to ever-­changing historical contexts and circumstances.69 In all cases, however, pishtacos are associated with dominant white men—landowners, priests, engineers, military men, bosses—who use their power to extract the life force of indigenous people for a variety of purposes.70 Pishtaco beliefs have been present in the Urubamba-­Ucayali region since at least 1908, when a Matsigenka informant told anthropologist ­William C. Farabee that a relative of his had been “cut open by a white man and his kidney-­fat used to make candles.”71 In the following years the pishtaco belief must have gradually taken root among native Amazonians, for by the early 1960s it was amply reported among the Ashaninka. By then, pishtacos were considered to be “diabolical Caucasians in the towns who kill Campas to extract the grease from their bodies for use in automobiles and airplanes.”72 In more recent years, the pishtaco figure has reappeared among the Ashaninka and Yine under the names of pe­lacaras (face peelers) and sacacaras (face removers).73 This time, according to Gow, the new avatars of the pishtaco figure were said to be gringos who killed indigenous people to remove their facial skins in order to use them “for plastic surgery, to restore lost youth and to gain eternity.”74 In other words, to use the stolen indigenous vitality to increase their own. Despite their human appearance, Ashaninka people consider pishtacos to be in the same category as witches, certain forest spirits, and other kinds of demons—all of whom take pleasure in killing human beings.75 In fact, the Ashaninka seem to extend the pishtacos’ demonic condition to all birakochas. “For the Campas,” Weiss observes, “there is something demonic about Caucasians: they are powerful, yet not benevolent, they are wealthy, yet not generous; are they human, are they mortal?”76 Weiss suggests that Ashaninka people liken whites to the mankoite demons, the elite of the demonic ranks, who live high up in cliffs in a manner that closely resembles the birakochas’ urban, mercantile way of life.77 These fiends are believed to have powers that are similar to those of the higher gods. But instead of being life-­givers like the gods, they enjoy killing the Ashaninka—especially children—in order to steal their souls.78 Other Ashaninka specialists confirm this perception.79 Like Ashaninka sorcerers, pishtacos—and by extension all birakochas—are thought to be immune to death unless properly disposed of after being killed. It is, thus, not surprising that the leaders of the 1912– 1914 movement called the Ashaninka warriors to burn the bones of the

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white people they killed. This ritual operation was considered to be the only way of getting rid permanently of the pishtaco intruders who were killing the Ashaninka to extract their life force. There is documentary evidence that the rebels followed their leaders’ advice. After successfully attacking Puerto Yessup on January 19, 1914, Chief Gaspar and his warriors not only burned the tambo and the post office with all its correspondence, but incinerated the bodies of the fifteen people they had killed.80 Shortly thereafter, the police constable of Puerto Mayro, on the Palcazu River, confirmed that all the inhabitants of Puerto Yessup had been “murdered and burned.”81 News of these atrocities quickly reached the vice minister of the interior, who was informed that the Ashaninka had also attacked Puerto Bermúdez, “killing and burning its inhabitants.”82 On other occasions, instead of burning the bodies of their victims, the rebels threw the corpses unceremoniously into the river, which, as we have seen, is another means of obliterating the souls of witches and demonic individuals. This was the fate of Carlos J. Corpancho, the young patrón who attempted to persuade his Ashaninka peons that he was an amatsenka divine emissary.83 It was also the fate of the German slaver Juan Fitkau, who was strangled with a rope and then thrown into a neighboring stream.84 And it was probably how the Pangoa rebels disposed of the body of the Austrian slaver Oscar Sedlmayer, since his corpse was never found.85 In addition to burning the corpses of their white victims or throwing them into a river, the Ashaninka made sure to burn all their possessions—houses, post offices, chapels, personal objects, transit luggage, correspondence, riding equipment, rubber loads, and even telegraph posts—in an effort, we must presume, to erase all evidence of birakocha presence in the region and to eliminate whatever traces of their owners’ souls may have remained in their possessions.86 Twelve of the fourteen tambos along the Pichis Trail were thus burned and destroyed.87 According to Pérez Shuma, however, this was not the only way that the Ashaninka countered the birakochas’ attempt to exterminate them. The insurgents also cut up the bodies of their white victims and dispersed the body parts in the bush with the objective of transforming them, through shamanic means, into peccaries; in other words, with the intention of turning eaters into eaten, life-­takers into life-­givers. This is confirmed by other oral sources. While talking about the Ashaninka attacks along the Pichis Trail, Raúl Tepa proffered, “My mother told me that at that time there were sheripiari who said, ‘Let’s kill the white people, because they will turn into white-­lipped peccaries, into white-­collared

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peccaries. They will turn into animals. And, then, we won’t lack meat.’ This is why people came in large numbers to fight against the whites.”88 Tepa confirmed Pérez Shuma’s claim that the Ashaninka warriors used to cut their white victims into pieces and throw them into the forest, in the hope that they would turn into peccaries. But he also asserted that once Ashaninka people realized that what their shamans had announced did not come true, they pursued and killed them as false prophets. This may explain why the practice was discontinued and no Ashaninka specialist has heard about it in present times.89 There is documentary evidence that confirms Pérez Shuma’s and Tepa’s accounts. La Voz de Tarma reported that the attackers of Puerto Yessup had torn apart the bodies of their victims before burning them.90 The police constable of Puerto Mayro not only confirmed this piece of information but reported that the rebels were “killing, mutilating the corpses, robbing, and burning all the tambos along the Pichis Trail.”91 This suggests that what happened in Puerto Yessup was not an isolated event but a common practice throughout the Pichis-­Perené area. This practice was also reported at least once during the 1915 Upper Ucayali uprising, when the eight-­year-­old survivor of the rebel attack on Tahuanía said that when he woke up after fainting, he saw around him “the mutilated corpses of his father and others.”92 There is no direct evidence of mutilation in other areas affected by the 1912–1914 Ashaninka movement or the 1915 revolt. But there is indirect evidence suggesting that even when the rebels did not dismember the bodies of their victims, they did tamper with them and throw them into the bush. In Pangoa, the colonist militia that inspected one of the fundos attacked by the rebels found the victims’ bodies “unburied” and dispersed around the place.93 In the Upper Ucayali, according to Variedades, the rebels only left behind burned houses and “the sacrificed remains of their victims.”94 In this same region, La Voz del Ucayali reported “more than eighty victims scattered out in the open.”95 We do not know whether the notion that the butchered bodies of white victims could be turned into peccaries was an old war tradition or a new shamanic development. There is evidence of at least one case of butchering of a white person before 1912. In the 1890s, the Ashaninka are said to have killed one of Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald’s foremen, after which they cut “his head, arms, and feet . . . leaving the rest abandoned.”96 Since there is no evidence that Ashaninka people ever took body parts as war trophies—like, for instance, their head-­taking Conibo neighbors97—it could well be that the killing of Fitzcarrald’s employee

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pursued similar objectives as did the practice reported by Pérez Shuma and Tepa. What we do know for certain is that at the time of the rubber crisis the Ashaninka already associated white people with wild pigs. According to oral sources, shaman-­chief Iromano used to tell his followers that birakochas were “children of the huangana [white-­lipped peccary], and as such they will increase and many will appear.”98 Written sources confirm this association. Only a few weeks after the beginning of the Upper Ucayali uprising, the new commander of the Libertad reported that the Ashaninka chief Bruno had told him that the rebels were determined “to exterminate the huanganas, which is how they call white people.”99 The relationship between white people and peccaries—shintori (white-­collared peccaries), but especially piratsi (white-­lipped peccaries)— is not gratuitous, since from an indigenous point of view both kinds of beings share many traits. Like wild pigs, which are social animals living in large herds, white people like to live clustered in large towns and cities. Like peccaries, birakochas are renowned for being loud, stinky, and extremely aggressive. But above all, like peccaries, white people are known for having an extraordinary capacity for reproduction and for leaving a trail of destruction wherever they pass. The likening of birakochas to wild pigs seems to have been not only a metaphor to characterize white enemies but also a means to underscore their less-­than-­human—or even n ­ onhuman— nature, a condition that seems to have been critical to accomplishing their shamanic transformation into game animals. This kind of ritual operation is not unusual in Ashaninka tradition, being in line with what we know about the creative acts of the tasorentsi gods of beginning times. Ashaninka thinkers assert, for instance, that Manchakori (Moon) killed and cut into pieces the body of his first son with an Ashaninka woman in order to create the different kinds of peoples that inhabit this earth nowadays.100 In turn, Pabá butchered the bodies of a group of primordial humans and recomposed the resulting pieces in order to create the present-­day spider monkeys.101 The dismemberment and transformation of birakochas into edible peccaries is thus in accordance with the kind of “constructional” view of the world so common among native Amazonian peoples, who understand creation as a technological act based on the transformation of preexisting things, bodies, and body parts.102 Although apparently contradictory, the butchering and burning of white enemies constituted two alternative ways of dealing with the demonic or animal-­like birakochas. Both shamanic strategies were meant to favor the Ashaninka in their deadly struggle for vitality with white

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people, the former by destroying once and for all the souls/vitalities of the white devils, thus impairing their reproductive capacity as a group, and the latter by transforming white people’s vitality into game animals, thus ensuring Ashaninka vitality and boosting Ashaninka demography. The notion that relations between all beings on this earth are characterized by a generalized struggle for vitality is based on a complex set of Ashaninka ideas about the creation and functioning of the world. There is no single, unanimously accepted or “true” version of this set of ideas, but all versions share some basic elements that would be recognizable to members of the various subgroups that compose the Ashaninka cluster. According to the version narrated by the late Ashaninka thinker Eusebio Laos Ríos, the solar divinity Pabá created the world and its inhabitants through a “particle” or “fine spark” drawn from his feather crown.103 Pabá’s breath—another manifestation of the god’s vital principle—is contained in a large river that circulates around the earth, emerging from a hole in the mountains Intatoni and Atamarka on the east, and flowing underground through a hole in the mountains Omoro and Otsitiriko on the west. It is the living Sun’s breath as such or transformed into water and flowing permanently through this earth that gives life to all beings.104 The amount of divine particles or breath that each creature receives at birth is, however, variable and may be subject to fluctuations. This, according to Don Eusebio, explains why certain people die when they are children, whereas others live to a ripe old age. The unequal distribution of life force would also explain—although Don Eusebio does not explicitly say so—why different kinds of beings—humans, animals, plants, spirits, and even some objects—are engaged in a permanent competition for vitality. The Ashaninka believe that at the beginning of time all beings were human. Thanks to the activities of the trickster god Abireri105 and his son, or grandson, Kiri, many of the primordial humans were transformed into the plants, animals, and objects that exist today.106 All these beings are thought to be endowed with human-­shaped souls or vitalities (ishire), which bear witness to their past human condition. For this reason, the Ashaninka consider them to be “people.” Given the “perspectival” nature of Ashaninka ontologies, these beings see themselves as human hunters and regard their structural opposites in the food chain as nonhuman prey or predators.107 Jaguars see humans as peccaries and dogs as coatis;108 peccaries view humans as jaguars;109 evil spirits see humans as game animals;110 and when transformed into jaguars, shamans view humans as deer.111

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Due to the unequal distribution and constant circulation of Pabá’s vital force, these different kinds of “people” compete with each other to gather as much life force as possible. In such competition, however, the increase of a certain species, or category of living being, can only be attained at the expense of another. This means that all living beings strive to accumulate as much vital force as possible in order to guarantee their survival and reproduction. As a result, the world is in a constant state of “unstable equilibrium” between different species.112 The Ashaninka think that to ensure the world’s continuity this balance must be maintained either through mutual predation or through the establishment of amicable relations, diplomacy, and negotiation.113 The spirit master/owners of animals become aggrieved when a hunter kills too many of their wards.114 In such cases, they may compensate for the loss by killing the hunter through illness or by transforming him into one of their animals. They may also withhold their animals, in which case hunters return with empty hands and their families go hungry.115 When game is scarce, if humans consume too much manioc, the female spirit owner of manioc may complain to her “father,” Moon, that she is being overeaten.116 By way of punishment, Moon may cause the manioc plants to grow slowly and produce little, thus depriving the offenders of a crucial source of vitality. If humans urinate on manioc, coca, ayahuasca, or tobacco plants, an act they regard as an attempt to kill them, the spirit owners of these plants may respond either by transforming themselves into predatory animals, like the ocelot, to attack the transgressor or by threatening to abandon this earth, depriving humans of their sustenance.117 When a menstruating woman bathes in a river or lake, her blood is perceived by Kiatsi, the boa and spirit owner or “mother” of fish, as a fire that burns her “children.” In revenge, Kiatsi steals the soul/vitality of the woman, forcing her to live with the water creatures “so that she will replace her dead children.”118 In the above examples, balance is ensured through an ethic of self-­regulation and the threat of violent retali­ation, or by the mediatory role of shamans who act as arbiters between species to ensure that a certain balance is maintained.119 Ashaninka people conceive the relationship between human groups, or different categories of human beings, in the same terms as they perceive their relation with animals, plants, and spirits, that is, as a competition for life force. The struggle for vitality with white people, which began in colonial days, has been particularly keen during periods of demographic decline due to epidemics, nucleation, or starvation.120 Ashaninka people regarded such junctures as instances of white

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people’s attempts to steal their vitality. In 1673, the Ashaninka accused white people of living with death and bringing disease;121 in 1716, they blamed them for hiding the game, concealing the fish, and making harvests scarce;122 and in 1847 they were suspected of bringing death, epidemics, and ill luck.123 Although the breakdown of the rubber compact was the ultimate cause of the Ashaninka uprising that started in 1912, the Ashaninka interpreted the crisis along the same lines as their seventeenth-­, eighteenth-­, and nineteenth-­century ancestors, that is, as another instance of white people’s resolve to exterminate them.124 It was the widespread conviction that white people were demonic beings that had suddenly decided to annihilate the Ashaninka under the guise of pishtacos that induced them to rise up in arms, not only against their white patrones but also against birakochas in general. This is what explains Chief Sargento’s call “to burn the bones of white people” and Chief Bruno’s pleas “to exterminate the huanganas.” Ashaninka people were persuaded that they were engaged in a life-­and-­death battle with the birakochas, and they were determined to win by whatever means they had at their disposal. Chief Tasorentsi’s driving dream was to remove white people from the region through a combination of guerrilla tactics and shamanic warfare. With the passage of time, however, the fierce struggle for vitality that characterized the first years of hostilities gave way to a much more transcendental goal—the attainment of immortality—which increasingly came to occupy the minds of Tasorentsi and his followers as the conflict shifted from the Pichis-­Perené to the Upper Ucayali region, and new indigenous allies adhered to the movement.

Six

After the Waters of Youth, 1915–1916

My father awaits us there, in the waters of youth. Chief Tasoren tsi’s Song

T

he chaos brought about by the financial crisis and the breaking of the rubber compact was unquestionably the major cause of the 1912–1915 indigenous hostilities in the Selva Central region. The scarcity and famine that followed the collapse of the rubber economy caused the Ashaninka to believe that it was another attempt by the birakochas to exterminate them, generating strong feelings of betrayal, fear, and anger. As a result, the latent antagonism between rubber patrones and indigenous peons evolved into a mystical struggle for vitality in which the white pishtaco attacks were countered by the Indians’ burning of the white devils’ bodies or the shamanic transformation of white people into white-­lipped peccaries. The resentment generated by the white patrones’ long-­standing abuses, and the bitterness caused by their refusal to honor the old rubber compact, were reasons enough for the Ashaninka to rise up in arms, but they also explain the ease with which Tasorentsi was able to transfer the combat zone from the Pichis-­Perené to the Upper Ucayali region once the military pressures forced the rebels to retreat. The rubber crisis had affected the Shipibo-­Conibo, Yine, and Amahuaca living along the Upper Ucayali/Lower Urubamba axis as much as, if not more than, the Pichis and Perené Ashaninka. It is therefore no surprise that segments of these ethnic groups were quickly attracted by Tasorentsi’s anti-­patrón, antislavery, and anti-­white discourse. However, economic grudges and the perceived threat of extermination by [ 109 ]

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the birakochas do not explain the powerful appeal to the Ashaninka of Chief Sargento’s call to join him in Nazarateki to see “their god.” Nor does it clarify why Chief José encouraged—or at least did not dispute—the notion that he was a tasorentsi world transformer. More importantly, it does not explain how Tasorentsi’s Ashaninka-­centered, world-­transforming discourse was able to attract so many non-­A shaninka to the rebel party. The Ashaninka and their neighbors’ decision to join Chief Tasorentsi did not solely have the aim of redressing their economic complaints and restoring a certain balance in their battle for vitality with white people. They were especially motivated by the expectation of achieving something much more transcendental, namely, a world transformation that would include regaining the state of immortality lost in illo tempore when the creator/transformer god(s) abandoned this earth.1 Whereas we have a good idea, through Chief Sargento’s declarations,2 of the political and theological agenda endorsed by the 1912–1914 rebel leaders, there is little published evidence disclosing the aims that drove the 1915 insurgents. The only indigenous statement on this matter that we know of is by Chief Bruno, who was reported as saying that the rebels were determined “to exterminate the huanganas, which is how they call white people.”3 The documentary sources make no reference to the drivers of the Upper Ucayali indigenous uprising. The main evidence that we have of the rebel’s mystical aims comes from a song sung by Ashaninka leader Carlos Pérez Shuma, and recorded by anthropologist Jeremy Narby on June 13, 1985. Narby had asked Pérez Shuma to tell him about the 1912–1914 Ashaninka uprising. This is what the Ashaninka leader answered: In 1913, my uncle Tasorentsi, the first Adventist missionary to come here to Bermúdez, was a very well prepared missionary. He came all the way from Iquitos teaching his paisanos. He taught people. When the colonists saw that he was teaching people, they put him in jail. He was in prison for a year. While in jail he suffered very much. They hanged him; they beat him; they hurt him everywhere. But he did not repent. He had a song that said [and here Pérez Shuma sang the song]: Chiritica mi papa he poteco he poteco chiritica mi papa he poteco

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mi papa da patami hamina haqui hacoconi vatano poritano he poteco. This was Tasorentsi’s song. He fought hard. With time he came out of jail. He went on, teaching his paisanos. He never gave up.4

In his answers to Narby’s questions, Pérez Shuma often condenses time, merging different historical moments, in this case Tasorentsi’s participation in the 1912–1914 Ashaninka revolt and his later involvement in the 1920s first wave of Adventist effervescence, as if they were simultaneous events. What seems to link these two historical moments for Pérez Shuma is Tasorentsi’s role as a leader and teacher of his people in their periodic struggles against the birakochas and the meaningful part that his song seems to have played in both confrontations. This suggests that Tasorentsi’s song was already in existence before the Adventist euphoria. The song’s utopian message, strongly embedded in Ashaninka cosmological traditions, confirms this supposition. The song urges listeners to seek the creator god, who awaits for them in the celestial waters of youth. The reference to these sacred waters as a means of attaining immortality falls squarely within Ashaninka world-­transforming expectations and differs from Seventh-­Day Adventist doctrine, with its emphasis on Christ’s resurrection of the righteous as a first step to the granting of immortality to the righteous dead and living. Other traits—such as the use of words in different indigenous languages—indicate that the song was meant to attract and mobilize not only the various subgroups of the Ashaninka cluster but also other indigenous peoples. This supports the notion that the song was composed in the transition period between the 1912–1914 Ashaninka movement and the 1915 multiethnic Upper Ucayali revolt. It also suggests that it was a key component of Tasorentsi’s strategy to turn the Ashaninka movement into a pan-­indigenous insurrection. However, since the song’s mystical tone resonates with Adventist messianic expectations, it is not surprising that Chief Tasorentsi continued to sing it many years after he had embraced his own personal version of Seventh-­Day Adventism. Jeremy Narby transcribed Tasorentsi’s song as it sounded, but he never undertook the task of translating it. Sensing that the song was crucial to understanding Tasorentsi’s theological agenda, I embarked on its translation with the help of several Ashaninka experts: anthropologists, linguists, and ethnomusicologists.5 The first step was to make a new,

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more accurate transcription based on the recording of the song generously provided by Narby. With the help of Austrian ethnomusicologist Bernd Brabec de Mori, who was kind enough to notate the score of Tasorentsi’s song (see figure 21), we came up with a new transcription that was slightly different from Narby’s: Chiritikani paapa heh-­poteko, heh-­poteko chiritikani paapa heh-­poteko nipaapara patani haninehaki hakokoni wapa noporitano heh-­poteko.6

The second step was to circulate the recording and the new transcription among the different specialists, asking for their impressions about the song’s style and lyric. After listening to Tasorentsi’s song, two Ashaninka and one Yine bilingual teacher, consulted by anthropologist and educator Lucy Trapnell, said that the song’s melody had a “religious” feel, but that the lyric was essentially unintelligible, because it seemed to combine both Ashaninka and Yine words.7 Four other Ashaninka specialists, who were involved in the translation of the Old Testament into Ashaninka, told missionary Mark Friesen that the song did not seem to be in either Ashaninka or Asheninka, and that it was mostly incomprehensible.8 Brabec de Mori, who collected songs from the Ashaninka, Conibo, Yine, Amahuaca, and Cocama peoples along the Ucayali basin,9 suggested that the song’s lyric seemed to contain some Ashaninka words, but that the melody did not correspond to any of the known Ashaninka musical forms.10 He recognized no Shipibo-­Conibo idioms in it, and only one Yine word. Finally, Peter Gow, the foremost expert in the history and ethnology of Yine people, indicated that the song’s lyric was definitely not Yine, but that he could recognize some Yine terms in it.11 That Tasorentsi’s song contains words in different indigenous languages should not be surprising. We know that Chief Tasorentsi was a polyglot who spoke Ashaninka,12 Yine, and Spanish. We also know that his first wife, Santana, was a Yanesha woman, and that Tasorentsi may have partly descended from Yanesha people, so it is quite possible that he also knew some Yanesha.13 If the Gran Pajonal leader wanted to reach

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a wider audience it is understandable that he would have chosen a mix of words in the languages of the various Selva Central indigenous peoples, a mix of idioms that would sound unintelligible to many but whose meaning would not be entirely lost to the numerous multilingual men and women that peopled the region. It should also be remembered that Pérez Shuma must have learned the song between August 1948, when he met his uncle José Tasorentsi for the first time, and 1949, when Tasorentsi left the Pichis area and moved back to the Pachitea valley.14 During that short period, Pérez Shuma was a boy of eight or nine15 and may not have fully understood or remembered some of the words of the song. As a result, he might have introduced slight variations of the original terms when he sang the song for Jeremy Narby more than thirty years later. Finally, it must be borne in mind that the differences between the dialects spoken by the different subgroups of the Ashaninka cluster are such that the same action may be referred to by very different verbs. These three elements combined explain why the song sounds unintelligible to most present-­day listeners. Bearing these considerations in mind, and constantly consulting with the above specialists, I undertook the translation of Tasorentsi’s song. In the following paragraphs, I reconstruct step by step the translation process in order to substantiate each of my translation choices. The song starts with a line that is repeated in verse 4 and consists of two words: chiritikani paapa. The first term seems to be a slightly modified form of the Asheninka verb shiritaantsi, which David L. Payne renders as “to seek,” “to believe,” or “to have faith in.”16 It derives from the root shire-­ or shiretsi-­, “soul,” suggesting that the action involves applying one’s soul to the search of someone or something. The addition of the flexive suffix -­ni indicates the plural of the verb, confirming that the song was meant to inspire large audiences.17 The second term, paapa, means “father” in Asheninka,18 but also in Yine and in Shipibo-­Conibo, where it appears as papa and pápa, respectively.19 All these peoples use variations of the term paapa to designate not only actual fathers but also the creator god(s). Since this line begins with a term meaning “seek/believe/ have faith in,” it is more than probable that the meaning of paapa in this context refers not to an actual father but to the creator god. This first verse may thus be translated thus: “Seek/believe/have faith in [our] father [the creator god].” The second line, which functions as a chorus and is repeated four times throughout the song (vv. 2, 3, 5, and 9), is composed of a single term: heh-­poteko. According to Caleb Cabello, an Ashaninka bilingual

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teacher consulted by Trapnell, this is a Yine term, gew-­potuko, meaning “very near.”20 In connection with the previous verse, this line could thus be translated as “[He is] very near.” The sixth line is formed by two terms: nipaapara patani. The first term seems to be a distortion of the Asheninka nopaapara. Composed of the noun paapa, “father,” plus the first-­person-­singular possessive prefix no- and the relative suffix -­ra, this term could be translated, according to linguist Pilar Valenzuela, as “that my father.”21 The second term in this line derives from the Asheninka/Ashaninka expression paata, meaning “wait,” plus the flexive suffix -­ni, indicative, in this case, of the relative future tense.22 Thus, verse 6 could be rendered as “That my father awaits.” Verse 7 consists of a single term, haninehaki, which is a transposition or slightly altered form of the name of a sacred place in Nomatsiguenga cosmology known as Hananekihá.23 According to Nomatsiguenga specialists Harold Shaver and Lois Dodds, this is a sacred lake where the Sun god bathes every night to reemerge young and fresh at dawn. It is also a place where old people can bathe to rejuvenate and attain immortality. The name is formed by the roots haneki24 or hananeki,25 meaning “boy/ girl,” “child,” or “youth” in both Nomatsiguenga and Ashaninka, plus the derivational root há-­, indicating location, as in hanta, “there.”26 Variants of the name Hananekihá are found among all Ashaninka subgroups— Hananerite, Hananerya, Hananerial, Hananeroha, Nahaneriha—always in reference to a volume of rejuvenating, life-­giving waters—a lake, river, or spring. We could therefore translate this verse as “there, in the waters of youth.” The eighth line is made up of three terms: hakokoni wapa noporitano. The first word seems to be a hybrid Yine/Ashaninka term formed by the noun koko, meaning “maternal uncle” or “(potential) father-­in-­ law” in Yine27 and “father-­in-­law” among the diverse Ashaninka subgroups,28 plus the Ashaninka inflectional affix h-­, indicating the male third-­person-­singular nonfuture subject,29 and the suffix -­ni, meaning, in both Yine and Ashaninka, that the person in reference is deceased.30 Thus, the term could be translated as “He [my] late father-­in-­law.” It should be noted, however, that whereas among the Yine the term koko is used by both men and women, among the Ashaninka subgroups, as Elena Mihas has noted,31 it is only used by female speakers. Male speakers would use the term koki.32 This suggests that while employing a Yine term as the basis to construct this idiom, Tasorentsi was aware that it would also be understandable to an Ashaninka audience. In fact, the term would have been understandable, although with a different

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meaning, even to Shipibo-­Conibo people, since cóco and cocón mean “nephew” when referring to a mother’s sister’s son.33 The following two idioms—wapa noporitano—were not recognized by any of the experts consulted as Ashaninka, Yine, or Shipibo-­Conibo idioms. It occurred to me that since Tasorentsi’s first wife was Yanesha, his father-­in-­law may have also been Yanesha, and so the words in this verse could be in that language, representing something Tasorentsi’s father-­in-­law had told him. My supposition was correct. The term wapa derives from the Yanesha verb huapueñets, “to come to where someone is,” as in the phrase huapa acheñ, “people are coming.”34 As to the term noporitano, Mary Ruth Wise, one of the leading experts in the Yanesha language, suggested that it might have been originally nomporitanom, in which case nompore would be the vocative form of nompor, “my father”; -­t would be the ubiquitous verbalizer or thematic suffix in Yanesha; -­an would mean “going along or away”; and -­om would mean “going away completed,” that is, “went away.” In such a case, nomporitanom could be translated as “my father went along,” whereas the phrase huapa nomporitanom would mean “my father is coming along.”35 Wise noted that this construction is not very correct Yanesha, but this could be because both the composer and the singer were not Yanesha speakers. If the above verse-­by-­verse translation is correct, then the song could be rendered as follows: Seek our father. He is very near. He is very near. Seek our father. He is very near. That my father awaits, there, in the waters of youth. My late father-­in-­law said: “My father is coming along. He is very near.”

Before analyzing the song’s meaning in greater detail we need to know why Pérez Shuma claimed that the song was “Tasorentsi’s song.” This is crucial in assessing to what extent the Ashaninka leader was responsible for the song’s message. Among the Ashaninka, according to Brabec de Mori, a song may be described as “belonging” to someone if the person has composed it, has learned it from a third party and is currently its owner/custodian, or has obtained it through revelation from a

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supernatural being. In the case of Tasorentsi’s song, in which the singer was accorded the status of divine emissary and the song assumes the form of a prophetic message, it is tempting to consider that the song was revealed by the creator god(s). This is perhaps corroborated by the fact that Ashaninka worshipping songs, known as beshiriantsi, often contain truncated or distorted words, Ashaninka-­ized foreign words, and words in secret languages, which, according to Brabec de Mori, “are meant to trigger associations rather than convey semantically accurate meanings.”36 The term beshiriantsi contains the same root as the verb shiritaantsi, which means to “seek/believe/have faith in.”37 If the main characteristic of worshipping songs is that they express one’s devotion to the creator/ transformer gods, Tasorentsi’s song clearly belongs to this category. However, there are two elements that suggest that rather than revealed, the song—which I will call the “Sky River Song”—was composed by the Ashaninka leader to convey what he considered to be the central message of his utopian discourse. The first element is that the melody of the song, according to Brabec de Mori, does not correspond to any of the musical forms common among the Ashaninka, Yine, or Shipibo-­Conibo. More importantly, after comparing Tasorentsi’s song with Ashaninka songs collected by him and Harry Tschopik Jr.38 in the Upper Ucayali, and by Dorothy Shaler39 in the Gran Pajonal region, Brabec de Mori concluded that in structural terms the song does not resemble any of the known styles of Ashaninka songs, but it does have some of the gravity of beshiriantsi songs. “Asháninka singers,” he notes, “mostly use highly individualized melodic lines but the principles of both the applied scales, which are mostly based on three to five tones, and rhythmic fluctuation are fairly constant and very different from Tasorentsi’s song with its clear-­cut phrases, melodic lines, repetitions with slight variations and an A-­A-­B -­A’ structure that is not found elsewhere in Asháninka song genres.”40 Rather, Brabec de Mori suggests that because of its chromatic heptatonic (seven-­tone) scale, which is very unusual in native Amazonian music, the melodic style of Tasorentsi’s song betrays elements of ancient and reinterpreted Catholic hymns. However, he also suggests that the song’s base could have been an Andean huayno borrowed from the neighboring highland peoples of Pasco and Junín. He notes that “the distinctive rhythmic features of huaynos are triplets, as at the beginning of each phrase in Tasorentsi’s song, as well as a rhythmically different accentuation of the last section of a musical sequence. This last trait can also be noted in Tasorentsi’s song, although the off-­ beat phrasing is restricted to the word noporitano.” Brabec de Mori’s

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conclusion is that “while not a huayno, Tasorentsi’s song structurally resembles the form of a huayno.” The second element suggesting that Tasorentsi’s song was composed rather than revealed is that it contains personal references, such as the allusion to the singer’s late father-­in-­law. In the Ashaninka context, this trait is characteristic of secular compositions, such as the amampaantsi genre of love songs, family songs, and songs about relationships, and the piranthaantsi genre of drinking and farewell songs.41 These two musical styles, sung by both men and women, are generally composed by the singer and are full of more or less open references to the person to whom the song is addressed, whether a relative, lover, friend, or rival. Brabec de Mori suggests that Tasorentsi may have purposely played with these various elements to give his composition the qualities of magical or agentive songs, a category of songs that have the power to effect changes in the world and include warfare, hunting, and sorcerous chants, as well as initiation, healing, thanksgiving, and worshipping songs.42 This seems to be the case. The “Sky River Song” is a perfect exercise in conceptual integration. By adopting a musical style that blended the rhythms of old Catholic hymns with those of Andean huaynos, Tasorentsi may have sought to appropriate the powerful magic of the white-­mestizo invaders. At the same time, by using words from different indigenous languages to create a multilingual, generally unintelligible but evocative lyric, he may have tried to reproduce the feel of revealed songs, whose singers, according to Brabec de Mori, often claim, “I can sing the song but I cannot interpret or explain it.”43 The juxtaposition of Ashaninka, Yine, and Shipibo-­Conibo terms bearing the same form but evoking slightly different images, such as paapa/papa/pápa, “our father” in relation to the creator god(s), or “Hananekihá” in relation to the “waters of youth,” would have reinforced this integration by generating new, cross-­cultural meanings equally understandable to a mixed audience. Nonetheless, it is clear that by including references to his personal life, Tasorentsi was underscoring the fact that his was not a song received from a third party or revealed by a supernatural being, but one derived from personal experience and direct communication with the creator/transformer god(s). The question that arises at this point is, what could have been the source that served as a model for Tasorentsi’s song? The most plausible answer is the hymns composed by Franciscan missionaries. We know that at least since the end of the nineteenth century, Franciscan priests had been composing religious hymns combining Spanish melodies with

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Ashaninka lyrics. In the account of his 1897 trip across the Gran Pajonal, Fr. Gabriel Sala provides a detailed report of this practice, and the score and Ashaninka lyrics of one of the hymns he composed.44 If José Tasorentsi was, as I believe he was, the same person as the young curaca José that Fr. Sala hired as a guide in his Gran Pajonal journey, he must have heard the Franciscan missionary singing his hybrid hymns many times, and he may have been attracted by the power of the alien music and words. Regardless of what the musical model for the “Sky River Song” was, what is important here is that it bears many of the traits Ashaninka people attribute to magical songs. Such songs are thought to have the power to effect desired changes in their listeners and the surrounding world. This is true of both ordinary and extraordinary beings and worlds. So what did the Ashaninka leader expect to achieve when composing and singing his song? And how did he mean to make the song intelligible to the various indigenous peoples he intended to attract to his party? To answer these questions we must first unveil the song’s many layers of meaning. It is clear that Tasorentsi composed his song as a prophetic message aimed at mobilizing a large, multiethnic audience. It is also clear that the Gran Pajonal leader intended the song as a political statement to be disseminated as widely as possible. The song’s message consists of one plea and three announcements. First, the singer urges listeners to seek/ believe/have faith in Our Father. Second, he asserts that Our Father is very near. Third, he adds momentum to his words by stating that the creator god awaits the faithful in the waters of youth. Finally, he increases the sense of urgency by affirming that Our Father is coming along. A detailed analysis of each of these admonitions reveals both the essence of Tasorentsi’s message and the means he used to transcend the linguistic and cultural barriers that divided his anticipated audience. The Ashaninka, Yine, and Shipibo-­Conibo mythical narratives on which my interpretation of Tasorentsi’s song rests were mostly collected in the 1950s and 1960s, at least thirty to forty years after the song was composed. Although I cannot be sure that they already existed in this form at the time of the 1915 Upper Ucayali uprising, it is more than probable that their structure and content had not changed substantially since then. Indeed, as Gerald Weiss asserts with regard to Ashaninka cosmology in the 1960s, although these narratives betray the varying influence of three centuries of Catholic missionaries,45 they are based on “a hard core of indigenous beliefs” and are structured in terms of certain dominant principles that are “distinctively Campa.”46 We can thus be confident that the central notions expressed in these cosmological narratives

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were already in force when Tasorentsi composed his song, even if they may have varied in some of their details.47 Tasorentsi is deliberately vague as to who the “father” he mentions in his song is. Through the use of the verb “to seek/believe/have faith in” in relation to the term paapa, it is clear, however, that he intended paapa to refer to the creator/transformer god(s). It is also clear that by using an expression that could be understood equally by the Ashaninka, Yine, and Shipibo-­Conibo, he was avoiding the problem of identifying this god by name. For Ashaninka people the term paapa would have evoked the Sun god, known as Katsirinkaiteri, “the hot one,” or Oriátsiri, “he who illuminates,” but more often as Pabá, Our Father, or Tasorentsi, the most powerful of the Ashaninka “almighty blower world transformers.”48 The term would have also brought to mind the figures of Inka and Pachakama/Pachakamaite, the technological divinities that are thought to have the capacity to create all kinds of industrial objects.49 In fact, according to Evan Killick, Ashaninka informants are “fuzzy” about the differences between Pabá, Inka, and Tasorentsi, so that the term “Our Father” could have applied to any of them.50 For the Conibo and Shipibo, the term pápa would have reminded listeners of Barí, the Sun god—also known as Pápa Barí51—who at the beginning of time, when darkness still reigned, created the present world and its creatures.52 At the same time, it would have conjured up the figures of the inka gods and, more particularly, Cori Inka, the Golden Inka or Good Inka, who is both a creator/transformer god and a cultural hero. It is this god who taught the Shipibo-­Conibo how to fish, garden, make fire, weave, and ornament themselves and their possessions with the intricate geometric designs for which they are famous nowadays.53 Some Shipibo-­Conibo thinkers assert that Barí, the Sun, is the material representation of the Good Inka, and, for this reason, they sometimes call the latter Barí Inka, merging the two figures in one.54 For Yine people the term papa would have evoked the notion of Goyakalu, the Eternal One, and the most powerful of the goyakalune creator/transformer gods.55 It would also have brought to mind the figure of Tsla, the hero-­trickster and creator bird-­god born from a human mother and a jaguar father, who is held responsible for creating indigenous and white people.56 Some Yine thinkers identify Tsla with Goyakalu.57 Others assert that Tsla “was like Inka,”58 and they call Tsla/Inka papa.59 In addition, at least some mythical narratives seem to identify Tsla with the Sun god.60 Like the Ashaninka and Shipibo-­Conibo, Yine people do not establish rigid boundaries when identifying their creator

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gods, often merging the figures of Goyakalu, Tsla, and Inka, referring to them interchangeably. I suggest that Tasorentsi’s vague use of the term paapa to refer to the creator/transformer god(s) constitutes an instance of calculated conceptual integration meant to bring together local traditions similar in overall form and structure, but very different at the level of content, in order to create a new, more generic image. The creation of such a cross-­ cultural blending would have been facilitated not only by similar notions about the attributes of the creator god(s), but also by the fluid and undifferentiated way in which the Ashaninka, Yine, and Shipibo-­Conibo conceive of and refer to them. When listening to Tasorentsi’s song, everyone would have guessed who “Our Father” was, while at the same time holding quite different ideas about the god’s individual identity. The Ashaninka leader’s first announcement, in which he claims that Our Father is “very near,” is equally vague. How near? And near in what terms? Spatially? Temporally? And yet members of each of the three indigenous peoples that Tasorentsi sought to engage in his cause would have understood perfectly what he meant by this phrase, since in their respective cosmologies it is recounted how long ago the creator/transformer god(s) abandoned this earth to live far away from their human creatures. Since then humans have experienced the sufferings of the human condition. Their only hope is that one day the gods will once more make themselves accessible to their human creatures in order to transform the world and restore to them their lost immortality. According to Ashaninka tradition, in ancient times Pabá/Tasorentsi had decided to abandon this earth that he had shared with other gods, spirits, and the original Ashaninka to live in the upper world.61 When he climbed to the celestial plane, some of the Ashaninka accompanied him and became immortal. Those who stayed behind started to experience illness and death.62 Ashaninka people anticipate, however, a time when Pabá/Tasorentsi will return to this earth to transform it into a new world. “When that occurs,” according to Weiss, “sky and earth will again be close together, the earth will speak once again, and its inhabitants will be a new race of humanity knowing nothing of sickness, death, or toil.”63 Similar expectations surround the figures of Inka/Pachakama. Ashaninka myth tellers affirm that these technological divinities were kidnapped by white people to profit from their extraordinary creative talents. Today the gods are retained forcefully far away, in River’s End, to prevent them from communicating with and benefiting the Ashaninka.64 As a result, white people are wealthy and the Ashaninka

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are poor. However, the Ashaninka hope that one day Inka/Pachakama will return, and that when that happens, the wealth differential between white and Ashaninka people will be reversed, and the Ashaninka will once more be rich and powerful.65 Shipibo and Conibo sages recount that in ancient times the inka gods lived together with the first humans in the upper reaches of the Ucayali. When the Spaniards invaded their lands, the Good Inka—Cori Inka in one version, Cheshe Inka in another—decided to move upriver in order to flee from the invaders and distance himself from the evil that reigned on this earth.66 Before doing so he went into the forest to find a plant that in one version would make his followers invisible to the invaders,67 and in another would make them immortal like the inka gods themselves.68 In both versions, during the Good Inka’s absence, the primordial humans got drunk, quarreled among themselves, killed each other, and even indulged in cannibalism. When the Good Inka came back and saw what had happened, he became very angry. He took with him those who had abided by his moral rules, turning them into immortal chaikoni spirits, and left the transgressors behind to experience disease, suffering, and death. Some narrators state that when the Good Inka fled upriver he was captured by the Spaniards, who took the Inka’s buried wealth and, for this reason, are now rich and rule.69 Others claim that the inka gods took refuge in an upriver location—some even say Cuzco, the Incan imperial capital—where they now live surrounded by some of the chaikoni spirits that accompanied them.70 The residence of the inka gods is variously described as being terrestrial, celestial, or underground.71 There, the inka gods wait to return to this earth to inaugurate a new “Golden Age, when the presently powerful white man and mestizo will be overthrown and the Shipibo will recoup their losses.”72 At that time, white people will be exterminated, “melted” by great floods or “cooked” by world fires.73 Others say that the Good Inka will return to take his people “to a new land, far away from the reach of those who persecute them.”74 Yine cosmological notions are also characterized by world-­ transforming hopes. Yine thinkers maintain that in mythical times the creator god Goyakalu/Tsla lived on this earth among the humans he had created: the ancestors of the present-­day Yine.75 The creator god protected his people and provided them with the moral rules necessary to lead a good life. While Goyakalu/Tsla lived with them, Yine people lived a life of happiness and abundance. One day, however, the ancestral Yine committed some unspecified transgression that angered the creator

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god. As a consequence, the latter decided to quit this earth and abandon Yine people, who are now in a state of gochate, that is, “failure,” “imbalance,” or “sin.”76 In one version, Goyakalu/Tsla went to live in an upper world.77 In another, Tsla and his twin brothers, the Muichkajite, escaped downriver after their jaguar relatives had killed their mother, and their Yine relatives had failed to protect them.78 In both cases, Yine people were left behind to experience the drawbacks of the human condition. In an associated Yine myth, of which there are various versions, it is said that the creator god Goyakalu/Tsla offered those Yine who had stayed behind the possibility of ascending to the upper world and becoming immortal.79 He warned them, however, that menstruating women could not go to heaven until their period had stopped. Many Yine were lifted to heaven in a wooden tray attached to a rope, but when a menstruating woman attempted to climb, the tray fell to the ground and the remaining Yine were left behind to live in the “land of death.”80 Since then, many Yine have tried to reach the home of Goyakalu/Tsla, either through the consumption of ayahuasca in an attempt to reach the sky, or by undertaking long boat trips downriver.81 Others, instead, wait for Tsla’s return, when, it is believed, Yine people will recover their lands and wealth and will shake off white people’s domination.82 In all these narratives we are told that since the creator/transformer gods abandoned this earth—either of their own free will or forced by invading foreigners—humans have lost not only their source of wealth and immortality, but also the possibility of leading a happy, harmonious, and moral existence. Living far away from their gods and in a land where death reigns, humanity’s only hope is to be reunited with their gods. Tasorentsi’s announcement that Our Father is “very near” would have rekindled this hope, bringing to mind the notion that with the god’s arrival the world would necessarily change, and people would once more become immortal. It is quite probable that listeners of different ethnic affiliations would have envisioned the promised world transformation differently, but all would have expected changes in the relations of domination between indigenous and white people, and a reversal of their economic situation. More importantly, they would have anticipated the restoration of their immortal condition, precisely the subject of Tasorentsi’s second announcement. It would be wrong, however, to regard the announced world transformation as a mere means to redress social and economic inequalities, a simple reversion of roles, with the indigenous peoples playing the dominant, affluent part and white people becoming the oppressed poor. The

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expected transformation would be much more radical, restoring harmony and equilibrium to a world that is regarded as being deeply disrupted by the immoral lifeways of both indigenous peoples and their enemies. The Ashaninka say that when the creator god(s) return, the sky and earth will move closer and the earth will “speak again.” Some Ashaninka thinkers claim that the earth is a goddess called Mamantsiki, who is the Sun god’s maternal aunt.83 We do not know what made her go silent, but since she is considered to be Mother of Manioc, Maker of Metals, and a superbly wise woman, her silence could have only disrupted the natural order of things, generating scarcity and harming the Ashaninka in the process.84 Shipibo-­Conibo narrators maintain that the world transformation will bring great floods and colossal fires that will exterminate white people.85 Since white people are regarded as the cause of all the world’s evils, their end should mark the beginning of a new era. Yine people, in turn, proclaim that the impending transformation will restore the world’s order, putting an end to the state of gochate, the disequilibrium brought about not by white people but by the failures of their own ancestors.86 Despite differences in details, in all these cases it is believed that the announced world transformation will heal the world, eliminate evil and inequity, restore balance, and inaugurate a new era of happiness, conviviality, and abundance. In contrast to the vagueness of Tasorentsi’s first announcement, his second proclamation is quite specific, indicating that the creator god expects to meet the faithful in Hananekihá, the lake of youth. Before analyzing what exactly Tasorentsi meant by this, it is worth noting that in this second announcement, Tasorentsi does not refer to the creator god as “our father” but as “my father.” Through this subtle means, the Ashaninka leader reaffirms the notion that he is the son of the creator god, a divine affiliation that he continued to claim many years later, as when he met with Capt. Lepecki in 1928. This extraordinary claim sought not only to confirm his position as a divine emissary but also to give credence to his utopian prophecies. Since we know that the Ashaninka pinkatsari had been recognized as a tasorentsi emissary at least two or three years before the song was composed, we have to conclude that this renewed claim was mainly aimed at persuading his potential Yine and Shipibo-­Conibo allies that he was an authentic world transformer, capable among other things of leading them to immortality. In Nomatsiguenga cosmology, Hananekihá is the lake where Pabá, the Sun god, goes to bathe every day at dusk, to appear next morning fresh and rejuvenated.87 These waters of youth were a gift that the

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Moon god, Manchakori, gave to the ancestors of the Nomatsiguenga so that they could regain their youth and become immortal. Reference to such a specific site seems to be incompatible with a song whose apparent aim was to mobilize not only the various Ashaninka subgroups but also other indigenous peoples. This is not, however, the case because the word “Hananekihá” is formed by the roots haneki or hananeki, meaning “child” or “youth,” and these roots are also present in the names attributed by other Ashaninka subgroups to the body of divine life-­giving waters that are said to have rejuvenating properties. Thus, the name Hananekihá would have instantly evoked the notion of such a sacred body of waters among listeners of any of the Ashaninka subgroups. The same was probably true of other indigenous peoples, since through l­ iving together, intermarriage, or trading relations, many Shipibo, Conibo, and Yine would have had a sense of the kind of place the singer referred to when mentioning Hananekihá. The Ucayali Asheninka mention the existence of a lake from which the creator god—Tasorentsi or Inka—gained his immortality.88 They claim that this was the lake from which the trickster god Nabireri fished out white people despite the warnings of the creator god. After Nabireri disobeyed him, Tasorentsi/Inka shut himself in the rocks around the lake, and since then no one else could become immortal.89 Some Ashaninka thinkers place this lake in Intantoni, or the River’s Beginning, that is, on the southern end of the earth. Others place the waters of youth far away in the west, in Irimaaka, the Ashaninka name for the city of Lima.90 They do not specify whether these life-­giving waters are a lake or a river, but they affirm that when Pabá, the Sun god, sets in the west, he plunges into the waters of youth as a white-­haired old man and comes out as a young boy. Then, he does a cross step and reappears in the east to start his daily journey again. Other Ashaninka traditions identify the waters of youth with a spring called Hananerya, also known as Pabá’s waters of youth or ihananeryaate Pabá.91 This spring flows from within a house located far away on this terrestrial plane, and its glowing life-­giving waters are said to be stored in deep pits where people can bathe to become young again. In older times, the Asheninka knew where the glowing spring was located, and some even settled around it. But nowadays, the myth teller warns, nobody knows where it is and it can no longer be reached. Most Ashaninka, however, identify Hananerya with a sky river, a tradition that fits better with the symbolism deployed by Tasorentsi in his wars and dreams. The Ashaninka specialist Eusebio Laos Ríos affirms

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that Hananerya is located in an upper plane, known as Hanabeni, “the land of life,” in opposition to this earth, called Kamabeni, or “the land of evil/death.”92 He notes that whoever drinks the waters of this river—rather than bathe in them, as in other versions—will become forever young. Other Ashaninka thinkers maintain that when he abandoned this earth, Pabá/Tasorentsi took with him the river of youth.93 They say that the life-­ giving waters of the sky river are not really water, but have the property of whitening one’s skin and rejuvenating old people. According to this particular narrative, the Star People—virtuous Ashaninka people converted into stars in primordial times—and other celestial beings bathe in this river to remain young. So do those whose souls are able to reach heaven after death. Weiss claims that the river of youth is called Hananeríte.94 It is an invisible river that courses through the sky and abounds in fish, which is the main food of the henokiniri, the gods and good spirits that inhabit henoki, or “up above.” Because these sky beings bathe in it to maintain their immortality, this river is also called hananeroha tasorenciha, meaning “God’s potent life-­giving waters.”95 Although Weiss conjectures that the Ashaninka notion of the river of youth may derive from the Milky Way,96 he asserts that unlike the neighboring Matsigenka, who identify the river of youth (Meshiriani) with the Milky Way, most Ashaninka do not.97 According to Weiss, Ashaninka people call the Milky Way antiaro tampo (large river) or iyámore henokisati (the sky-­dwellers are closing a river branch [to fish]), and regard it as being “entirely distinct from Hananeríte, the River of Eternal Youth, which flows invisibly in the sky.”98 In contrast, John Elick writes that the Pichis Asheninka describe the Milky Way as “the great river that flows through Inkite, the sky,” a sky river in which the ancient Ashaninka used to bathe in to renew their bodies.99 Eduardo Fernández confirms this view when claiming that, according to Nomatsiguenga people and the Perené Ashaninka, the gods and spirits that populate the upper realm “live in this space traversed by a long river, Nahaneriha, the Milky Way, which is where Moon bathes to be reborn at the end of each [lunar] period.”100 Unlike other Ashaninka subgroups, the Ashaninka of the Envira River, in Acre, Brazil, regard the river of youth as an underground river situated close to the residence of Nabireri, the trickster transformer god.101 The Envira Ashaninka assert that the cold waters of this river, which they call Hananerial, have rejuvenating and curative properties because it is the home of Anaconda, the master/owner of fish, who is believed to become young again each time that it sheds its skin. As we

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shall see below, the Envira Ashaninka account of Hananerial connects the Ashaninka versions of the sky river of youth with Shipibo-­Conibo and Yine conceptions of a cosmic river of youth that flows in circles transversally around the terrestrial plane. Shipibo-­Conibo myth tellers claim that in his daily progress, Barí Inka, the Sun god, travels in a large canoe driven by four black vultures along a foaming sky river that runs from east (upriver) to west (downriver).102 When the Sun god reaches the western limit of the earth, the sky river is said to plunge into the underworld through a cave hole. There, it reverses direction, flowing from west to east. At night, while Barí Inka is traveling through the underworld, Oshe, Moon, and the Star People travel along the sky river in their own canoes. Peter G. Roe asserts that Shipibo people regard the course of the sun along the celestial and subterranean rivers as a daily cycle of death and rebirth by which the Sun god fertilizes the terrestrial plane before dying to be reborn, rejuvenated, the next morning.103 Moon and the Star People also remain forever young by bathing in the wondrous waters of this river. Some Shipibo-­Conibo myth tellers assert that in ancient times, many people did not want to wait until death to achieve immortality. In one of these narratives, collected by Pierrette Bertrand-­Ricoveri, after a long and dangerous trip upriver, an ancestor by the name of Tinticorichi arrived with his people to the land of Cori Inka, known as jacon mai, literally, the “good/beautiful land.”104 There, the Inka invited the visitors to bathe in “a pool of crystalline water carved in the live rock,” after which, the Good Inka invited them to join the inka gods and the immortal chaikoni spirits to enjoy a grand banquet. Although the myth teller does not explicitly say so, we know that Tinticorichi and his people became immortal after bathing in the clear waters of jacon mai because they were invited to share food and drink with the inka gods and chaikoni good spirits. Roe and others claim that Shipibo-­Conibo people distinguish the Milky Way, known as Chashonbai, or “Swamp Deer’s Path,” from the celestial/subterranean river along which Sun and Moon travel every day.105 According to Roe, Chashonbai is a negative constellation, formed by the Milky Way’s black clouds, that represents the path along which the Black Jaguar (an avatar of the Sun god and the Good Inka) pursues the Swamp Deer (an avatar of Moon or the Stingy Inka).106 There is not, however, general consensus about the matter. Carolyne Heath asserts that the sky river along which the Star People navigate differs from the Milky Way,107 but in a more recent interview she stated that for

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Shipibo-­Conibo people “the Milky Way is like a large river, similar to the Ucayali, which washes their lands.”108 Such discrepancies indicate the existence of important differences in detail between individual myth tellers and thinkers, but also the possible borrowing of mythical notions and images from neighboring peoples. Yine traditions also mention the existence of a cosmic river along which the Sun god travels in its daily cycle. The three published myths on this subject agree that the Sun god is driven in a large canoe by sturdy bird rowers—herons, wood storks, and king vultures—who are the only ones that can stand the Sun’s intense heat.109 One of these versions says that the cosmic river encircles the earth, traversing the sky from east to west and the underworld from west to east,110 and that the Sun’s canoe enters into the underworld through a narrow gorge located on the western rim of the earth. The other two versions present accounts of the Sun god’s celestial111 or underworld112 part of the journey, but none of them indicate that the waters of the cosmic river have rejuvenating properties. There is evidence, however, that this is the case. In a myth collected by Minna Opas, the cultural hero Tsla is said to have “lived in his house close to the sea (and relatively close to the white people’s city), and went every evening to bathe in a nearby river. Although he entered as an old man in need of a walking stick, he emerged as a young adult.”113 Given that the sea is located west of Yine territory, where the sun sets, and that Tsla is said to perform this ritual bath every day, the imagery in this account suggests that at least some Yine people identify Tsla with the Sun god. An associated narrative confirms that the river of youth mentioned in this myth is the sky river along which Tsla/Sun travels every day.114 In this second myth, it is said that in ancient times a Yine chief by the name of Powra and his followers went downriver along the Urubamba and Ucayali in search of Tsla’s home. After a long and perilous trip, they arrived at the place where this world and the upper world join. Here the travelers went up through the hole used by the Sun god in his daily travels along the river of youth until they arrived in Tsla’s village. The teller of this myth does not say whether, like Tinticorichi, the hero of the Shipibo-­Conibo myth, the Yine chief, and his companions acquired immortality by bathing in Tsla’s river of youth. This is, however, implicit in the narrative, since we know that Yine people think that the souls of those who have led a moral life go to the sky home of the gods, where “they receive their goyaknu,” 115 a term that has been rendered as “eternity,” “deity,” and “glory,”116 but which could also be translated as “immortality.” If this

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is the case, the act of reaching the creator god’s sky dwelling would be synonymous with acquiring immortality. According to Gow, like most Shipibo-­ Conibo, Yine people do not identify Tsla’s sky river with the Milky Way.117 They conceive the Milky Way, known as tengognewaka gatnu gapo, “the sky road,” to be a path rather than a river.118 From a Yine point of view, the sky river would be invisible to human eyes, since it is located on a higher plane than the Milky Way. However, there is a certain resemblance between Ashaninka, Yine, and Shipibo-­Conibo notions of the sky river of youth and the Milky Way that Chief Tasorentsi was able to tap into to suggest that both sky features were identical. Whereas Tasorentsi’s second announcement encourages listeners to assume a proactive attitude and seek the creator god, who is waiting for them in the waters of youth, in his last message, the Ashaninka leader assumes a more passive stance, declaring that his late father-­in-­law has told him that the creator god is already coming to this earth and implicitly urging his listeners to prepare themselves to greet him. Both these apparently contradictory strategies are present in the world-­transforming mythologies of the Ashaninka, Yine, and Shipibo-­Conibo. In relation to Yine people, Gow hypothesizes that, as a result of important historical changes—namely, the presence of a new kind of white persons (gringos) in Yine territory—narratives stressing the proactive strategy for communicating with the creator god(s) preceded in time and were replaced by those underscoring the passive mode.119 This may well be true for Yine people, but it does not seem to be the case for the Ashaninka and Shipibo-­Conibo, among whom both kinds of narratives exist simultaneously. The same holds true for Tasorentsi’s song, in which neither option is given priority over the other. By leaving these options open, I suggest, Tasorentsi sought to attract as wide an audience as possible. Since both alternatives are present in the mythical traditions of the Selva Central indigenous peoples, listeners of different ethnic affiliations would have identified with both of them, even if they differed as to which one was more important. It is clear from the above narratives that the Ashaninka, Shipibo-­ Conibo, and Yine peoples expected to be reunited with their creator god(s), and in many cases still do so. They believe that when this happens, the present world will experience a dramatic transformation. Indigenous people will shake off white people’s domination and become wealthy once more, regaining possession of the industrial goods that legitimately belong to them. Evil and immoral behavior will be eradicated, and the

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world will regain its lost balance. More importantly, once reunited with their gods, indigenous people will recover their immortal condition. Tasorentsi’s warning that Our Father is “very near” would have been understood by Ashaninka, Shipibo-­Conibo, and Yine listeners as an indication not only that the moment of reunion with the creator god(s) was close, but that they should prepare themselves to welcome him. This is not, however, all there is to Tasorentsi’s composition. In line with its magical or agentive character, the “Sky River Song” was meant not only to announce the creator god(s) return, but also to excite the god’s compassion and speed up his return. We have seen that the oral evidence and the song’s internal traits indicate Chief Tasorentsi composed his song sometime between the last stages of the 1912–1914 Ashaninka revolt and the beginning of the Upper Ucayali uprising on September 3, 1915. If the song originated during the Ashaninka movement, it would have been meant exclusively for an Ashaninka audience, and there would have been no need to compose a multilingual lyric. But Tasorentsi intended his song as a mobilizing instrument that—apart from the common grievances against white patrones—would inspire and persuade the Ashaninka, Yine, and Shipibo-­Conibo peoples to come together to expel the white invaders. For that he needed a multilingual lyric. This was no easy feat, however, for despite being neighbors and having much interrelationship, these three peoples were historical enemies. To unite them Tasorentsi resorted to their common world-­transforming expectations, which, as we have seen, are deeply embedded in their respective cosmologies. We do not know how Tasorentsi’s song was disseminated throughout such a vast region. It is very probable, however, that it was passed from settlement to settlement through the mediation of local shamans in the context of ayahuasca ritual sessions in which attendants seek to communicate with a variety of spiritual beings. In such ceremonial gatherings, which were and are still performed by all the peoples involved in the 1915 uprising, singing played a central role.120 Through these ceremonial acts, shamans sought to activate the magical agency of their songs, most often to invoke the help of their animal familiars in the task of curing their patients but also to summon the ancestors or even to communicate with the good spirits and higher gods.121 Thus, the dissemination of the “Sky River Song,” whether achieved through shamanic practitioners or by other means, must be regarded not only as a way of proselytizing but, above all, as a means to persuade the creator god(s) to fulfil their promises of immortality and a drastic world transformation as soon as possible.

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There is indirect evidence suggesting that Chief Tasorentsi used all symbolic means at his disposal to reinforce the song’s utopian message. Since the beginning of my investigation on the Upper Ucayali uprising, I was intrigued by the emphasis that contemporary newspapers had placed on the fact that the rebellion had started with simultaneous attacks on four large rubber entrepôts on September 3, 1915, at 6:30 a.m. I first thought that this date and time was selected to coincide with some particular event in the lunar cycle. But through MoonPage, a website that allows one to determine the phase of the moon for a given date and time zone,122 I found that on September 3, 1915, the moon was waning and only 33 percent full (see figure 22). Since there was nothing special about the moon’s phase, it occurred to me that perhaps the significance of that particular date and time lay in the stars’ position. To determine this, I consulted AstroViewer’s Interactive Night Sky Map, which shows how the night sky looks at precise dates and times at specific locations.123 I set the map’s coordinates for the town of Atalaya (lat 10° 46’ S, long 74° 05’ W), which is located on the confluence of the Tambo and Urubamba Rivers, almost midway between Cumaría and Sepa, the northernmost and southernmost entrepôts attacked by the rebels. Having determined that on September 3, 1915, the sun had risen at 5:58 a.m.,124 I set the map’s time at 5:30 a.m., an hour before the attacks began. On the basis of these various calculations I could determine that on Friday, September 3, 1915, at 5:30 a.m., while the sky was still dark, the Milky Way was exactly in the center of the sky, oriented in a northeast/ southwest direction (see figure 23). Since on that day the moon was waning, the night must have been quite dark.125 More importantly, September is in the middle of the dry season (July–November), so the sky was in all probability clear. These two conditions would have provided the rebels with an unobstructed view of the night sky, especially as they were waiting near the open spaces of the Ucayali and Urubamba Rivers. Hiding in the outskirts of the targeted rubber entrepôts, waiting for first light to start their attack, the rebels would have been able to see the Milky Way shining brilliantly against the blue-­black sky right above their heads. This was surely not a coincidence. I suggest that Chief Tasorentsi chose that particular date and time to start the uprising so as to reaffirm his song’s central message, namely, that the creator god was waiting for the rebels to join him at the sky river of youth. This would not have been hard to believe. As we have seen, most Ashaninka, Shipibo-­Conibo, and Yine agree that the creator god’s waters of youth have the form of a sky river that crosses the firmament from one extreme to the other. They

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also agree that this sky river is the route followed by the Sun god every day and by Moon and the Star People every night. Most maintain that the sky river is invisible to human eyes and that only skilled shamans can see it as it really is. But some—the Pichis and Perené Ashaninka, the Nomatsiguenga, some Shipibo-­Conibo, and all the Matsigenka—­ identify it with the Milky Way, a notion that would have been known by their neighbors who believed otherwise. It would not have been too difficult for Chief Tasorentsi to have merged these different traditions to sell the idea that the sky river of youth was indeed the Milky Way. His status as a powerful world transformer—accepted, as we have seen, by many—would have given credence to this new conceptual blend among those who did not usually associate the river of youth with the Milky Way. By choosing that precise date and time to start the uprising, Tasorentsi sought to further stress this association. When the attacks began, the sun would have just come out, evoking among the waiting rebels the mythical image of the Sun god emerging, fresh and renewed, after having bathed in the river of youth, a sky river that would have been visible against the predawn sky some time earlier as a glowing stream of stars. This scene would have confirmed Tasorentsi’s song’s utopian prophecies, namely, that the creator god would soon return to this earth to rescue his human creatures, liberating them from white people’s domination and granting them immortality.

Seven

From War Chief to People-­ Gatherer, 1921–1929

How did you come down from heaven? A non y mous Y ine m a n

I

n the early 1920s, three fortuitous events altered the course of Chief Tasorentsi’s life. The first was the 1920 land rush toward the Upper Ucayali, triggered by the cotton boom that followed the collapse of the rubber economy.1 Although the cotton craze was soon to fizzle, it generated a renewed interest in the region, which had experienced a long decline since Tasorentsi’s insurgents had destroyed many of its fundos in 1915.2 As a result, in 1920 some of the region’s most powerful patrones began to request large land concessions from the state with the intention of producing cotton, among them Francisco (Pancho) Vargas. Many outside entrepreneurs did likewise.3 The largest of these requests was that of Francisco Rivero de la Guarda, police constable of the Upper Ucayali,4 who applied for a large concession along both banks of the Unini River in order to create a colony for more than one hundred families.5 De la Guarda argued that the new colony would help to repopulate the region and facilitate the colonization of the Gran Pajonal, where, he said, 40,000 Ashaninka had taken refuge after the 1915 revolt. Although de la Guarda’s project never materialized, the renewed interest in the Upper Ucayali attracted a new generation of patrones and increased the demand for indigenous labor. This, in turn, generated the conditions for the resurgence of indigenous slavery and the escalation of conflicts between white patrones and indigenous peons. The arrival of Seventh-­Day Adventist missionary Ferdinand A. Stahl in the Upper Perené area sometime in early 1921 was the second event [ 132 ]

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to affect the life of Chief Tasorentsi. Stahl was an American of German descent who had been a missionary in the Lake Titicaca region since 1909.6 In 1920, because of health problems, he asked to be reassigned and, a year later, began working in the Selva Central at the Perené Colony.7 To ensure his welcome, he brought a letter of support from the British directors of the Peruvian Corporation, the colony’s parent company.8 Despite some initial opposition from its administrator, Víctor Valle Riestra, Stahl was eventually allowed to settle in the colony to work as a missionary among the local Yanesha and Ashaninka. He did not waste time, and by August 1922 he had founded a mission in the ancient site of Metraro (see map 7.1).9 The enthusiasm generated by Stahl’s preaching was extraordinary, leading to a first wave of Adventist effervescence throughout the region. Characterized by John H. Bodley as a “transformative movement,” this religious drive eventually encompassed not only the Ashaninka but all Selva Central indigenous peoples.10 The third event, and the one that had the most immediate effect in Chief Tasorentsi’s life, was the military uprising of Capt. Guillermo Cervantes, which took place in Iquitos on August 5, 1921.11 Capitalizing on the general discontent with President Augusto B. Leguía, who was accused of keeping Loreto “in the cruelest oblivion” after the collapse of the rubber economy,12 Capt. Cervantes persuaded his troops to rise up in arms, crush police opposition, and take military and political control of Iquitos. Immediately afterward, the rebel leader sent two detachments— one to the Huallaga River, the other to the Upper Ucayali—to prevent government troops from advancing into Loreto.13 The second detachment, under the command of Capt. Manuel Curiel, reached the Pachitea River by the end of August.14 According to oral sources,15 Chief José Tasorentsi was living at the time on the Pachitea, where he had taken refuge after the 1915 uprising.16 Since Cervantes’s rebel troops did not know the area well, they recruited Chief José to lead them to Puerto Bermúdez, from where they intended to march along the Pichis Trail in order to attack Lima. We know through written sources that Capt. Curiel recruited several Ashaninka and Shipibo-­Conibo men on the Pachitea to act as guides, messengers, and spies.17 It is therefore quite likely that among them he recruited Chief José, who spoke Spanish, knew the area well, and, at forty-­six, was in the prime of his life. This same oral source claims that Tasorentsi led Cervantes’s rebels to Puerto Bermúdez, but when the revolutionaries retreated from pursuing government troops, the Ashaninka chief decided to stay in the Upper Pichis. This does not fully accord with

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M a p 7.1. Selva Central region during the 1920s and 1940s Adventist effervescence.

historical facts, since we know that the rebels never reached Puerto Bermúdez.18 It is possible, however, that after participating in these military operations, Chief Tasorentsi realized that the authorities were no longer looking for him, and that he could safely go back to the Nazarateki River, where he had spent much of his adult life. It was while living on the Nazarateki that the Ashaninka world transformer heard of Stahl’s presence in the Upper Perené. From the very beginning, Ferdinand Stahl was quite successful in attracting the indigenous population living within or around the Perené Colony. Part of his

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success was attributable to the apocalyptic character of Adventist discourse, which strongly resonated with indigenous world-­transforming hopes. It was also owed to his and his wife’s, Ana’s, knowledge of nursing, which became a central feature of their missionizing strategy.19 But, above all, Stahl’s success came from his extraordinary powers of observation, his natural ethnographic skills, and his fine-­tuned intuition for indigenous traditions that could serve to advance his missionary goals. Stahl was a master of calculated conceptual integration, and he soon began to adjust his religious discourse and even his own persona to Ashaninka beliefs and practices. Why did Stahl’s skills cause his preaching to spread so swiftly throughout the Selva Central region? According to contemporary missionary literature, Adventist preaching revolved around two main biblical themes: the third angel’s message and Christ’s second coming.20 The first theme refers to the three angelic messages that will precede Christ’s return and mark the beginning of the eschaton, or end of times, as reported by John in the Apocalypse, or book of Revelation (14:6–12).21 Seventh-­Day Adventists proclaim that it will be the task of the “remnant,” the small group of people who have remained loyal to the truth of the gospel, to disseminate the three angels’ messages. The third and most fearful of these messages is a call for the restoration of the true worship of God, including the observance of the Sabbath and the Old Testament food taboos,22 and a warning against worshipping the beast, which for Adventists is a symbol of the Catholic Church. Stahl and other contemporary Adventists considered that the time had arrived to start disseminating the third angel’s message, and that it was their duty to propagate it, since the end of the world would not arrive until the truth of the gospel had been made known to all peoples.23 In their view, the three angels’ messages are a prelude to the destruction of the world and the establishment of heaven on earth. The first of these events will take place when Christ returns to earth to put an end to Satan’s dominion and restore the world to its original perfection. Adventist descriptions of Christ’s second coming are full of powerful images that had a deep impact on indigenous audiences.24 According to these accounts, Christ will announce his coming at midnight in a loud voice from heaven. His proclamation will shake the earth, causing a great earthquake as has never been seen before. The mountains will shake and the whole earth will heave, destroying every village, town, and city on its surface. Christ will then descend in all his power and glory, carried on the clouds of heaven. As Christ approaches, God’s trumpet will sound and all sinners and unbelievers, but specially the proud kings of the earth,

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the rich men, the commanders and mighty men, will try to hide from God’s wrath. Christ will then call the righteous from their graves and send his angels to gather the elect from all corners of the world. Hearing his potent voice, the righteous dead will rise from their graves to meet him. The righteous living will also flock to Christ’s presence. After glorifying them and granting them immortality, Christ will raise the righteous living and dead in the air to take them to his father’s house, the New Jerusalem, or city of peace. At the same time, he will slay the unbelievers with his mighty sword and cast the apostates into a lake of fire. After this, Christ and the righteous will reign in heaven for a thousand years. During that time, the unrighteous dead will be investigated and judged, whereas Satan and his angels will be banished to the earth, which will be barren and devoid of human life. At the end of the millennium, the Holy City with Christ and the righteous ones will descend from heaven to this earth. The unrighteous dead will be resurrected, and Satan and his angels will be released from their confinement. Together they will attempt to take over the City of God. But God will destroy them with a heavenly fire, thus cleansing the earth, freeing it from sin and sinners, and putting an end to the great controversy between good and evil. In this purified earth, the saved will live with God in the New Jerusalem, a city made entirely of gold and traversed by the river of waters of life, which, flowing from God’s throne, will vivify everything and everybody. There they will be able to eat the fruits of the Tree of Life, which will prevent them from ever again feeling hunger or fatigue. And there they will lead a peaceful life full of new potentialities, forever untouched by pain, sorrow, or death. It is no surprise that after hearing such a vivid account and being asked whether they were disposed to prepare themselves to receive Christ, Ashaninka audiences responded, as Stahl reports in his many devotional articles, with enthusiastic shouts: “Good! Good, we will do it!”25 The three angels’ messages, the description of the millennium, and the final battle between God and Satan may have sounded somewhat outlandish to indigenous audiences, but the narrative of Christ’s second coming and the salvation of the virtuous would have brought to mind the kind of images that characterized their own eschatological narratives. This would have been particularly true of the notions of God as a celestial Father, Christ’s gift of immortality to those who follow his teachings, the translation of the chosen ones to God’s mansion in heaven, and the City of God as a place traversed by a river of life-­giving waters and devoid of suffering, illness, and death. Especially attractive

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would have been the idea that God will punish the mighty unbelievers, whom indigenous people rapidly associated with white-­mestizo patrones. Although there is no evidence that Stahl or other Adventist preachers ever set a specific date for Christ’s second coming, it is clear that they believed the event was imminent. While reporting in 1924 on progress made among the Yanesha and Ashaninka, Stahl asserted that Adventists should “push the work now as time is fast closing and soon the Lord will come in the Clouds of heaven.”26 Similarly, V. E. Peugh, superintendent of the Inca Union Mission, proclaimed that everywhere there were signs of the nearness of the end and Satan seemed indeed to be “consolidating his forces and preparing for the final great struggle.”27 Such statements greatly impressed Stahl’s indigenous audiences, who took the “imminence” of Christ’s second coming much more literally than the Adventist missionaries might have expected or even wished. Stahl’s nursing training also proved to be a great asset for attracting new believers. The Adventist missionary was conscious of the importance of medical work, claiming that its effects “are immediate and notable, and obstacles that otherwise would impede the gospel work are readily surmounted.”28 He was right. If Stahl was allowed to stay in the Perené Colony despite so much local opposition, it was largely because he succeeded in curing both the president of the Peruvian Corporation29 and the colony’s manager.30 The effects of Stahl’s medical deeds among indigenous people were even more impressive. Shortly after his arrival in the Perené valley, while curing an Ashaninka child, Stahl told the child’s father that it was not he who cured but God, adding that he always talked to God and the latter always responded.31 Instead of using the Spanish word for “God,” Stahl used the Ashaninka term “Pabá,” Our Father. It is not clear whether he did this to clarify what he meant or with the intention of establishing a link between the Christian and Ashaninka gods. In any case, rather than making things clearer, Stahl’s choice of words had the contrary effect of persuading the Ashaninka that he was Pabá.32 From then onward, word spread that Pabá had arrived in Metraro. “Pabá has come,” the Ashaninka claimed. “He is in the Perené area. Pabá is a tall gringo who gives away ribbons. He kneels all the time, closes his eyes and speaks out loud. Pabá sings. Pabá heals the sick.”33 Many believed that not only Stahl but all Adventist missionaries were gods come down from heaven, and, as late as 1929, a curious Yine man asked Barbara Osborne, wife of missionary Henry Westphal, by what means had they come down from heaven.34 Rather than rejecting this identification, Stahl seems to have fully embraced it, at least in the beginning, thus demonstrating his capacity to

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adapt his message to local conditions. Adventist pastor Alejandro Bullón Páucar, thanks to whom we know much about Stahl’s life in those early years, states: “To connect with the Ashaninka, Stahl became an Ashaninka. He lived, slept and ate as an Ashaninka. He became one of them, assimilating their culture and personality.”35 Not surprisingly, Ashaninka people began to call him “the blond shaman.”36 Stahl obliged, and wherever he went, the first thing he did was to summon the sick in order to cure them, often wearing an Ashaninka cushma, or long tunic (see figures 24 and 25). This strategy, as we have seen, was not entirely new. Carlos J. Corpancho had tried it in 1912, albeit unsuccessfully, and before and after him many other patrones had sought to be recognized as amatsenka (good spirits) by adopting Ashaninka dress and mores. Stahl, however, resorted to conceptual integration in order to be recognized not as a “godly patrón” but rather as one of those powerful Ashaninka shaman-­priests, equally skilled at healing people and communing with the divinities who, like Chief José, are sometimes accorded the status of tasorentsi emissaries. By blending the Adventist notion of preacher/healer with the Ashaninka idea of shaman-­priest, Stahl gave shape to a quite revolutionary new construct, the notion of “Christian shaman.”37 This is confirmed by Capt. Lepecki, who asserted that the Ashaninka regarded Stahl “as the greatest wizard and priest.”38 The same was true of Yine people, who, according to Gow, “understood the Adventist message as a potential collective shaman-­becoming, and the Adventists as powerful shamans.”39 This does not mean that Stahl condoned Ashaninka shamanism. On the contrary, he opposed it openly, preaching that witchcraft, sorcery, and shamanic healing are diabolical arts, that its practitioners always end up trapped in Satan’s hands, and that demons are not to be feared if one has embraced God’s word.40 Instead of healing with the help of animal spirit familiars and communicating with Pabá through sacred fires and soul flights as Ashaninka shaman-­ priests did, Stahl claimed to cure with God’s help and to talk with God either directly or through his Bible, which he said contained God’s word. As a result, Ashaninka people began to regard Stahl as Pabá or, at least, as a tasorentsi messenger, and Stahl’s Bible as a powerful magical object, which, because of its gilt edges, they called “the golden book.”41 Whether knowingly or not, Stahl encouraged this idea further by choosing to establish his first mission at the site of Metraro.42 He knew that Metraro was a strategic place because, as he reported to his superiors, it lay midway between the Gran Pajonal and the Cerro de la Sal, which every year attracted hundreds of Ashaninka and Yanesha people

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who came to extract salt.43 It is hard to believe, however, that Stahl did not know that Metraro was also a place of great historical and mythical significance for both Ashaninka and Yanesha people. In effect, Metraro was the burial site of Juan Santos Atahuallpa, the Andean rebel who, in 1742, persuaded the Selva Central indigenous peoples to unite in order to expel the Spaniards. Known as Yompor Santo’ by the Yanesha,44 and as Apinka45 or Sacramentaro46 by the Ashaninka, Juan Santos was considered to be son of the Sun god and is today the maximum personification of the heroic world transformer in both Ashaninka and Yanesha traditions.47 Until 1891, when Juan Santos’s remains were disinterred and sent to Tarma under orders of the prefect of Junín, Metraro had been a pilgrimage site where Ashaninka and Yanesha people gathered annually to pay homage to their hero.48 By the early 1920s, Juan Santos’s tomb was in ruins,49 but by choosing to settle nearby, Stahl reinforced the notion that he was a tasorentsi envoy, while at the same time leaving open the possibility of being identified as the reincarnation of Juan Santos. According to Ashaninka scholar Enrique Casanto Shingari50 and Ashaninka leader Carlos Pérez Shuma,51 this is precisely what happened. Persuaded that Stahl was Juan Santos Atahuallpa, or at least a godly messenger heralding the mythic hero’s return, many Ashaninka flocked to Metraro and soon converted to Adventism.52 There is evidence that Stahl was not immune to Ashaninka attempts at deifying him. Bullón Páucar states that the Adventist missionary “liked to encourage the kind of adoration or, rather, fear and awe that the Ashaninka felt for him as they considered him to be a god.”53 In fact, according to Bullón Páucar, Stahl nourished the legend that indigenous people were creating around him. As a result, the Ashaninka started to attribute to him miraculous powers, claiming that he could cure people through prayer and the imposition of hands, that he could walk on water, that God protected him with a resplendent light, and that he was immune to attacks by Kamari, master of all demonic beings.54 In later years, according to Juan Carlos La Serna Salcedo, once the groups of believers began to consolidate and form their own churches, Stahl sought to efface this “messianic” identification in order to ensure a more doctrinal connection with Adventism, but during the early years of his mission he did not hesitate to use it as a potent conversion tool.55 His strategy was extremely effective, and Stahl’s message spread so fast that by 1928, V. E. Peugh reported in amazement that the light of the gospel seemed to have penetrated the darkest corners of the forest in an almost “supernatural way.”56 In effect, although Stahl was a very

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active preacher, holding morning and evening services, conducting Sabbath school classes, and traveling frequently throughout the area, his millenarian message seems to have spread ahead of him simply by word of mouth. In response to his message, Ashaninka, Yanesha, Yine, and even Matsigenka people started to flock to Metraro, sometimes in small family groups and sometimes in larger, more formal delegations headed by their chiefs (see figure 26).57 According to Stahl, they came “to learn about the true God” and to ask him for someone who could “teach them the word of God.” If we are to trust oral sources, however, most people went to Metraro in the hope of actually seeing God. One of these pilgrims told Bodley that he “expected to see God himself, whom he viewed as a tall white man. They all expected to see God in that very moment or by tomorrow, since they had been told that if they had faith and believed, God would appear.”58 This same man stated that though some of the visitors went back to their homes unconvinced, many embraced the Adventist message, and when they returned home, they gathered in large villages, kept the Sabbath, refrained from “sorcerous” activities, and gave up alcohol, coca, tobacco, and the forbidden foods.59 It was in this context of Adventist effervescence that, around 1922, Chief José Tasorentsi decided to travel to Metraro to meet “the white Pabá.” According to a testimony collected by Bodley in 1966, “When Tasorentsi heard that Jesus had descended in the Perené valley, he decided to go to Metraro to see if it was true that God had descended from heaven. He went alone and stayed in Metraro for some time studying the word of God.”60 A second version, collected ten years later by Bullón Páucar, asserts that José Carlos Tasurinchi, whom he also calls Tashuninki, went to Metraro accompanied by two of his nephews: Catosho Machari and his brother Manunco Ulises, who later on adopted the Spanish names Abel Fieta and Ulises Díaz, respectively.61 According to this version, Abel and Ulises were Ashaninka from the Upper Ucayali region, but most sources agree that, like Chief José, they were Yine,62 or of mixed Yine-­A shaninka heritage.63 We do not know how long Tasorentsi stayed in Metraro or what he did there, except that he “studied the word of God.” We know, however, that he soon joined the small group of converts who became Stahl’s first interpreters and gradually his most effective “people-­gatherers” (juntadores de gente).64 Members of this group, who accompanied Stahl on his missionary trips around 1923–1924, included Tasorentsi; his Yanesha wife, Santana; Tasorentsi’s Yine nephews Abel and Ulises; Ulises’s Ashaninka wife, Manuela; and the Ashaninka Shirunkama and his wife, Jaromi.65

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A picture of an Adventist mission in a mountainous area—possibly Metraro—taken by an anonymous photographer around this time shows a group of Ashaninka converts, flanked by missionary Ferdinand Stahl, surrounding two Ashaninka men, one of them dressed in Western clothes, who could well be chief Tasorentsi (see figure 27). In another instance of conceptual blending, people-­gatherers assumed the combined functions of tasorentsi heralds and Christian preachers, but also of indigenous settlement leaders. Like tasorentsi heralds and Christian preachers, they announced the return of God/Pabá, but like settlement leaders they undertook the task of persuading their followers to join them in founding a new village—in this case, to wait for Christ’s second coming and the world’s end. It is thus not surprising that some of the original people-­ gatherers were already chiefs—like Chief Tasorentsi—whereas others who were not, soon came to be recognized as such—like Shirunkama.66 According to an early source, Santana was a Yanesha woman who also spoke Ashaninka and Yine and was one of the group’s main preachers.67 A later source claims, however, that she was an Ashaninka woman who spoke Spanish quite fluently, since she had been raised as a criada by Perené Colony administrator Víctor Valle Riestra.68 It is possible that Santana was both Yanesha and Ashaninka, since the Upper Perene is a region at the interface of the Yanesha and Ashaninka traditional territories, where interethnic marriages are common. In the 1960s, Bodley’s informants told him that Santana was Tasorentsi’s wife.69 In contrast, present-­day oral sources maintain that she was the wife alternatively of Ulises Díaz,70 Abel Fieta,71 or Shirunkama.72 This confusion probably derives from the fact that Santana was associated with all of these men, since the group often traveled together when accompanying Stahl on his missionary trips.73 We know from Stahl’s own writings, however, that in the 1920s Ulises was married to Manuela or Manonga,74 who had been one of Stahl’s first female interpreters,75 whereas Shirunkama was married to Jaromi.76 As to Abel, there is no mention that he was married to Santana before 1947, suggesting that if he ever married her it was after Tasorentsi and Santana broke up, around 1929, and Tasorentsi married Lucrecia Pérez Noriega.77 This suggests that at the time they all met in Metraro, Santana was already Tasorentsi’s wife. Of the group’s seven members, Ulises, Manuela, Shirunkama, Jaromi, and Abel are the ones most often mentioned in Adventist official publications. In fact, Stahl never mentions Santana and only once mentions Chief Tasorentsi in any of his writings. In the account he wrote with V. E. Peugh about their 1925 trip to Iquitos, they report that while

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traveling down the Perené River a chief by the name of José Carlos visited them in Cascadas to request a teacher.78 There is no indication in their account that Stahl already knew Chief Tasorentsi, and yet there is written evidence that the Adventist missionary not only knew him in Metraro but had often taken him as an interpreter on his evangelizing trips.79 It is possible that Stahl was reluctant to acknowledge Tasorentsi because he knew that the Ashaninka leader had been the paramount chief of the 1915 uprising and responsible for the killing of many whites. It may have also derived from the fact that Tasorentsi’s preaching did not quite adhere to Adventist doctrine. Reporting on Tasorentsi’s preaching when he first visited Shahuaya on the Ucayali River around 1925, Meyando Vásquez recounts: Wherever [Tasorentsi] went he said that he was bringing the word of God. He said that we should believe all of God’s words; that we should not fight, kill, rob, or sell people to the patrones. He also said that we should not get drunk. He claimed that when God descends from heaven, he will punish those who have not followed his words. He asserted that he had seen God and God had told him that he would come in one or two years. He warned us that we should wait for God. He claimed that God had made the earth and all the animals that we eat, but that there were some animals that we shouldn’t eat. He warned against white people, who claimed that God was not coming and that we should eat all kinds of animals. . . . He said that only believing in God’s word could we be saved. And he warned that those who did not believe would be burned; that they would die like peccaries.80

Much of Tasorentsi’s preaching, as expressed by this account, was in tune with Adventist doctrine. It was also faithful to his antislavery position insofar as it reaffirmed the moral obligation not to “sell people to the patrones.” What is novel in this speech is Tasorentsi’s request not to “fight, kill or rob,” which in this context appears to be a subtle appeal to abandon violence as a political tool and marks what could be regarded as Ta­sorentsi’s second moral conversion. Equally novel are two references that betray indigenous inclusions not quite attuned to the Adventist creed. The first reference is that he “had seen God and God had told him that he would come in one or two years.” We have no way of knowing whether Tasorentsi is referring to the Christian God or the Ashaninka Pabá. However, given the human propensity to conceptual blending, especially in contexts of clashing thought systems, it is probable that in

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Tasorentsi’s mind these two figures had merged into a new figure, modeled on the traditional Pabá but with many of the traits of the Christian God. Given that many Ashaninka believed that Ferdinand Stahl was this new God/Pabá, Tasorentsi’s assertion could be interpreted as meaning that he had seen Stahl in Metraro, and the missionary had told him that Christ would come in one or two years. This, however, contains an obvious contradiction: if Stahl was God come to earth, he would not have told Tasorentsi that God’s arrival was imminent. Ashaninka elder Armando del Arca provided me with the key to understanding this statement. When I mentioned to him Tasorentsi’s claim, he said: “Well, as you know, all sheripiari have visions. They are not legal. They are like an imagination that penetrates you and that you see like a vision or dream.”81 What del Arca implied in his somewhat skeptical way is that Tasorentsi’s claim should be interpreted as meaning that he saw and talked to God while visiting heaven in his ayahuasca trips.82 Given the existence of numerous Ashaninka, Yine, and Shipibo-­Conibo narratives recounting the trips to heaven of ancient shamans or wise men, Tasorentsi’s claim would have not sounded outrageous to an indigenous audience. It would not have sat as well, however, with Adventist officials, especially since he was prophesying a quite specific date for Christ’s return. The second of Tasorentsi’s indigenous references would have been equally disturbing to Adventist ears. Following what appeared to be solid Adventist tenets, Tasorentsi warned his audience against those white people who denied Christ’s second coming and mocked Adventist food taboos. He claimed that only those who believed in God would be saved. Unbelievers, on the other hand, “would be burned” and “die like peccaries.” The first part of this statement seems to conform to the Adventist claim that, at the end of times, apostates and unbelievers will be consumed by a heavenly fire. But taken together with the announcement that unbelievers will die “like peccaries,” Tasorentsi’s assertion seems to constitute a not so subtle evocation of both Chief Sargento’s call to kill white people and “burn their bones” and Chief Bruno’s exhortation “to exterminate the white-­lipped peccaries.” I suggest that by casting white people in the exclusive role of unbelievers, Tasorentsi’s intention was to instill the idea that even if indigenous people were to renounce on moral grounds the use of violence to get rid of whites, whites would still be punished by God/Pabá through exactly the same means as the Ashaninka had used to deprive them of their vitality more than ten years earlier. It was also meant, I would argue, to press the notion that indigenous people were “more Christian” than whites and, thus, more deserving of

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God’s good will—an understanding common among recently converted native Amazonian peoples.83 Tasorentsi’s preaching suggests that although he may have been willing to renounce violence as a means of liberating his people from white-­mestizo oppression, he had no intention of relinquishing his role as a tasorentsi world transformer. This would explain why, even as late as 1928, when he met Capt. Lepecki, he continued to claim that he was “hijo del Sol,” son of the Sun god. For Chief Tasorentsi’s conversion to Adventism was not a radical born-­again kind of experience, but a new way of achieving old goals, namely, eliminating white people, transforming the world, and achieving immortality. This new strategy required preserving some of the old religious practices, including the ritual consumption of ayahuasca. Oral sources confirm that Tasorentsi regarded Adventist and Ashaninka ritual practices as being complementary ways of achieving these goals. Del Arca asserts that people believed that Stahl and Tasorentsi were “sons of Pabá,” and that both sought to achieve immortality for the Ashaninka: “The pastor by means of prayer and Tasorentsi supporting him with his ayahuasca (vegetal).”84 In other words, Tasorentsi preached what could be considered a “shamanized” version of Adventist doctrine. By framing the eschatological aspects of Adventist beliefs in a traditional shamanic context, Tasorentsi transformed the Christian message into an anti-­patrón argument. If Stahl subtly promoted the notion that he was a “white Christian shaman,” Tasorentsi not so subtly furthered the idea that he was a “shamanic native pastor.” This leads to the intriguing question of whether Tasorentsi ever really converted to Adventism or whether his shamanic and Christian beliefs were incompatible, as Lepecki believed. If we take conversion to mean the adoption of a new religious faith or viewpoint through a change of morals, attitude, and emotion, I would argue that Tasorentsi unequivocally converted to Adventism. The ultimate expression of this transformation was his renunciation of violence, which he upheld for the rest of his life. If quitting slave trading marked Tasorentsi’s first moral conversion and his transformation into a warring world transformer, then quitting violence marked his second moral conversion and his transition from war chief to people-­gatherer. However, if by conversion we mean not only embracing a new faith but also strictly adhering to its precepts, then we would have to conclude that Tasorentsi never fully converted. According to oral sources, this was the case. Nataniel Sarmiento claimed that Tasorentsi “died an unbeliever,” by which he meant that he

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was never baptized in the Adventist faith.85 Del Arca confirmed this, stating that his grandfather had once urged Tasorentsi to be baptized, but the Ashaninka chief had refused, arguing that this would mean quitting tobacco and ayahuasca and with them his capacity to communicate with Pabá.86 Elaborating on this, del Arca explained that the Mother of Ayahuasca—the plant’s spirit owner—is a jealous mistress, and if Tasorentsi had been baptized, the spirit would have abandoned him or, worse still, turned against him. Stahl must have been aware of Tasorentsi’s unorthodox preaching because by 1925 he already spoke and understood Ashaninka.87 This and the fact that Tasorentsi refused to be baptized and never gave up ayahuasca could explain why Stahl was reluctant to admit any association with him. Tasorentsi was definitely not the kind of native “worker” he had expected to train when he began missionizing in the Selva Central.88 While Stahl did not hesitate to adopt certain Ashaninka notions and mores to advance his mission, he must have been quite alarmed by the kind of shamanized Adventism that Tasorentsi had begun to preach. If we add Tasorentsi’s independent spirit—of which he gave ample proof in the following years—it is understandable why Stahl would have wished to remove him from the official history of Adventist evangelization of the Selva Central region. Tasorentsi was not the only indigenous leader “invisibilized” by official sources for not accepting Adventist doctrine in full. Such leaders, according to La Serna Salcedo, preferred to maintain a “friendly distance” from Adventist missionaries, which allowed them to benefit from the protection, favors, and goods offered by the missionaries while at the same time maintaining a large degree of political and theological autonomy.89 Around 1925, Chief Tasorentsi left Metraro to start a new phase in his life as a people-­gatherer, but it is not clear whether he was commissioned by Stahl or left of his own accord. He went downriver, preaching along the Perené, Tambo, and Ucayali Rivers as far as Contamana.90 On his way he must have met Adventist preachers Emeterio Cruzate and José Salinas because, according to one source, it was around this time that he appeared in Mozote, an oxbow lake close to the mouth of the Shahuaya River, acting as their interpreter and assistant.91 Salinas was a mestizo from the Upper Perené area, Cruzate an Afro-­Peruvian “illusionist” from the port of Callao, who was said to seduce indigenous people through his “magnetism.”92 They had supposedly been sent to the Ucayali by Stahl to preach and prepare the ground for his arrival—­ although the Adventist missionary denied this later on.

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According to an oral source, when Cruzate and Salinas arrived in Mozote accompanied by Tasorentsi and a large group of Ashaninka, many people, mostly Conibo, came to listen to them.93 Most of them believed that Stahl—of whom they had heard—and the visiting preachers were Inka gods. Cruzate and Salinas insisted through Tasorentsi and their Shipibo translators that Inka was not a god, the true God is in heaven, they were messengers and not gods, and they were Adventists waiting for Christ’s second coming. However, Tasorentsi’s preaching and his claims to have seen God must have undermined the teachings of Cruzate and Salinas. As a result, according to this source, some concluded that Tasorentsi was “a son of God” and decided to convert. Others returned to their homes disappointed that the mestizo and Indian preachers were not the expected Inka gods. Since Tasorentsi promised to return and bring a teacher, many of the new Shipibo-­Conibo and Ashaninka converts stayed in Shahuaya, where they were joined by a large number of Yine and Matsigenka people.94 However, after one or two years, when Tasorentsi did not return, many began to abandon the village. Shortly after Tasorentsi’s visit to Shahuaya, Ferdinand Stahl embarked on his first trip to Iquitos, via the Pichis Trail and the Pachitea River, with the intention of assessing the region’s potential for evangelization.95 He returned along the Upper Ucayali route in order to visit the Urubamba and Tambo Rivers and make a first contact with the Shipibo-­Conibo, Yine, and Tambo Ashaninka. The trip was a success. Stahl’s native preachers, who had been sent in advance, had done an excellent job, and wherever the German missionary went he found people “ready to hear and accept the message and anxious for schools and teachers.”96 In the area of Cheni, on the Tambo River, Stahl met an Ashaninka chief by the name of Ompikiri, who asked him for a teacher.97 Stahl promised Ompikiri that he would bring a teacher in three years’ time. In turn, the chief promised to move his village to the shores of the Tambo, so Stahl would not miss it when he returned. This encounter was going to have unexpected consequences. When Stahl finally reached Iquitos, he found white people equally well disposed towards Adventist preaching.98 This persuaded him of the need to found a new mission territory with headquarters in Iquitos. Stahl’s enthusiastic reports convinced the South American Mission Executive Board to approve, in December 1926, the opening of the Upper Amazon Mission, with Stahl as its superintendent.99 A few months later, the board approved Henry Westphal and his wife, Barbara, to do mission work in Iquitos, and invited William Schaeffler and his wife, Olga Marguerite, to open a new mission station on the Upper

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Ucayali River.100 After a one-­year furlough, in late 1927, Stahl settled in Iquitos with his wife, Ana; Danish nurse, Anna Jensen; mestizo preachers Elena Chávez, Juan Ramos, and Isaías Salazar; and the Ashaninka workers Virginia, Camacha, María, Carlos Charice, Shirunkama, and his wife, Jaromi.101 One of Stahl’s first actions as superintendent of the Upper Amazon Mission was to organize a trip, in April 1928, to determine where to establish a new mission station. He was accompanied by Peugh, head of the Inca Union. The account of their trip indicates that by 1928 the Adventist effervescence was at its height. The message of Christ’s second coming had spread to the region’s remotest corners, and wherever they went the missionaries found the Ashaninka and, to a lesser extent, the Yine and Shipibo-­Conibo gathered in large villages in the hope of seeing God and receiving a teacher. It was during this trip, as we have seen, that Chief Tasorentsi—referred to as José Carlos—visited Stahl and Peugh in Cascadas “to plead for a mission school to be established in their village.”102 A few days later, Tasorentsi and his men escorted the missionaries downriver to the village he had founded on the Upper Tambo River. Stahl and Peugh were in for a surprise, because on their arrival they found more than two hundred believers who “had already erected in the center of the village a large building suitable for a school, hoping that we might be able to furnish them a teacher.”103 The followers included men, women, and children, indicating that Chief Tasorentsi had persuaded whole families to follow him to the Tambo (see figure 28). One of Lepecki’s Polish companions asserts that Tasorentsi recruited most of these families in the Gran Pajonal region.104 This aligns with oral sources claiming that, after leaving Metraro in 1925, Tasorentsi spent some time preaching in the Gran Pajonal.105 His preaching on that occasion was powerful and persuasive. He told people that God was coming soon. He urged them: “Let’s go see God.” People asked: “What thing is God? What is he like?” . . . José Carlos said that God was like a liberator. He preached that when we believe and consecrate ourselves, God will take us to heaven. He said that God was building a house for us, that he was planting fruit for us. He said that if we are faithful we will not die, but if we are unfaithful we will die.106

After promising to do their utmost to send a teacher to Taso­rentsi’s village, Stahl and Peugh continued their trip downriver to Cheni. According to the missionaries, Tasorentsi, not satisfied with their vague

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promise, followed them to Cheni “hoping still to get something more definite from us.”107 In Cheni, Peugh and Stahl were received by four hundred Ashaninka and Yine headed by Chief Ompikiri, who, as promised, had moved his village to the shores of the Tambo River so that Stahl would not miss it.108 The missionaries’ reception was spectacular. Ompikiri and his men had built two large buildings to be used as mission house and school/church, respectively. The missionaries were impressed to see that Ompikiri’s people “had left off their vices, were keeping the Sabbath, and practicing health reform.”109 After several days during which the Ashaninka attended Stahl’s Bible classes en masse, the missionaries decided to establish the new mission in Cheni (see figure  29). It would be headed by William Schaeffler. In the meantime, however, they placed native preacher Ulises and his wife, Manuela, in charge of the mission (see figure 30).110 Another source asserts that they also left Ulises’s brother, Abel Fieta.111 Stahl’s decision triggered a chain of events that would result in the imprisonment of Chief Tasorentsi, the banishment of Ulises and Manuela, and the relocation of the Schaefflers in order to safeguard their lives. The Adventists’ activities in the region had alarmed both the local patrones and the Franciscan missionaries. White-­mestizo patrones were concerned that many of their peons were abandoning them in order to hear Stahl or his native preachers. Many did not return, and those who did refused to work on Saturdays and were less docile. Their sudden interest in having schools and learning to read, write, and count was also disturbing, since the profitability of debt-­peonage depended in great measure on their peons’ illiteracy. Franciscan missionaries were equally displeased. As early as 1925, Fr. Alberto Gridilla wrote in his diary, somewhat perplexed, about Stahl’s great success, wondering how he managed to gather so many Ashaninka wherever he went.112 Gridilla reckoned that the Adventist missionary’s preaching boded dark days for the Franciscan missions. “Protestants,” he reflected, “are better equipped than us to make converts and gain ground among Catholics. They walk with the century; we have to be towed. They cultivate medicine and sports to make themselves popular and if we want to counter their influence, we will have no other choice but to place ourselves at their same level.”113 Stahl’s decision to found a mission in Cheni, halfway between Puerto Ocopa, the region’s most important Franciscan mission, and La Huaira, the largest of the three haciendas owned by the powerful Pancho Vargas, increased suspicions about the Adventists’ intentions. Subsequent events seemed to confirm their fears. In May 1928, soon after Stahl

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and Peugh continued their trip to Iquitos, Tasorentsi moved with his people to Cheni. A month later, the police constable of Puerto Ocopa, quite alarmed, reported that seven hundred Ashaninka had gathered in Cheni under the command of “the great curaca Tasorinche, the one of the 1915 massacre.”114 Worse still, the police constable of the Urubamba noted in a later report that the company included other 1915 rebel leaders, such as chiefs Ompikiri and Napoleón.115 It is not clear whether these two chiefs embraced Adventism independently or were swayed by Tasorentsi. However, given that it was said at the time that Tasorentsi was the most important of these three chiefs,116 it is not improbable that it was he who recruited them. As soon as Tasorentsi moved to Cheni with his followers, a rumor arose that the Indians gathered there intended to attack Puerto Ocopa. Its most likely source was Pancho Vargas, a mestizo who had been the right-­ hand man and compadre of Carlos Scharff Sr., one of the region’s most powerful and ruthless patrones at the time of the rubber boom (see figure 31).117 After Scharff was killed by a group of Yine in 1909, Vargas inherited the rest of his compadre’s Yine peons and moved with them from the Piedras River to Sepa, on the Lower Urubamba. Gow asserts that Vargas spoke Yine and Ashaninka, and that he used his knowledge of indigenous mores to act as curaca, patrón, and ceremonial leader of the Yine people.118 In effect, in another instance of calculated conceptual blending, Vargas seems to have purposely integrated the notion of patrón with that of Indian chief, giving origin to a new blend, that of “chiefly patrón,” a figure more powerful and authoritarian than traditional indigenous settlement leaders, while at the same time more involved in the social and ritual life of their peons than traditional patrones. Vargas had already been plotting to get rid of the Adventist missionaries, whose preaching threatened to disrupt the status quo that so much benefited him. In April 1928, he sent his henchmen to kill Stahl while the missionary was visiting Cheni, but they failed because Stahl was surrounded by dozens of Ashaninka converts.119 A month later, Vargas accused Adventist preachers Emeterio Cruzate and José Salinas of ­enticing Ashaninka peons into moving to the Upper Tambo, where they would receive much merchandise and a school.120 Following Vargas’s orders, Samuel F. Figueroa, police constable of Puerto Ocopa, arrested the two men, accusing them of being Adventist agents intent on subverting the region’s order and attacking the Puerto Ocopa mission in connivance with the Ashaninka.121 To ensure that they would never again preach in the region, Figueroa sent them to prison in Lima.122

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Vargas’s most important move to counter Adventist influence was, however, to persuade Congressman Abraham de Rivero, representative of the Province of Ucayali, to support the creation of the District of Upper Ucayali with its capital in Atalaya, on the confluence of the Tambo and Urubamba Rivers. The district was created on February 7, 1928.123 Atalaya was founded, shortly after, on May 29, 1928, amidst great fanfare and the presence of Ucayali congressman Rivero, despite its gloomy appearance (see figure 32).124 The fact that the new town was established on lands donated by Pancho Vargas confirms that the hacendado’s main goal was to reinforce state presence in the region by creating a new district whose authorities he could easily control to protect his interests and those of his fellow patrones against Adventist missionaries and their subversive converts.125 In this he succeeded. Atalaya became the stronghold of the Upper Ucayali patrones, and the control they exerted over its authorities allowed them to continue enslaving indigenous people until well into the twentieth century.126 The congregation of a large number of Ashaninka and Yine in Cheni headed by Tasorentsi and other renowned 1915 rebel leaders provided Vargas with the pretext he needed to attack Adventists. In a telegram to Congressman Rivero, Vargas stated that indigenous people were gathering in large numbers, instigated by Protestant agents and the leaders of the 1915 uprising.127 He warned the government that the Indians intended to attack the Catholic mission of Puerto Ocopa and urged the authorities to remove the rebel leaders to avert this danger (see figure 33). At around this time, Vargas must have also informed Figueroa of this impending threat, for Capt. Lepecki reports that after visiting Tasorentsi in Cheni in May 1928, he met Figueroa, who was going downriver “to talk to Tasulinchi about the rumors circulating among Indian tribes of his plans to destroy the town and the Catholic mission in Puerto Ocopa” (emphasis in original).128 The word in italics was meant as an ironic remark, since Lepecki immediately notes that, for protection, Figueroa had brought with him “ten armed Indian thugs” under the command of Chief Cayetano, who was an infamous Ashaninka slaver.129 Lepecki was right in mistrusting Figueroa’s intentions. As soon as the police constable arrived in Cheni, he arrested native preachers Ulises and Manuela. There are up to four versions of what tran­spired on that occasion. According to Figueroa’s version, after arresting Ulises and Manuela he took them to Pancho Vargas’s house—suggesting that he had detained them under Vargas’s orders—after which he tran­sported them to Puerto Ocopa and, later on, to Jauja.130 He claims to have never

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maltreated them; he simply deported them for “disrupting social order.” In a second version, it is said that the arrested were Ulises and his brother Abel Fieta, and that their capture was ordered by two renowned slavers, the Peruvian patrón José Zevallos and his Spanish colleague Santiago Torres.131 The brothers were taken to Atalaya, where they were chained to a post and held in the open for fifteen days without food or drink. They were liberated after Stahl denounced their arrest. The third version asserts that the only person arrested was Ulises. He was arrested by policemen sent by his former patrón,132 after which he was taken to Puerto Ocopa, where he remained in prison for a month before being freed by the prefect of Junín.133 The last version, collected by John Bodley, claims that a patrón from Atalaya by the name of Perdiz ordered the arrest not only of Ulises and Manuela, but also of Tasorentsi; his wife, Santana; and Abel Fieta.134 According to this source, the captives were stripped and were kept in stocks and starved for three days until they managed to escape.135 Local patrones had good reasons to arrest Tasorentsi, whom they loathed for having led the 1915 massacre.136 It is hard to believe, however, that Figueroa or Ibarra would have captured the legendary Ashaninka leader without leaving written evidence of his arrest. It is possible, however, that we are not dealing with a single event and that the five native preachers were arrested by different agents at around the same or different times. In official spheres, it was the arrest of Ulises and Manuela that generated a flurry of accusations between, on the one hand, Pancho Vargas and his allies, mostly high-­ranking patrones and corrupt local authorities, and, on the other, Ferdinand Stahl and his supporters, mainly small patrones and a few progressive-­minded officials. Stahl immediately appealed to the prefect of Loreto asking guarantees for his personnel.137 He accompanied his appeal with a letter signed by thirty-­ three Upper Ucayali patrones, who stated that the so-­called Indian uprising was an illusion, and the disorders of previous months were the result of the actions of two Satipo colonists, Emeterio Cruzate and José Salinas, who, using his name and under the pretext of religion, had sought to recruit cheap labor.138 At around the same time, Pastor Schaeffler, who had just arrived in the Upper Ucayali and was staying in fundo Santaniari, accused Pancho Vargas of having ordered the arrest of Ulises and Manuela, and of conspiring with other patrones to prevent him from traveling to the Tambo to establish a new mission.139 For this reason, he requested guarantees for him and his wife. Since he also wrote to the US and German consulates, the minister of foreign affairs asked the prefect

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of Loreto to open an investigation to assess “the situation that reigns on the Upper Ucayali.”140 The inquiry yielded mixed results. Julio Merino Mejía, subprefect of Ucayali, reported that after visiting the area in June 1928, he had found “no evidence of an Ashaninka uprising in the Upper Ucayali,” and that since the arrest of Cruzate and Salinas no other incidents had been reported in the region.141 In contrast, Leonidas Ibarra, police constable of the Urubamba River, reported that Schaeffler was promoting the gathering of large numbers of Indians in fundo Santaniari, that he had no documents authorizing him to hold such meetings, and that his preaching had encouraged the Indians to attack their patrones.142 Ibarra concludes by saying that he forbade Schaeffler to continue holding religious meetings in Santaniari and told him to go some other place to proselytize; otherwise, he would arrest him for contempt. Fearing Ibarra’s threats, the Schaefflers moved downriver to Masisea.143 In view of these contradictory reports, Merino commissioned 2nd Lt. Carlos Gensollen of the Civil Guard to travel to the Upper Ucayali to offer guarantees to the Schaefflers and investigate the whereabouts of native preachers Ulises and Manuela.144 By chance, in Contamana, Gensollen boarded the same ship in which Stahl was traveling from Iquitos to the Upper Ucayali to intercede for his personnel.145 On their way upriver, Gensollen struck up a friendship with Stahl and gathered positive information on the Adventist missionaries. They traveled together to the Tambo River, where they had their picture taken, probably in Colonia Pira—one of Pancho Vargas’s posts on the Lower Tambo (see figure 34).146 This picture seems to feature chiefs Ompikiri and Tasorentsi (compare with figures 3 and 28), which suggests that the Ashaninka leaders traveled from Cheni to meet Gensollen and accompany him upriver. Afterwards, Gensollen continued his trip to Cheni to further assess the situation. His report was devastating.147 The officer asserts that it is false that the inhabitants of the Upper Ucayali oppose an Adventist presence. Most are happy with the fact that the missionaries teach Indians to distinguish between good and evil, to read and write, to count money, and not to drink. It is only a small group of patrones, mostly friends and relatives of Francisco Vargas, who oppose them with the support of a few corrupt authorities. This group is against Adventists instructing their peons because once “civilized” they would have to pay them not with merchandise as they currently do, but with a proper salary. Gensollen accuses Police Constable Ibarra of being a puppet in Vargas’s pay and committing all kinds of abuses against the

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Adventist missionaries and indigenous converts, thus infringing those constitutional articles that guarantee freedom of worship and the right to assemble, and which forbid slavery and imprisonment by debt. Despite this important victory, in late September 1928 Stahl decided to abandon the idea of establishing a mission in Cheni. The opposition to Adventist presence was too strong and the risks for his personnel were too high. Instead, he instructed Schaeffler to open the mission in Santaniari and encouraged the Ashaninka and Yine gathered in Cheni to move to the new site as soon as possible.148 Tasorentsi, Ompikiri, and Napoleón must have done so almost immediately since, shortly after, they were mentioned as living in Santaniari (see figures 35 and 36).149 Schaeffler describes the arrival of one of these Ashaninka chiefs accompanied by twenty men, claiming that although he was “one of the leaders in the Campa uprising of 1916 [sic]” and a known murderer, “God changes the heart of the most degenerate person.”150 However, many of these chiefs’ supporters must have refused to follow them or did not stay in Santaniari for too long, because a year later, in August 1929, Barbara Westphal reported that the mission had a stable population of one hundred, which increased to two hundred on Sabbaths.151 This was a far cry from the seven hundred that were said to be gathered in Cheni in May 1928. Was it a sign that the Adventist effervescence had begun to fizzle? It is quite possible. The arrest and torture of native preachers, the persecution of Stahl and Schaeffler, and the lack of materialization of Christ’s second coming must have discouraged at least some of the early converts. In contrast, the increasing antagonism between patrones and peons had the effect of exacerbating indigenous world-­transforming expectations. In his meeting with Capt. Lepecki in May 1928, Tasorentsi had told the Polish officer that he was waiting for Ferdinand Stahl, who had promised to return “with a great boat filled with knives, axes, machetes and firearms [to] create an Indian pueblo.” His assertion betrays some of the magical elements typically associated with “cargo cults,” the Melanesian belief system based on the expected arrival of ancestral spirits in large ships bringing cargoes of food and other valued goods.152 But it also exalts the idea of a utopian urban world in which indigenous people will live in a town of their own, separated from white people and with all the advantages associated with modern cities: schools, health posts, and stores. Tasorentsi also told the Polish explorer that they were quiet people and wanted to live in peace with the whites. “The only thing we don’t want,” he added, “is patrones and Pancho Vargas. He is an evil man. He always

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wants us to give him our children, and we don’t want to give our children to anybody. We want to raise them ourselves.”153 Not only does this statement constitute a strong condemnation of Vargas and his slaving activities but, above all, it expresses Tasorentsi’s determination to put an end to slavery in order to restore the lost equilibrium in their long-­lasting struggle for vitality with white people. As Gow notes, however, by distinguishing Pancho Vargas from other patrones, Chief Tasorentsi was also underscoring Vargas’s peculiar status as a “chiefly patrón,” that is, a man doubly treacherous insofar as he ensured his Yine peons’ allegiance by acting as an indigenous headman.154 In the following months, a more radical version of Tasorentsi’s utopian message began to circulate throughout the region. In October 1928, the police constable of the Urubamba River reported that a group of sixty Yine peons who had escaped from Pancho Vargas’s fundo in Sepa claimed that they had done so at the behest of Carlos Scharff—owner of fundo Santaniari and son of the rubber baron of the same name— who had sent word that “the god Stahl” had arrived bringing plenty of merchandise and calling them to join him in Santaniari.155 The fugitive peons further reported that Scharff’s messenger had told them that “those who did not obey would die in the burning earth [and] that a steam launch would arrive by air throwing bombs over San Pablo, Atalaya, La Huaira and Sepa, wiping out all white people” (see figure 37).156 Other rumors circulating among Yine people at around this time asserted that “when the sky steamboat arrives, it will bring all the wealth that could be wanted, and then truly, we will be without bosses.”157 In both cases, hand in hand with the cargo cult theme was a clear indication that the arrival of the “flying steamboat” would bring about the destruction and obliteration of white-­mestizo people and, particularly, that of Pancho Vargas, who owned three of the four fundos mentioned in Stahl’s supposed message. At around the same time, Figueroa, the police constable of Puerto Ocopa, informed the subprefect of Ucayali that Indian workers were restless because of Stahl’s calls urging them to abandon their patrones or face punishment by God, “who, according to the German missionary, will scorch the land, dry up the rivers, and burn the forests.”158 In a later report to the prefect of Loreto, Figueroa claimed that Adventist preachers also “invite the mobs to go [to Santaniari] to hear God’s word, claiming that Viracochas and white people in general are worthless, and that only Adventists will live in the Ucayali and other rivers.”159 It is hard to believe that either Stahl, Schaeffler, or Scharff was the origin of

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these radical messages. However much they disapproved of the abuses and slaving activities of Pancho Vargas and his cronies, they would have refrained from attacking them frontally, knowing that this would make their already fragile position within a still strongly Catholic country totally untenable. It is also unlikely that Vargas’s associates invented the messages, since these contain elements already reported by other sources more sympathetic to the indigenous peoples’ plight. The most likely origin of these subversive messages is, thus, Chief Tasorentsi himself, who by then had already moved to Santaniari and was uncompromising when it came to Pancho Vargas and other white-­mestizo slavers. As we have seen, the Ashaninka leader had already told Lepecki how much he disliked Vargas. He had also preached that white people would be burned and die like peccaries. And he is said to have claimed that “evil patrones would be destroyed,” after he was arrested and tortured in Atalaya.160 The messages that started circulating around October 1928 were only more radical versions of the end of times as Chief Tasorentsi envisioned it—a world devoid of “evil patrones” and slavers, who would be wiped out by bombs thrown by a “flying boat,” an image that undoubtedly originated from news of the first two airplanes that landed in San Ramón on October 26, 1927 (see figure 38);161 a world where indigenous people would live in towns with schools, stores, clinics, and plenty of merchandise that would magically arrive in large boats; a world, in brief, in which Indians would live in peace with friendly whites while awaiting to be lifted to heaven to live in the house that God/Pabá was building for them, surrounded by fine manioc and banana plantations,162 and forever young and healthy thanks to the life-­giving waters of the river of life that flows through the City of God. These ominous indigenous prophecies had the effect of alarming the region’s elite even more. Instigated by Pancho Vargas, Eduardo Arróspide, the new police constable of the Tambo and Upper Ucayali rivers, accused Adventist missionaries of “sowing panic and terror” in the region, and of twice sending their Ashaninka converts to kill him.163 A number of Vargas’s allies wrote to the police constable of Urubamba accusing Adventist missionaries of seducing their peons with their preaching, and denouncing indigenous converts for attacking their fundos, stealing their goods, and trying to kill them.164 In response to these complaints, the prefect of Loreto sent a damning report on Adventist activities to the minister of foreign affairs.165 He asserted that Adventist missionaries—foreigners of dubious nationality—were subverting Indian peons, inciting them to disobey their patrones; that they used their so-­called schools to instill dangerous

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Bolshevik ideas; and that they were disturbing the existing order. As a result, he claimed, Indians were committing all kinds of crimes against their patrones, and many had abandoned them without paying their debts. He warned that the Upper Ucayali patrones were uniting to defend their interests, and expressed his fear that one day they could kill the missionaries, generating a diplomatic incident of unforeseen repercussions with the United States. He concluded by asking the minister to persuade the US and German consuls to remove their missionaries or, were this not possible, to allow him to expel them from the region. Without waiting for an answer, shortly after, the prefect of Loreto ordered the Santaniari mission to be closed.166 This situation did not last long. A few weeks later, the government forced the prefect to reopen it,167 but the antagonism against Adventist preachers did not decline. If anything, it became more virulent. In view of the mounting pressures, a year later, on March 10, 1930, the Executive Board of the Inca Union decided, by recommendation of Superintendent Stahl, to close the Santaniari mission and authorize William Schaeffler to move to Cascadas on the Perené River. This put an end to the Adventist experiment in the Upper Ucayali.

Eight

Twilight Years of an Old World Transformer, 1930–1958

People continued walking in the hope of finding the Promised Land. Chief Ca r los Pérez Shum a

T

he Inca Union’s decision to close Santaniari and send Pastor William Schaeffler to Cascadas must have been a hard blow for indigenous believers. The news that Adventist missionaries were fleeing the region because of pressure from the patrones must have caused misgivings about their power and the veracity of their prophecies, particularly those related to Christ’s second coming and the bombing of white people’s towns. Many of the devotees that had been gathered in Cheni by chiefs Tasorentsi, Ompikiri, and Napoleón had already returned to their homes, discouraged by the patrones’ constant threats and harassment. Schaeffler’s sudden exit from the Upper Ucayali, followed by native preachers Ompikiri, Napoleón, Ulises Díaz, Manuela, and Abel Fieta,1 further dampened indigenous enthusiasm. Of Santaniari’s original population of about two hundred, only eighty followed Schaeffler to Cascadas.2 The closure of Santaniari and the Adventist retreat to the Perené region marks the end of the first wave of Adventist effervescence in the region, which, according to La Serna Salcedo, had peaked in August 1929 with the mass baptism of hundreds of Ashaninka converts in Cascadas, on the Perené River.3 In subsequent years, Seventh-­ Day Adventism would continue to grow but at a much slower pace, partly because in 1930 the Adventist hierarchy decided to detach the Perené area from the Upper Amazon Mission in order to create the Peruvian Mission,4 [ 157 ]

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thus effectively taking the Ashaninka missions away from Stahl’s control, and partly because the 1929–1939 Great Depression and the subsequent shrinkage of resources forced it to put a stop to the rapid expansion it had promoted until then. Not all native people-­gatherers followed Schaeffler to Cascadas, however. Chief Tasorentsi, Shirunkama, and his wife, Jaromi, stayed on the Upper Ucayali, where they continued to preach their indigenized version of Adventist doctrine. According to oral sources, in 1929, shortly before the closure of Santaniari, Tasorentsi married Lucrecia Pérez.5 Given that from then onward his previous wife, Santana, disappears from the written and oral records, it is to be assumed that they separated. According to Segundo Arroyo, when his parents met, his mother, Lucrecia, was a criada of Jaime Morón de la Fuente, Chief Tasorentsi’s first boss. She had been captured in the Upper Pichis valley when she was a child and sold on the Unini to Morón. According to their youngest son, in order to redeem Lucrecia’s debts, free her “from slavery,” and marry her, Chief Tasorentsi worked as a peon for Morón. There is indirect evidence, however, that Tasorentsi may have chosen the more expeditious method of eloping with Lucrecia without paying her debt to Morón, since we know that on several occasions Morón accused the Adventists of Santaniari of stealing his peons.6 Either way, the marriage was very productive; the new young wife bore the fifty-­four-­year-­old chief eleven children in the following seventeen years.7 We know little about Chief Tasorentsi’s personal life during the Santaniari years, but what little we do know, we owe to Barbara Osborne Westphal, one of the few persons who left a written account of her encounter with the Ashaninka world transformer. The adventurous missionary wife met Tasorentsi in August 1929 while visiting Santaniari in the company of her husband, Henry Westphal. Her remarks on Chief Tasorentsi reveal to us a domestic facet of the Ashaninka leader’s life that seldom appears in written or oral sources. According to Westphal, Tasorentsi by then was the most important of the three Ashaninka pinkatsari living in Santaniari. “The others consult him,” she claimed, “and all the Campas recognize his authority.”8 Westphal was quite fond of Tasorentsi, whom she called Tasolinchi. “He is a good chief,” she reported, “wise in Indian lore and skillful in all their arts. He can make good canoes, oars, beadwork, or build a house, stuff birds, make combs, baskets and mats, and of course he is a good shot.”9 She then goes on to recount how, when Tasorentsi and his men organized a shooting display for her with their bows and arrows, they never missed the target. Although these traits are not surprising in a

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pinkatsari, they reveal that in Ashaninka society even noted leaders were not exempt from the activities of the daily life of common men. Making a strong and beautiful mat would have been as important a sign of masculine skill as leading a war party. Tasorentsi’s masculinity did not prevent him, however, from being tender. Westphal reports that one day, when he thought no one was looking, she saw Tasorentsi playing with little Grace, the Schaefflers’ one-­and-­a-­half-­year-­old daughter, pulling her around in a little wooden cart,10 an image difficult to reconcile with that of “the bloody Tasulinchi” popularized by local patrones. Perhaps the most startling revelation by Westphal is her assertion that Chief Tasorentsi was deeply indebted to a former patrón. She does not say who this patrón was but notes sympathetically, “Poor Tasolinchi has a debt of seven hundred and seventy soles to his former patrón, a price that no Indian can hope to pay even in a lifetime. He contracted this debt by buying a shotgun, a knife, a pair of overalls, and other things from the patrón at exorbitant prices.”11 Was this a new or an old debt? Was it the debt he had incurred with Morón while he was a young man? Or was it related to Tasorentsi’s attempt to redeem Lucrecia’s debts in order to marry her? Westphal does not say. It is evident, however, that despite his many years fighting white patrones or preaching against them, Tasorentsi had not been able to escape the old debt-­ peonage trap. The decision to quit working for the patrones would come some years later, once more pitting the Ashaninka leader against Pancho Vargas and the region’s elite. On this occasion, however, Tasorentsi was lucky because his friend, Carlos Lehman, the owner of fundo Santaniari, offered to pay his debt, provided Tasorentsi and his men “would clear and plant a big chacra for him.”12 This suggests that having quit the slave trade and being heavily indebted, Chief Tasorentsi had few means of obtaining cash or basic foreign goods, other than his capacity to mobilize his followers’ labor force—which in native Amazonia is one of the main forms of wealth13—or deepening his friendship with the Adventist missionaries. When Schaeffler abandoned Santaniari in 1930, Chief José Carlos moved with his family and followers to Chicotsa, where he continued to preach and gather people.14 We know nothing about his stay in Chicotsa, but the Ashaninka pinkatsari could not have missed the irony of him preaching about the peaceful attainment of immortality in the same place that he and his warriors had attacked fifteen years earlier. Chief Tasorentsi did not stay in Chicotsa for long. Shortly afterward, prob­ ably in 1931, the group moved to Shahuaya, where Tasorentsi had first

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preached in 1925 in the company of Emeterio Cruzate and Abel Salinas. He was well received by the people living in Boca de Shahuaya—the mouth of the Shahuaya—who were an assortment of Ashaninka, Mayoruna, and Cashibo people who had been robbed by Conibo slave raiders when they were children and now lived independently, often married to Conibo spouses.15 This time, however, the Ashaninka leader decided to settle farther upriver along the Shahuaya so as to avoid contact with the Ucayali patrones. In this area, he found a group of four Ashaninka families, who soon became loyal followers.16 Tasorentsi’s stay in Shahuaya was brief but quite eventful. In a very short time he managed to attract a large number of Ashaninka, Yine, and Matsigenka people.17 According to Polish settler Marja Bochdan-­ Niedenthal, this and the gathering of another large group of Ashaninka on the Sheshea River led local patrones to conclude that indigenous people were intent once more on expelling them from the region.18 When a group of Shipibo-­Conibo arrived in Cumaría in October 1931 asserting that the gathered Ashaninka intended to attack the nearby fundos Vainilla and Arica, panic spread very rapidly throughout the region. Many ucayalino families fled their fundos and headed to Cumaría in search of refuge. “We then saw,” claimed Bochdan-­Niedenthal at the time, “how fearful are the whites living in these areas: the women were shaken by spasms, the men were ready to flee wherever possible, the local police believed itself to be lost in advance.”19 When the attack did not materialize, however, calm slowly returned to the region. Sometime later, Chief Tasorentsi departed to Contamana to study at the Adventist Sabbath School that had been recently established there (see figure 39).20 Before leaving, he promised the people of Shahuaya he would come back to found a mission with a proper school and teacher. We do not know why he made this decision. Was it because he feared retaliation for the disruption his preaching had caused in the region? Was he attracted by the material advantages he could obtain from the Adventist mission? Or was he urged by Stahl, because he thought that the Ashaninka leader was still too pagan and needed further indoctrination? If the last was true, then Stahl’s ploy did not quite work. Chief Tasorentsi was definitely not prepared to renounce his status as a world transformer. Oral sources state that when he left Shahuaya for Contamana, Tasorentsi took with him twelve Ashaninka followers.21 Most of them belonged to the four interrelated Ashaninka families he had recruited on the Shahuaya River.22 That they were twelve does not seem to be a mere coincidence. By taking with him twelve followers, it seems clear

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that Chief Tasorentsi intended to suggest a resemblance between himself and Jesus Christ in order to legitimize and enhance his ascendancy. The parallelism was not difficult to establish: both figures claimed to be sons of God, both acted as emissaries of their divine fathers, both appeared to their followers as liberators and bringers of immortality, and now both were accompanied by twelve disciples. There is no evidence that Tasorentsi ever claimed to be Jesus Christ returned to this earth. But by choosing to go to Contamana accompanied by twelve disciples he was clearly hinting at the fact that he and Jesus Christ occupied similar positions. This would account, at least partly, for the enormous success of his subsequent preaching activities. Tasorentsi’s stay in Contamana, the capital of the Province of Ucayali, was fraught with conflicts. In May 1928, the two Catholic priests that served the town left, one to retire, the other promoted to another post.23 Franciscan missionary Valentín Uriarte warned that this loss could favor the Protestant agents that were already preaching so effectively in the region.24 He was correct. Taking advantage of the absence of Catholic priests, Ferdinand Stahl promoted Juan P. Ramos to the position of missionary licentiate, with the responsibility of opening a new mission in Contamana.25 Ramos was a young mestizo man whom Stahl had recruited while missionizing at the Perené Colony.26 He was one of the three mestizo preachers that followed the Adventist missionary when he moved to Iquitos in November 1927.27 Ramos settled in Contamana with his wife, Catalina, in September 1928.28 His presence generated a strong reaction from the Catholic population and local authorities, who at one point forbade him from holding Sabbath school classes.29 Despite their constant harassment, however, Ramos was quite successful in gathering around him a small group of white-­mestizo devotees. Chief José Carlos seems to have been impervious to the hostility between Catholics and Adventists that characterized his stay in Contamana, since there is no written or oral evidence indicating that he ever preached against the Catholic Church or its priests, perhaps because of his acquaintance with Fr. Gabriel Sala and the Franciscan priests of San Luis de Shuaro when he was a young man. Tasorentsi’s sympathy towards the Franciscans, or at least his lack of prejudices against them, seems to be confirmed by the fact that during the 1912–1915 hostilities the rebels never attacked Franciscan missions, the only exception being the 1914 siege of the Apurucayali mission. If we are to trust Franciscan sources, however, the Ashaninka rebels made it clear that this attack was not against the missionaries, but against the rubber patrones whom the

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missionaries were hiding.30 Thus, it seems clear that Chief Tasorentsi did not assume as his the Adventist hostility toward the Catholic Church. During his stay in Contamana, Tasorentsi and his followers attended Juan Ramos’s Sabbath school and preached in the neighboring Indian villages. According to oral sources, however, he did much more than simply study the Adventist doctrine. Alcides Calderón claims that in those years the Ashaninka leader was recruited to fight in the Peru– Colombia War. The conflict had started on September 1, 1932, when a group of forty-­eight loretano civilians attacked and seized the town of Leticia on the Amazon River.31 Founded by Peruvians in 1867, Leticia had been ceded to Colombia in 1922 under the terms of the Salomón– Lozano treaty, an event that most loretanos regarded as an unconsulted and shameful cession of their territories by the central government. Hostilities between the two countries lasted less than a year, until April 1933, when President Luis Miguel Sánchez Cerro was murdered by a political opponent and the new president, General Oscar Benavides, initiated peace conversations with Colombia. The war ended with the withdrawal of the Peruvian troops from Leticia on June 25, 1933. Calderón claims that when the war broke out, Chief Tasorentsi was recruited, together with other renowned Ashaninka war chiefs of the Upper Pichis River, “to help the loretanos fight Colombia.” This would not have been totally impossible. We know that Sánchez Cerro had ordered the army’s high command to recruit local men since he believed that coastal and highland soldiers would not be able to stand the Amazon jungle’s harsh conditions.32 We also know that by the end of 1932 the army had ordered the recruitment of at least 225 men from the Ucayali region.33 Most of these men were to be, however, new recruits (between twenty-­one and twenty-­five years old) or reservists (between twenty-­six and thirty years old).34 Although it is possible that the army also recruited at least some men from the so-­called territorial army, that is, men between thirty and fifty years old, at fifty-­seven Chief Tasorentsi would have been too old even for this category. If Tasorentsi’s recruitment is a matter of debate, his alleged war deeds are even more improbable. According to Calderón: My grandfather told me that when the war with Colombia broke out many paisanos went to help the iquiteños. Tasorentsi was one of the paisanos that was recruited for the war. Also the Sharevas. They say that the Colombians arrived in Iquitos in their war boats. When they landed, the cowardly iquiteños fled and the Colombians took away

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their rifles. Tasorentsi had gone to Iquitos with fifty Ashaninka warriors. So he ambushed the Colombians. When they started to shoot at them, the Colombians locked themselves in their boat. Then, Tasorentsi picked up an axe and started making a hole in the boat: po, po, po, po, po. When he finally managed to open a hole, water flowed in and all the Colombian soldiers died. This is how Peruvians won the war. When the Colombians stopped coming and asked for peace, Tasorentsi and his warriors returned home.35

There are several historical inaccuracies in this account. Colombian warships never reached Iquitos during the war. No Colombian warship was ever sunk during the conflict, though some were bombed by Peru’s naval air force.36 Colombia was not the one to ask for peace. And no one really won the war. When the war broke out, both countries were ill prepared to sustain a long war effort, and when, at Peru’s request, peace was agreed upon they went back to the boundaries established by the Salomón–Lozano treaty.37 We will probably never know for sure whether Tasorentsi participated in the Peru–Colombia War, or under what condition. What is worth noting, however, is that whether he did or not, his fame as an experienced war chief was so great that the Ashaninka did not hesitate to include him in the war effort in a heroic role. While Tasorentsi was in Contamana, other Adventist preachers continued to work actively in the area. In July 1929, after a long stay in Iquitos with the Stahls, during which time he painfully learned how to read and write, Shirunkama and his wife, Jaromi, decided to go to the Upper Ucayali to preach among their fellow Ashaninka.38 They disembarked in fundo Vainilla, not far away from Boca de Shahuaya. A few months later, Henry Westphal—who was visiting Santaniari—heard rumors that a large number of Ashaninka were gathering on the Aruya, a tributary of the Shahuaya, waiting for a “pastor.” Other rumors said that the Indians were gathering to attack white people. As a result, local patrones had announced they would kill any Evangelical who came near their fundos. To assess the truth of these rumors, in October 1929 Westphal decided to visit the place where the Ashaninka were gathering. On arriving in Aruya, he was surprised to see not only that Shirunkama had managed to gather a large number of Ashaninka in the new mission but, above all, that the humble preacher had experienced a striking personal transformation and was now acting as a determined Ashaninka pinkatsari (see figure 40).39 Westphal reports that Shirunkama and his followers had cleared twenty acres of forest and were now planting cotton, which

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they intended to sell to the river merchants. At nights, men and women studied “the word of God” and sang the hymns that Shirunkama had taught them. Westphal reports that he was struck by the earnestness the Ashaninka manifested in their prayers, and the heartfelt hope with which they expected Christ’s second coming. He would have been even more surprised had he known that Shirunkama also held ayahuasca ceremonies in the expectation of speeding up God’s return.40 The people of Aruya pleaded for a teacher, but Westphal could do little more than promise to convey their wishes. At around the same time, Rufino Pacho and his wife, Felicia, established another mission among the Shipibo at the mouth of the Roaboya River, one day upriver from Contamana. Pacho was one of the Aymara converts that Stahl had brought from Puno in 1921 to help him missionize in the Perené Colony.41 He had worked for many years as a paid teacher assistant in Metraro42 and in 1930 was transferred to Loreto, charged with establishing a new mission station on the Ucayali River.43 This he achieved a year later, with the establishment of the mission post Ebenezer on the Roaboya River. In 1931, when Stahl visited Ebenezer in the Auxiliadora, the Upper Amazon Mission’s motorboat, he found that Pacho was running a day school with seventy-­nine students, was holding regular Sabbath meetings, and had instructed forty-­one converts, whom Stahl immediately proceeded to baptize (see figure 41).44 By then the mission had a population of around one hundred Shipibo, a nice schoolhouse, and a large church building.45 It also attracted many Ashaninka and Yine, who went to Ebenezer to hear Pacho preach at his Sabbath school.46 After living in Contamana for more than two years, Chief Tasorentsi returned to Shahuaya sometime in 1933.47 During his absence Stahl had visited the mission once, curing the sick and presenting people with knives and axes.48 Then came a period recalled by the Shahuaya converts as “the years of silence,” when many left the area and others kept only some of the Adventist observances while waiting for Tasorentsi’s return. When Tasorentsi finally came back from Contamana, he decided to reestablish the mission on the right bank of the Shahuaya River, across the Pastal de Picón (Picón’s Pastures).49 By then, according to Bodley, Tasorentsi had begun to preach that God would come in one or two years and people should believe in him if they wanted to attain immortality.50 To keep converts focused on this message, he instituted a religious program similar to that held in Metraro. This included morning and evening worship services, Sabbath observances, and Bible classes. This closer adherence to Adventist practices did not prevent

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him, however, from holding ayahuasca sessions in the hope of communicating with God. Tasorentsi’s blended religious discourse seems to have been quite effective, for shortly after settling in Shahuaya he managed to gather in the new mission all the Ashaninka families dispersed in the area.51 As word spread that the son of Pabá was preaching in Shahuaya, other Ashaninka families from the Satipo, Perené, Gran Pajonal, and Pichis areas joined him. In Meyando Vásquez’s words: “Once more, people flocked to Shahuaya to see God.”52 In a short time the new mission grew to have around forty families, that is, close to two hundred people, a very large settlement by Ashaninka standards.53 On the Sabbath, this figure increased even more, for many of the Conibo from Boca de Shahuaya started to attend services in the upriver mission. In the process, they were converted to Tasorentsi’s brand of Adventism and became part of his following. To avoid close contact with the patrones, whom his Ashaninka followers feared and mistrusted, Tasorentsi had opted to locate the new mission far from the Ucayali River. He was determined to keep Arístides Trigoso, the area’s closest patrón, as far away from the new mission as possible.54 The owner of fundo Vainilla, near Cumaría, Trigoso was a renowned slaver.55 Before the mission was established, he used to visit the Shahuaya River periodically, bringing merchandise and giving it away among the local population in exchange for work clearing and weeding his chacras in Vainilla.56 Tasorentsi put an end to these exchanges. His years in Contamana seem to have convinced him that it was not worth working for the patrones. According to Pérez Shuma, Tasorentsi used to tell his followers, “Don’t work for the patrones anymore. We must put an end to their deceits.”57 His fellow people-­ gatherer, Shirunkama, seems to have undergone a similar process after living for some time in Iquitos, for both of them told their followers that they should form their own villages and work for themselves. It is worth noting, however, that neither Tasorentsi nor Shirunkama incited his followers to disengage from the market economy and return to a state of self-­subsistence. On the contrary, they encouraged a more direct participation in the region’s economic activities as independent cash crop producers—an economic strategy that Adventist missionaries would only start promoting in earnest ten years later.58 Tasorentsi urged his followers to plant rice, Shirunkama to cultivate cotton.59 Both leaders advised their followers to sell their crops to river merchants rather than to local patrones, and to weigh their products themselves in order to avoid being cheated. Soon, in addition to rice, the Shahuya converts

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began to trade maize, beans, and hides with the river merchants who visited the area in their canoes.60 The Ucayali patrones continued to arrive in Shahuaya in search of peons, but the Ashaninka refused to work for them, for the patrones forced them to work on the Sabbath, which they had begun to keep.61 To compensate for the loss of access to industrial goods entailed by refusing to work for local patrones, Chief Tasorentsi resumed his role as a trader, acting as a middleman between the interior and riverine indigenous populations.62 Displaying the same gifts that he had shown as a young man and taking advantage of his vast network of relations, the Ashaninka leader obtained spun cotton, cushmas, wax, and tar from the Gran Pajonal and Upper Pichis Ashaninka, and traded these items with the Boca de Shahuya Conibo for machetes, knives, clothes, powder, shot, and mirrors. The Conibo had access to these goods through their salted paiche trade with the local patrones. Although at the time the Conibo wore European clothes, they still used cushmas for sleeping. Since spinning cotton and weaving were burdensome, heavy tasks that Conibo women preferred not to perform, they bought their cushmas from the Ashaninka. To adapt them to their tastes, the Conibo dyed them black and then decorated them with their characteristic geometric designs. Ashaninka cushmas were highly valued, being exchanged at the rate of one cushma for two and a half kilos of shot, or one machete, or two knives. Through this active interregional trade, Chief Tasorentsi was able to achieve the triple purpose of shielding his Ashaninka followers from direct contact with the Ucayali patrones, providing them with a steady flow of manufactured goods, and spreading the news of God’s return throughout a vaster region. Chief Tasorentsi also used his powers as a middleman to persuade his followers to engage in profitable collective contracts. According to Segundo Arroyo, his uncle Agustín Napoléon told him that during those years he and Tasorentsi had taken a contract to build the first Pucallpa airstrip. “Your father,” Napoleón claimed, “built this landing strip, the first in Pucallpa, when it was still a fearsome forest. He took that contract in 1920. He went with his Shipibo and Ashaninka people. And he finished it further upriver from Pucallpa.”63 Agustín Napoleón is the same Ashaninka chief who joined Tasorentsi in the 1915 uprising and who, after converting to Adventism, followed Tasorentsi, first to Cheni and later on to Santaniari. He was, therefore, one of Tasorentsi’s closest associates, and except for the fact that the Pucallpa airstrip was built in 1934 and not in 1920, Napoleón’s account fits well with what we know about the history of this airport.

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According to Franciscan historian Dionisio Ortiz, the naval air force first built a landing strip in Pucallpa in 1932 or 1933, during the Peru– Colombia War.64 But the airstrip was badly designed and apparently never used. In 1934, the Franciscan missionary Fr. José Aguirrezábal attempted to persuade the authorities of Pucallpa to build a better airport, with the idea of turning the town into a major Amazonian air hub. Since the authorities were unresponsive, he took it upon himself to build the airstrip. With the help of sixty Shipibo men from the neighboring Franciscan mission of Yarinacocha, he started construction in June or July 1934.65 The airstrip was finished in only four months, and, according to Ortiz, the Indian workers were paid in “cloth and other merchandise.”66 It is quite possible that the Shipibo of Yarinacocha were not the only indigenous men to have been involved in the project, and that Fr. Aguirrezábal hired other indigenous workers, including Chief Tasorentsi and his Ashaninka and Shipibo-­ Conibo followers. This would have been a great opportunity for Tasorentsi and his men, who, having quit working for the patrones, would not have had many alternative sources of manufactured goods. After Tasorentsi returned to Shahuaya in 1933, Stahl started visiting the mission in his launch every year.67 Each time he came, the local Ashaninka and Conibo asked him for a teacher. Finally, around 1937, Stahl appointed Martín Urquía, a Shipibo teacher/preacher trained in Ebenezer, to serve in Shahuaya. Urquía stayed in Shahuaya for less than a year, teaching at the small school the local converts had built for him. He was replaced in 1938 by Isaías Salazar, who had converted to Adventism in 1921 after listening to Stahl preach while he was a young boy living on the outskirts of the Perené Colony.68 Salazar had accompanied Stahl and his wife to Iquitos in November 1927.69 Before being appointed to Shahuaya, he had been preaching in a Conibo settlement located on the upper branches of the Iparía River.70 To avoid flooding, shortly after Salazar settled in Shahuaya, Chief Tasorentsi decided to move the mission across the river, to the Pastal de Picón.71 There, the local converts built a large two-­story mission house whose ground floor was used as a school and the upper floor as a church.72 Neither Urquía nor Salazar is listed as a paid member of the Upper Amazon Mission in the Seventh-­ Day Adventist Yearbooks of the 1930s and 1940s, so we must assume that they were paid or maintained by the local converts themselves in accordance with the Adventist policy of promoting the mission self-­sufficiency established by the Inca Union in the early 1930s.73 Since its beginning, Shahuaya attracted many runaway slaves who had escaped from their patrones to live independently.74 The same was

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true of Aruya.75 This had caused much discontent among the local patrones, some of whom, as we have seen, had even threatened to kill any Adventist preacher who dared enter their fundos. The establishment of a school in the new Pastal mission aggravated this situation. The school proved to be a powerful enticement for those indigenous families who wanted their children to learn how to read and write, so the flow of fugitive peons seeking greater autonomy and an education grew even larger. At the same time, the school increased the patrones’ loathing of Adventist preachers, since until then illiteracy had been the key element that had allowed them to control and exploit their laborers. Tasorentsi’s constant denunciation of indigenous slavery must have also been a thorn in their side. We know that by 1931, after the first wave of Adventist effervescence, at least some Upper Ucayali Ashaninka chiefs resumed their slaving activities in complicity with local patrones.76 These Indian slavers captured women and children on the Perené, Ene, and Pangoa Rivers, which they then sold in the Upper Ucayali. Chief Tasorentsi’s attempts at persuading these chiefs to quit the slave business must have increased the animosity of those patrones who, like Pancho Vargas, were involved in slave raiding and trafficking. The stage was therefore set for a final confrontation between Chief Tasorentsi and the Upper Ucayali patrones. According to Meyando Vásquez, in 1938, shortly after the mission was moved across the river, a large number of Yine people from the Sepahua and Tambo Rivers came to settle in Shahuaya.77 Many were debt-­peons who had fled at night from fundo Sepa, owned by Pancho Vargas (see figure 42). The fugitives said that they had come to hear more about “the word of God.” Soon, there were more than one hundred Yine in the Pastal mission. Vásquez claims that Pancho Vargas wrote to Chief Tasorentsi and Salazar, asking them to return his peons, arguing that they could not leave his fundo without first settling their debts. To protect the Yine fugitives from Vargas, the Ashaninka leader told them to hide in a chacra on the other side of a nearby hill. Shortly after, Vargas came looking for his peons. Since Salazar and Tasorentsi refused to tell him the whereabouts of the fugitives, Vargas was forced to return to Atalaya empty-­handed. Sometime later, however, Vargas obtained an order from the Atalaya police constable allowing him to seize his peons and punish Tasorentsi and Salazar for hiding them. He arrived in Shahuaya accompanied by several guards, took his peons, and had Chief Tasorentsi and Salazar arrested.78 There are three versions of what happened next. Bullón Páucar claims that the prisoners were tied to a tree in Atalaya’s central plaza and whipped until they passed out.79 When they recovered, their captors tried

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to force them to drink manioc beer and eat forbidden meats in an attempt to break them down. Almost a week later, when Salazar’s wife heard of her husband’s arrest, she informed Stahl. Thanks to the missionary’s intervention, the prisoners were finally released. According to a second version told by Carlos Pérez Shuma, the “colonists” who had arrested him, hanged Tasorentsi from his arms, beat him, and hurt him everywhere.80 But although they kept him in chains for a year, he never recanted his faith. María Paredes told Bodley a third, more disturbing story, one that differs substantially from the above more or less heroic accounts.81 According to her, when the group arrived in Atalaya, the patrones ordered Tasorentsi to whip Isaías or else they would kill him. Tasorentsi caved in and whipped the teacher. In any of its versions, this event must have constituted a traumatic experience for both men. But if what María Paredes told Bodley is what really happened, it must have been especially traumatic for Chief Tasorentsi, for it put into question not only his religious faith but also his moral integrity. From what we know of subsequent events, María Paredes’ version seems to be the most probable. All sources concur that after being released, Tasorentsi and Salazar returned to Shahuaya. Shortly after, Salazar fell ill as a result of the flogging and moved to Lima, where he died around 1947.82 As to Tasorentsi, when he returned to Shahuaya, he acted as a broken man. According to Bodley, “he was disenchanted with the movement and refused to preach or assume leadership again. Informants described him as being ‘sick at heart.’ Without his leadership, the mission fell completely apart and its population quickly drifted away.”83 Nataniel Sarmiento adds that after the Atalaya ordeal, Tasorentsi became too sick to hold worship or preach, and that his wife had to take over and hold worship and preach in his place.84 Apparently, the Ashaninka leader also stopped holding ayahuasca sessions, since Meyando Vásquez claims that after his arrest, Nicolás Otsi—one of Tasorentsi’s twelve disciples—and Shirunkama took over and “continued drinking ayahuasca and preaching the word of God at night.”85 This suggests that in these remote mission stations, where Adventist institutional control was weaker, there was still room for the persistence of blended religious discourses and ritual practices. It also suggests that, even after attending Sabbath school in Contamana, Tasorentsi had never stopped drinking ayahuasca with his followers. When Tasorentsi came back from Atalaya, he and his family moved to another house, presumably out of fear that the patrones would arrest him again.86 The atmosphere of persecution must have been too strong, however, for a few months later Chief Tasorentsi decided to

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leave Shahuaya with his wife, Lucrecia, and their children.87 According to Nataniel Sarmiento, the family moved to the Pachitea River.88 It is possible that at least some of Tasorentsi’s followers went along with him, because when Luis Gómez, the new teacher/preacher appointed by Stahl, arrived in Shahuaya on April 18, 1939, he found the mission “deserted, the church building in complete ruin, [and] the brethren like scattered sheep, fearful of persecution.”89 He must have exaggerated a little, since the school building could not have decayed so much within the span of only a few months. But it is quite possible that without Tasorentsi’s leadership, many of his followers had opted to move to safer places. Never again, according to Bodley, was Shahuaya to have as large a population as when Tasorentsi was its leader.90 This was not the first time Chief Tasorentsi had taken refuge in the Pachitea basin as the result of a major life crisis. He had done so in 1916 after he and his followers were defeated by government troops, and he would do it again at the end of his life, when he realized that there was no longer a place for him in the new, more institutionalized Peruvian Adventist Church. At the time, the Pachitea basin was a no-­man’s-­land between two areas with greater state presence: the Upper Pichis and the Middle Ucayali. Although it was an area of passage for boats connecting Puerto Bermúdez with Masisea, the fear inspired by the Uni (Cashibo) living on the left banks of the Pachitea meant that there were no important white-­ mestizo towns or indigenous settlements along the basin. As a result, there were no local authorities to be afraid of, and land, game, and fish were abundant. This made the Pachitea basin the perfect hiding place. It is not clear how long Chief Tasorentsi stayed in the area or what he did while living there. It does not seem to be a coincidence, however, that in 1942 the Shipibo-­Conibo began to report that mysterious emissaries were visiting their settlements in helicopters and planes, announcing the imminent return of the Inka god.91 These envoys proclaimed that the Inka’s return would be preceded by great earthquakes and floods, and they urged the Shipibo-­Conibo to prepare themselves morally and spiritually to receive him. The rumor spread across a vast area along the Ucayali River, from the mouth of the Iparía in the north to the mouth of the Tamaya in the south, and centered on the mouth of the Pachitea, where Tasorentsi was supposed to have taken refuge at the time. The rumors began to circulate a year before the Lima-­Pucallpa road was inaugurated on September 8, 1943,92 and seem to have been connected to the general unrest caused by the road’s construction. The message proclaimed by the Inka’s emissaries, according to Michael Harner, was remarkably similar to

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what Chief Tasorentsi had been preaching since at least 1912: “This world is not good for anything. Soon we will be together with the Inca, and the whites will be kept the prisoners of the Inca. You will be happy. We will be together. We will be rich. We will have all the things of this world.”93 Although there is no oral or written evidence corroborating this, the time and place of these events point to Chief Tasorentsi as the origin of these rumors.94 Further research would help confirm this supposition. Chief Tasorentsi did not stay in the Pachitea basin for long. According to his son, sometime after abandoning Shahuaya, his mother, Lucrecia, persuaded Tasorentsi to take her to the Upper Pichis to visit her family, whom she had not seen since her abduction as a child.95 By then, the Ashaninka leader must have recovered from the Atalaya ordeal, for it was said that all along his way to the Upper Pichis he continued to spread the Adventist message and to form small groups of believers.96 Around 1943 or 1944, after establishing the last of these groups close to Hacienda Rami at the confluence of the Azupizú and Nazarateki Rivers, Tasorentsi settled with his family and followers in a small pampa, or flatland, on the shores of Kapirunkarini, a small tributary of the Nazarateki, in exactly the same location where he lived during the 1912–1914 Ashaninka movement. It was here where the young Adolfo Gutiérrez met him in 1947. Although sparse, Gutiérrez’s account of this encounter is worth reproducing for what it tells us of Tasorentsi’s life in his twilight years: I met Tasorentsi in 1947, when the Pichanaki landslide, the big earthquake took place. . . . By then he was of an advanced age. Although not so old. . . . He must have been 55 years old or so. . . . I was nine, almost going to ten. So when I arrived in Belén, on the Nazarateki, he sent word that he wanted to know me. I went with my uncle, a Piro man called José Manuel Solórzano. . . . So I went in my little canoe to the mouth of the Nazarateki. A little upriver from its mouth, there is a small pampa. There [Tasorentsi] had his house, his chacra. . . . We found a boy who was coming down to the river to bathe. “Where is José Carlos Tasorentsi?” we asked. He said: “He is here; up there. He is my grandfather. See there.” So we climbed up the bank. And there we found him. He wasn’t very tall; he was rather short. There were many people there. They were probably his sons. We didn’t talk much. The only thing he said was: “Well, you are my nephew. Your father is my cousin.” That was it. “I came here because I like it.” That’s the only thing he said. There was a regular number of people living with him. Many small houses. But I don’t know if he was still a pinkatsari.97

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Tasorentsi was then much older than Gutiérrez estimated, probably around seventy-­two years old, and he still had a large following, but a big part of it may have been his own extended family. A year earlier, Tasorentsi and his wife, Lucrecia, had the last of their eleven children, Segundo, but Tasorentsi must also have had numerous grandchildren. However, the boy Gutiérrez met on the river must have been a grandson from one of the children he had with Santana or some previous wife, since at the time, Ricardo, the first of Lucrecia’s children, could not have been older than seventeen. As head of such a large group of relatives and followers, there can be no doubt that Tasorentsi continued to be recognized as both chief and spiritual leader. When Chief Tasorentsi arrived on the Upper Pichis, no Adventist preacher, whether foreign or native, had ever worked in the area on a regular basis. Stahl had traveled along the Pichis Trail a few times on his way to or from Iquitos but had not founded any mission in the area, so Tasorentsi was the first Adventist preacher to settle in the area. If we are to trust oral sources, he was quite successful in spreading the Adventist message and persuading people to form small groups of believers.98 Although he never again achieved the kind of prominence and influence he had had in previous decades, he was highly respected both because of his extraordinary political trajectory and because he was the only Adventist preacher in the area. This situation was soon going to change as the result of a series of problems affecting the Perené Ashaninka Adventists. When in 1930 Pastor Schaeffler left Santaniari, he first settled in Cascadas, where there was already a large Ashaninka settlement,99 but shortly after, the local converts asked him to move the mission to a more suitable place, because Caseadas was rather inaccessible and lacked good soil and reliable water sources.100 In 1931, after exploring the area in search of a better place, Schaeffler settled in Sotziki,101 a site located midway between Cascadas and Metraro, with 250 of the Cascadas converts.102 By then the Inca Union had decided to detach the Perené stations from the Upper Amazon Mission in order to create a new mission territory: the Peruvian Mission.103 This gave new impetus to Sotziki so that by 1933, after the Metraro mission was closed and its converts resettled in Sotziki,104 its population had grown to four hundred people.105 Sotziki’s success, however, proved to be its undoing because the higher population density facilitated the spread of epidemics; a first measles epidemic devastated the mission in late 1933—killing more than 30 percent of its population; the second struck in 1939, and though it was not so mortal, it demoralized the Ashaninka converts.106

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In addition, relations between the mission and the Perené Colony’s administration, in whose lands it was located, were never wholly harmonious. The colony administration appreciated the Adventists because they had managed to eradicate two of the most important indigenous “vices”: consumption of alcohol and the chewing of coca leaves. They also valued the fact that Stahl and subsequent Adventist missionaries had always encouraged their Ashaninka and Yanesha converts to work for the colony clearing new gardens, tending its coffee plantations, and, especially, picking coffee at harvest time. At the same time, they resented the Adventist refusal to work on the Sabbath, for during the harvest campaign every day missed can result in great losses. Sotziki ultimately recovered from the great population decline of the 1930s, but in the following decade its relations with the Perené Colony’s administration became increasingly strained. According to Barclay and La Serna Salcedo, the main cause for this was the missionaries’ incapacity, or lack of will, to continue pressing the indigenous converts to work for the colony.107 This was perceived as a breach of the unwritten contract by which the colony had allowed the Adventist missionaries to work on its lands in exchange for their commitment to provide the colony with a steady flow of indigenous labor. As a result, in 1948, the mission was closed and its inhabitants moved to the Upper Pichis. According to Barclay they were expelled by the colony; according to La Serna Salcedo they left of their own free will. The reasons adduced by Barclay and La Serna Salcedo may well have caused the conflict between the Perené Colony and the Adventist missionaries. Oral sources, however, provide a different perspective on the problem. According to Adolfo Gutiérrez, the conflict between the missionaries and the colony arose because the Sotziki converts wished to become independent coffee producers and the colony administrator would not allow it.108 The problem was compounded by the Ashaninka people’s awareness that they did not own the lands they occupied and were at the colony’s mercy as to what they could or could not do in them.109 In the mid-­1940s, the administrator had told them that if they wanted to grow coffee, they should leave the colony and settle beyond its boundaries, in state-­owned lands. This is what David Shingari and a few ­others did around 1944, when they settled in Belén, on the Nazarateki River.110 However, even though he was banning the independent growing of coffee, the administrator wanted the Ashaninka to stay. He was probably counting on their reluctance to abandon the colony because it would have meant cutting ties with a sure employer in exchange for the

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uncertainties of a life as independent producers. He might have been right, and the Ashaninka might have never left the colony were it not for a totally fortuitous event. On Saturday, November 1, 1947, at 9:55 a.m., when the Sotziki converts were attending service at the mission’s large church house, a loud, deep rumbling was heard and the earth began to tremble and heave, throwing people off their feet and destroying the mission’s school.111 The earthquake was felt throughout the Selva Central region. It was so severe that it produced hundreds of landslides and mudflows, which obliterated entire villages, razed chacras and plantations, wiped out the river fauna, and changed the local topography, including even the course of the Perené River.112 Having been told numerous times that the second coming of Christ would be preceded by a fearful earthquake, the Ashaninka regarded the 1947 upheaval as a sign of the impending end of the world. Present-­day accounts claim that a tobacco shaman from the village of Pichanaki—which was leveled by a mudflow—had foretold the catastrophe, but nobody, not even he himself, had done anything to move to a safer place.113 Others assert that a week before the earthquake, the fish of the Pangoa and Tambo Rivers had attempted to warn humans of the imminent catastrophe by swimming up the smallest tributaries, where they died by the thousands.114 According to Carlos Pérez Shuma, the Ashaninka interpreted these signs as indicating that these “were times of danger.”115 The 1947 earthquake not only reinforced the Adventist eschatological message, reminding Ashaninka converts of the imminence of Christ’s second coming and the world’s end, but it was soon linked, according to La Serna Salcedo, to the exodus of the Jewish people and the search for the promised land.116 It reaffirmed the Sotziki converts’ determination to regain their autonomy and freedom of decision by moving outside the colony, and gave rise to the second wave of Adventist effervescence. According to oral sources, shortly after the earthquake, the people of Sotziki sent a commission to explore the Upper Pichis and find a place to settle. One source says that they sent two men,117 another that they sent ten.118 Among the men mentioned by different sources as members of this exploratory commission were Eduardo Castillo, the Aymara teacher/ preacher who was in charge of the Sotziki station at the time of the 1947 earthquake;119 Juan Ucayali, an Ashaninka man from Satipo, who as a boy had been accused of being a child sorcerer and sold to a patrón in exchange for a shotgun;120 Oseas Tepa, an Ashaninka warrior from the Urubamba River, who had moved to Sotziki with one brother and three sisters, attracted by the Adventist millenarian message;121 and Anselmo

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Cruz, who was one of the first Ashaninka to have worked for colonists in La Merced and San Ramón, and who had much experience of the ways of white-­mestizo people.122 According to Adolfo Gutiérrez, when the commission arrived on the Upper Pichis, they found Chief Tasorentsi, who was living close to the confluence of the Nazarateki and Neguachi Rivers. Tasorentsi told them, “Come here. Here there is plenty of land to live on.”123 Another source confirms that Tasorentsi played a crucial role in “seducing” the Sotziki Ashaninka to settle on the Upper Pichis.124 The explorers also met David Shingari, who told them that the Upper Pichis was a large flatland, where there was plenty of fish and game, unlike the Perené valley, where the topography was rugged and game and fish were scarce.125 In their descriptions of the Upper Pichis, Tasorentsi and Shingari made indirect reference to the biblical image of Canaan, the promised land. This image, according to Pérez Shuma, was being promoted by the Adventist missionaries to persuade people to leave the Perené Colony: “Because they said that we must walk to get to Canaan. That we must suffer to reach Canaan. To reach the land that produces milk and honey. With their sweet voices they said that we must not stop believing. . . . And with that obedience people continued walking in the hope of finding the promised land.”126 Sometime in 1948, after exploring the area, Castillo sent a letter to Sotziki urging the converts to move to the Upper Pichis. The letter said, “Come quickly for in this place there are no dangers. There are many game animals. You won’t lack what to eat.”127 Castillo’s mention of the lack of dangers refers to the fact that on the Upper Pichis there were no high hills and, therefore, no risk of landslides. What came to be known as the “Pichis exodus” in Peruvian Adventist history was a massive event. Up to 800 families, according to one source, moved from Sotziki to the Upper Pichis.128 The exodus was not accomplished in a single move. The first large group settled in Belén, sometime in 1948, on land bought by Eduardo Castillo from Ramón Carrión, a local patrón. Under the pretext that they owed him for the land, Castillo made many of the Ashaninka migrants work for him extracting rubber. Not everybody was satisfied with this arrangement. This first group was broken up when Anselmo Cruz obtained a land concession of 80 hectares from the government and invited some of the original migrants to found a new mission by the name of San Pablo farther upriver. When the second large group of migrants arrived on the Nazarateki, the people of Belén and San Pablo were reluctant to allow them on their lands, since they feared that the overpopulation would

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soon deplete the game and fish. According to Adolfo Gutiérrez, Chief Tasorentsi directed this last group to a place downriver past the confluence with the Neguachi, saying, “The land is good. There is a good pampa there.”129 This is how Nevati, the third and largest Upper Pichis Adventist mission, came into being. This seems to have been Chief Tasorentsi’s last action in favor of the Sotziki migrants. Not long afterwards, in 1949, he abandoned his settlement in Kapirunkarini and moved with his family and followers to the Pachitea basin. We do not know for sure what made him go back to his refuge area, but I would suggest that his main motivation was that he no longer felt that there was a place for him in the new, more orthodox Adventist Church. After eighteen years of thorough indoctrination by foreign and Peruvian missionaries, the Sotziki Ashaninka were no longer the enthusiastic but doctrinally ignorant converts of the first wave of Adventist effervescence. Between 1930 and 1944, a period defined by La Serna Salcedo as one of “consistent growth,” the Selva Central Adventist missions had experienced an important process of institutionalization.130 The Ashaninka converts had not dropped their world-­ transforming expectations, as their interpretation of the 1947 earthquake shows, but they were probably much less inclined to support the kind of shamanized Adventism favored by Chief José Carlos. It is even possible that they regarded José Carlos’s designation, Tasorentsi, as heretical or at least as an embarrassing reminder of their previous naïveté. It is also unlikely that the more orthodox Sotziki Ashaninka would have regarded Tasorentsi’s ayahuasca sessions in search of Pabá favorably, or his song exalting the sky river of youth, which we know he continued singing, since Carlos Pérez Shuma learned it from him as a young boy recently arrived from the Perené valley. The presence of experienced missionaries such as Eduardo Castillo, who by then acted as a paid church-school teacher and licensed missionary,131 and the activities of well-­trained Adventist leaders, such as Juan Ucayali, Anselmo Cruz, and David Shingari, must have left little space for Chief Tasorentsi’s blended kind of preaching. If this was the case, it in no way affected Tasorentsi’s adherence to the Adventist faith or discouraged him from preaching his particular version of Adventist doctrine. According to Segundo Arroyo, after leaving the Upper Pichis, his father continued preaching all along the way to the Pachitea basin.132 Wherever he went, he announced Christ’s second coming, the world’s end, and the attainment of immortality in the sky river for those who believed in God. He urged people to gather in villages and observe the Sabbath in order to wait for Christ’s return. The last mission

T w ilight Y ea rs of a n Old Wor ld T r a nsfor mer  [ 177 ]

he founded before entering into the Pachitea was Yarina, on the Lower Palcazu River. This event is confirmed by John Elick, pastor of Nevati, who, without mentioning Chief Tasorentsi directly, in 1951 wrote that a new Adventist group composed of twenty-­five adults and many children had been founded on the Lower Palcazu River, not far from the Pachitea, thanks to “the lay missionary work of a Campa brother.”133 The omission of Tasorentsi’s name confirms once more the Adventist hierarchy’s reluctance to admit acquaintance with such an unorthodox native preacher, one who had refused to baptize, continued drinking ayahuasca, and preached a mix of Ashaninka and Adventist religious notions that was no longer acceptable to mainstream Adventist converts. Chief Tasorentsi continued preaching along the Pachitea River until his oldest son, Ricardo, died of a snakebite in Cacahual, not far downriver from Santa Teresa, where they had temporarily settled.134 By then, Ricardo must have been around twenty years old. His death was devastating to Tasorentsi and his family. According to Segundo Arroyo, when his older brother died, his father said, “My oldest son has died. He was my golden staff. I’ll establish my village here.”135 The reference to the golden staff is doubtless an allusion to the Inka myth of the Ayar brothers, one of whom, Ayar Manco, decided to found his capital, Cuzco, at the site where the golden staff he had received from his father, the Sun god, had sunk effortlessly into the ground.136 It is difficult to ascertain how Tasorentsi came to know this particular Inka myth, but by referring to it, it is clear that he intended to invest himself with the prestige attributed to the founder of the Inka dynasty—son of the Sun god like him—and invest the foundation of Santa Teresa with the stature of the mythical Cuzco. In its beginnings, Santa Teresa was inhabited by Tasorentsi’s extended family and ten other families, the remainder of his original following. With the passage of time, however, the settlement’s population grew gradually as new Ashaninka and Yanesha families joined the old world transformer. The last years of Chief José Carlos were uneventful. According to his youngest son, he continued disseminating the Adventist doctrine without, however, quitting his ayahuasca ritual gatherings.137 During those years, he promoted the formation of three more Adventist groups in Yamiría, Sira, and Baños, which he formed with Ashaninka and Yanesha families from the Pichis and Palcazu Rivers. Tasorentsi’s son claims that he also brought many Ashaninka families from Brazil. It is hard to believe that in his seventies Chief Tasorentsi would have had the strength to make the long trip to Brazil. But it could be quite possible that, hearing about Tasorentsi’s preaching and his promise of immortality, some Brazilian

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Ashaninka would have come to the Pachitea to ascertain the truth of these rumors. Peter Beysen claims that Hananeri, his most important Ashaninka collaborator, traveled from the Envira River, in Brazil, to Peru in the hope of meeting Apinga, the Inka god, and attaining immortality.138 Hananeri drew Beysen a map showing the route he followed along the Huacapistea, a tributary of the Upper Yurúa, and the Sheshea, a river that flows into the Ucayali not far from the Shahuaya and Pachitea Rivers.139 Connections between the Ucayali and the Upper Yurúa Ashaninka have been well attested by José Pimenta since at least the 1930s and up to the present day.140 In 1946, an explorer claimed that it took only eight days to travel upriver from the mouth of the Sheshea, through a land pass to the Huacapistea, and down to the Yurúa.141 If it is true that at least some Ashaninka families from the Brazilian portion of the Upper Yurúa moved to the Pachitea attracted by Tasorentsi’s utopian message, we would have to conclude that the Ashaninka world transformer’s moral and spiritual influence was felt in a vast area of western Amazonia, from the Ene and Lower Urubamba in the north to the Middle Ucayali in the south, and from the Andean piedmont in the west to the Upper Yurúa in the east. José Carlos Amaringo Chico died in 1958 at the age of eighty-­three. According to his son Segundo, he was killed by sorcery: “That is how he died. Quietly, without bothering, without falling ill. In a single stroke. At midnight, on the day he died.”142 He died in Yuyapari, not far downriver from Santa Teresa, and was buried there. As is often the case with Ashaninka world transformers, however, his death was soon shrouded in mystery. According to Armando del Arca, some people said that Tasorentsi had announced that “he would never die, that he was going to sleep and wake up fifteen days later. But he died and never got up again.”143 Others confirmed this account, claiming that “he really died. Fifteen days we waited for him. But he did not come back.” Del Arca does not believe these accounts, arguing that whenever someone asked the tellers of these stories to show them Tasorentsi’s tomb, they never did. “No one really knows where he died,” he claims. “He just disappeared. Everybody wondered whether he had died. But no one really knows.”144 For him, as for others, Tasorentsi never died. He just disappeared.

Epilogue

J

osé Carlos Amaringo Chico’s life extended over a critical period of modern world history, from 1875—four years after discontented workers established the radical Paris Commune and one before Graham Bell made the first successful telephone call—to 1958, only a year after the signature of the treaty creating the European Economic Community and one before Fidel Castro proclaimed the Cuban Revolution. In the meantime, the world witnessed two world wars, three dramatic revolutions (Mexico, Russia, and China), two great depressions (1873–1896 and 1929–1939), the fall of the British Empire, the emergence of the United States as a world superpower, the foundation of the United Nations, the triumph of the suffrage movement, and the launch of the Sputnik, the first man-­made satellite. It was also a critical period in Peruvian history, ranging from the end of the prosperity brought about by the Guano Era in 1873 to the 1958 creation of the first peasant unions in the valleys of La Convención and Lares, which gave rise to a nationwide peasant movement demanding agrarian reform. During that long period, Peru passed from what was called the First Civilism (1872–1879) to the Cohabitation (1956–1962), and through wars with Chile, Ecuador, and Colombia; several boom-­and-­bust economic cycles; and numerous military governments, alternating with brief periods of democratic rule. It also experienced a gradual but steady extension of civil rights and the empowerment of previously disenfranchised sectors of the population, especially highland peasants and urban workers, but also, to a lesser degree, Amazonian indigenous peoples. Some of these national and world events had a direct impact on the life of Chief Tasorentsi and his followers; others were less influential, mere backdrops against which Ashaninka, Yine, and Shipibo-­Conibo history played out. [ 179 ]

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Chief Tasorentsi’s actions during this long period had important repercussions for the country’s social imaginary, the region’s economy, and the lives of the Selva Central indigenous peoples, especially the Ashaninka. News of the 1912–1914 Ashaninka movement and the 1915 multiethnic uprising appeared regularly in Peru’s major newspapers.1 Many more were published in the regional press. This news had a great impact on the government and public opinion, especially since many journalists and commentators attributed indigenous hostilities to the abuses committed by the so-­called civilizados. Compelled by the uproar caused by these revelations, in June 1914, President Oscar Benavides appointed Agustín de la Puente Olavegoya to assess the “Indian situation” in the Pichis-­Perené region. Although we do not know its content, it is clear that de la Puente’s report was favorable enough regarding indigenous people to counter the military’s proposal to banish the rebels and their families to other parts of the country. The media frenzy caused by the 1915 insurrection was even stronger, so much so that it even caught the attention of the Pro-­Indian Association, usually more interested in denouncing the oppression experienced by Andean indigenous peoples. As a result, in the September issue of its monthly, El Deber Pro-­Indígena, the association justified the rebels’ actions, condemning slavery in unequivocal terms as the cause of indigenous hostilities. The Pro-­Indian Association’s pronouncements, and those of other defenders of indigenous peoples’ rights, kindled new debates on indigenous slavery and the criminal responsibility of “savage Indians.”2 Unfortunately, although most observers denounced Amazonian slavery as a despicable and uncivilized practice, the debate did not lead to decisive political measures aimed at putting an end to it. President Ramón Castilla had abolished slavery in 1854, and the government had forbidden Amazonian correrías since at least 1905. The problem was, therefore, one not of lack of legislation but of the government’s incapacity or unwillingness to enforce national law in remote areas, where corrupt authorities ruled with little official control. In contrast, the debate on the criminal responsibility of native Amazonians, triggered by the legal report issued by Iquitos judge Jenaro Herrera in August 1915, led to more concrete, though not necessarily positive, results.3 Written in the context of the 1912–1914 Ashaninka movement, Herrera’s report proposed that given that native Amazonians were illiterate and, thus, unaware of the “social contract” that bound all Peruvians under the national law, they should be exempted from the kind of criminal and civil responsibility demanded from those who subscribed to it. In accordance with this view,

Epilogue  [ 181 ]

Herrera suggested that native Amazonians should be considered and judged as “minors.” This proposal, which sought to protect indigenous people but ended up infantilizing them, was eventually incorporated into the country’s 1924 penal code, having unfortunate consequences for the advancement of Peru’s indigenous population’s rights until well into the twentieth century.4 At the local level, Tasorentsi’s military actions changed the region’s social and economic landscapes, at least for a while. Most of the Pichis Trail tambos were sacked and destroyed. Road, telegraphic, and mail communications were interrupted for long periods, and, indeed, although the Pichis Trail continued to be used until at least the late 1940s, it never regained the importance it had before the 1912–1914 attacks. The rubber patrones working along the Pichis and Upper Ucayali rivers abandoned their entrepôts, partly because of the collapse of the rubber economy, but mostly out of fear of losing their lives at the rebels’ hands. At least forty fundos and rubber stations were abandoned in the Upper Ucayali region and were not reoccupied until the early 1920s. Not only did the rebels manage to expel most of the civilizado population but for at least six years they succeeded in putting a stop to correrías and slave trafficking. This was due to a great extent to Chief Tasorentsi’s capacity to persuade the region’s most active Indian slavers to put an end to their activities. It took local patrones many years after the revolt before they could finally reassert their control over the indigenous labor force and reinstate the region’s slave traffic. Chief Tasorentsi’s initiatives as an Adventist people-­gatherer were no less influential. From the early days of Pastor Ferdinand Stahl’s ministry in the Selva Central region, the Ashaninka leader had expressed an interest in education. He studied in both the Metraro and Contamana Bible schools, and although we do not know for sure that he ever learned how to read and write, this is not totally implausible since, as we have seen, at least one of his fellow people-­gatherers, Shirunkama, did.5 Be that as it may, Chief Tasorentsi was a great supporter and promoter of formal education. Like many other contemporary indigenous leaders, he pleaded with the Adventist missionaries to send him a teacher so that his followers could learn how to read, write, and count. He finally saw his wish fulfilled in 1937, when Stahl appointed Martín Urquía to serve in Shahuaya’s recently constructed school. Although we cannot attribute to Chief Tasorentsi all the merit for the rapid spread of formal education among the Ashaninka, there is no doubt that he played an important role in persuading his followers that literacy was an indispensable tool for shaking off the yoke of

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white people’s domination. It is, therefore, entirely appropriate that the National Integrated Agricultural High School established in 1987 in Santa Teresa, the community he founded on the Pachitea River, is named “José Carlos Amaringo Chico” after him (see figure 43).6 Chief José Carlos was equally instrumental in convincing his followers that, rather than laboring as debt-­peons for their patrones, they should work as autonomous producers and organize themselves to sell their products directly to river traders, an economic strategy that preceded by almost ten years that promoted by Adventist missionaries in the Perené and Pichis valleys. To achieve these goals, and in accordance with his vocation as a people-­gatherer, Chief Tasorentsi encouraged demographic nucleation in large settlements centered on a church and school. The advancement of nucleation, literacy, and economic independence was the result of Chief Tasorentsi’s conviction that violence was no longer an effective strategy to fight white patrones and that, as he told Capt. Lepecki, indigenous people should find a way to live in peace with their white neighbors.7 At all events, as he used to preach, God would take care of white unbelievers, wiping them out as if they were wild pigs. This radical shift was to have great influence on subsequent generations of Ashaninka leaders. Indeed, the 1915 uprising was to be the last large Ashaninka armed revolt against white-­mestizo people. Since then the Ashaninka have remained faithful to Chief Tasorentsi’s strategy of furthering local organization, formal education, economic autonomy, and peaceful cohabitation with white people. Many years later, in 1989, the Ashaninka were once more to rise up in arms, this time not to fight white people in general but against the Shining Path and Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement insurgents and their native supporters. It could, thus, be said that Chief Tasorentsi’s emphasis on peaceful negotiation to deal with white-­mestizo people and the state prefigured the strategy followed by the various associations, federations, and confederations created by the Ashaninka beginning in the late 1950s.8 The strategies endorsed by Chief Tasorentsi as a people-­gatherer generated as much opposition and animosity as his previous armed actions. He became the white patrones’ number one enemy, reviled as the supreme chief of the “1915 massacre,” and they persecuted, imprisoned, and tortured him to stop him from disseminating his “subversive” ideas. This situation almost generated an international conflict after the Inca Union informed the US and German consulates of the persecution experienced by Adventist missionaries and their native assistants, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was compelled to intervene to calm things down.

Epilogue  [ 183 ]

The behavior of white patrones and local authorities had become so scandalous that the government was even forced to impugn its own regional representatives, as when it ordered the prefect of Loreto to reopen the Santaniari mission, which he had closed because Adventist missionaries and their native supporters were allegedly spreading Bolshevik ideas. Given the impact that Chief Tasorentsi’s actions had at the national and regional levels, it is puzzling to realize what a slight mark his wars and dreams left in both Peruvian historiography and indigenous oral memory. A full analysis of this issue would demand the kind of research that is beyond the scope of the present work. Here, I can only offer a few speculations as to why his memory has not been preserved. With regard to the first piece of this puzzle, it is worth noting that modern historical research on the Selva Central region has greatly depended on the works of Franciscan historians, which cover most of the region’s colonial and postcolonial history, namely, José Amich (1631–1771),9 Fernando Rodríguez Tena (1650–1780),10 Fernando Pallarés and Vicente Calvo (1770– 1882),11 Bernardino Izaguirre (1619–1921),12 and more recently Dionisio Ortiz, who wrote the history of several areas of the Selva Central region from colonial times up to the 1960s or 1970s.13 In addition, the Franciscans published a periodical entitled Anales de la obra de la propagación de la fe en el Oriente del Perú, which registers the main events that took place between 1897 and 1937.14 Given the Franciscan historians’ thoroughness, these works have become important references for modern anthropologists and historians. Such a heavy dependence on these works has meant, however, that whatever events the Franciscan historians failed to chronicle are as if they had never happened. This is the case of the 1915 Upper Ucayali uprising. To understand this omission, we must first make a brief detour into the history of Franciscan missionizing in the Upper Ucayali region. Between the c­ losure of the Ucayali missions in 1882 due to demographic decline and indigenous indifference15 and the creation of the Apostolic Prefecture of San Francisco Solano of Ucayali in 1900,16 the Franciscans had little or no presence along the Ucayali. The new prefecture served a vast region, including the Chanchamayo, Perené, Pichis, and Pachitea valleys; the Gran Pajonal; the Apurimac, Ene, and Tambo Rivers; and the entire Ucayali River basin. The Franciscan Order did not have either the human or material resources to operate over the whole region, so it concentrated its actions in only three areas: Chanchamayo, the Apurimac River, and the Middle and Lower Ucayali. In this last area they had four missions: Contamana, Cashiboya, Requena, and Santa María del Río

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Blanco.17 At the time, Franciscan missionaries had no permanent presence in the Upper Ucayali, their nearest mission post being Apurucayali, on the Pichis River, which was miles away from the Ucayali, on the other side of the Gran Pajonal. After the destruction of Apurucayali by Ashaninka rebels in May 1913, the Franciscans were left with no presence on or in the environs of the Upper Ucayali until the foundation of the missions of Satipo (1918), Puerto Ocopa (1919), and Atalaya (1929). This would explain why the 1915 Upper Ucayali revolt received so little attention from Franciscan historians. It did not affect them and, thus, they made no effort to include it in their chronicles. Indeed, Izaguirre omits the episode entirely, simply noting, when recounting the situation of the Selva Central missions between 1915 and 1921, that “the ferocity of the wild Campas of the Pangoa and Tambo rivers is well known in the country”—an oblique reference, perhaps, to the Ashaninka hostilities during that period.18 In a similar vein, the 1915 and 1916 Anales make no reference to the multiethnic revolt, except for condemning slave raids, which, missionaries argued, “force Indians to rebel against white people.”19 Only Dionisio Ortiz, as we have seen, mentions the uprising, even if only briefly and without specifying the year in which it took place.20 I suggest that it was this lapse that has rendered the Upper Ucayali uprising invisible to the eyes of modern Peruvian historians and anthropologists. So much so that it was only very recently that the revolt was first mentioned, even if only in passing, in a modern historical work.21 The second part of the puzzle is harder to explain. Why, being in almost every respect the equal of Juan Santos Atahualpa, has the memory of José Carlos Tasorentsi not been incorporated into Ashaninka mythology or oral history as has that of the eighteenth-­century Andean leader? There is no doubt that Ashaninka people considered Chief José Carlos a powerful world transformer of similar stature as Juan Santos Atahualpa: a foreign, multilingual shaman, fearless warrior, and charismatic leader of uncertain origins, with a good knowledge of the white people’s world and a dark moral past, who claimed to be a divine emissary and managed to convoke an assortment of otherwise enemy peoples on the basis of an anti-­white, anticolonial discourse and the utopian promise of changing the world and attaining immortality.22 This characterization may not have been as clear for Yine and Shipibo-­Conibo peoples as it was for the Ashaninka, and for this reason his absence in their oral traditions is more understandable. Here I can only speculate as to the causes of why Chief José Carlos has been all but obliterated from Ashaninka oral memory.

Epilogue  [ 185 ]

I suggest that there are two possible explanations for this historical amnesia. The first is a certain reticence among present-­day Ashaninka— most of whom have been raised in the Adventist or Evangelical faiths— to acknowledge a historical figure who was regarded as a tasorentsi god, spirit, or emissary, a designation that nowadays Ashaninka Adventists and Evangelicals reserve for the Christian god. I first noticed this reserve when I asked Adolfo Gutiérrez, a practicing Adventist, why people called Chief José Carlos “Tasorentsi.” He answered, “Hmm . . . well, I suppose he liked to be called that way. Because Tasorentsi means God. I don’t know his legend.”23 When I added that Tasorentsi claimed to be itomi Pabá, or son of the Sun god, he said, “Aha. Yes, precisely, when he preached he would say, ‘I am a child of God. You too should be God’s children.’ For that is precisely the case, isn’t it? For the belief is that all of us are God’s children.” Elena Mihas’s Adventist collaborators expressed a similar reticence when asked whether they had heard of Chief Tasorentsi. One of them, Elías Meza, said, “Aha, they say he was a fellow tribesman. He is not a real divine emissary. He is not a real god. .  .  . They called him like that for no reason.”24 It is clear from these answers that the interviewees were not comfortable with the idea of a fellow Ashaninka who claimed to be a divine messenger or, worse still, God himself. This would explain their insistence on the fact that he called himself that “for no reason,” or that they “don’t know his legend.” In their view, if Chief José Carlos claimed to be itomi Pabá, it was simply because he, like everybody else, is a child of God. If, as I suspect, some of these informants also knew that Chief Tasorentsi was not only an Adventist people-­gatherer but also a shaman who was never baptized and continued to hold ayahuasca sessions until his death, it is understandable why they would wish, in an act of active forgetfulness, to suppress his memory.25 This, however, begs the question of why Ashaninka people—­ including some Adventist believers—have kept the memory of Juan Santos Atahualpa, who also claimed to be son of God, while not remembering Chief José Carlos.26 A possible answer may be that Juan Santos—known as Apinka or Sacramentaro in Ashaninka oral traditions—is already a remote mythical character, whereas Chief José Carlos is a recent historical figure still present in the memories of living people who heard about him or even met him personally. In other words, Chief José Carlos would be too human and close in time to be acknowledged as a divine world transformer. A more plausible answer could be, however, that whereas Juan Santos defeated the Spaniards and died while widely recognized as a charismatic leader, Chief José Carlos never obtained

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a definitive victory over white-­mestizo Peruvians and died having lost much of his earlier prestige and aura. Worse still, he was persecuted, imprisoned, tortured, and, perhaps, even forced to whip his companion Isaías Salazar. In other words, he was defeated in a most humiliating way. Tasorentsi’s feat of expelling white patrones from the Upper Ucayali region for six years is dwarfed in the face of Juan Santos’s victory, which forced out white people from the Selva Central region for almost a hundred years. That the Ashaninka consider only victorious world transformers worthy of being memorialized seems to be confirmed by the fact that although their oral history contains many references of past leaders claiming to be itomi Pabá,27 none is particularly remembered or celebrated. This would make sense from the point of view of a people holding world-­transforming expectations, since a dead but victorious world transformer like Juan Santos Atahualpa can always be expected to come back, whereas a dead and defeated world transformer is an oxymoron, a notion that can only undermine the utopian conviction that someday someone will change this unjust and suffering world. This brings us to Hanne Veber’s claim that the notion of “Asháninka messianism” is an anthropological fiction that “derives its veracity more from its scholarly repetition than from grounded analysis.”28 Attentive readers must have by now noticed that throughout this book I have avoided using the terms “messiah,” “messianic,” or “messianism.” I have done so for two reasons. First in order to emphasize indigenous understandings of the nature of Chief Tasorentsi’s power, message, and activities rather than imposing on them foreign anthropological notions, and second to avoid prejudicing readers as to the existence, or not, of messianic inclinations among the Ashaninka and other Selva Central indigenous peoples. This should allow for a more impartial discussion of Veber’s provocative claim. Veber argues that the use of certain concepts, such as “cargo cult,” “millenarianism,” or “messianism,” developed to explain specific sociocultural practices in specific contexts, may “confer misleading images on the phenomena they describe” when applied to other situations.29 More importantly, such concepts often seem to have a life of their own and “once set in motion, they continue to go around, even when they remain weakly supported by ethnography.”30 This is what Veber claims has happened with the notion of Ashaninka messianism. The term, she claims, was first applied by Alfred Métraux to characterize Juan Santos Atahualpa and his movement, and it was later popularized by Stefano Varese through his groundbreaking ethnography La sal de los cerros.31

Epilogue  [ 187 ]

Veber claims that through these and subsequent works, the messianic character originally attributed to Juan Santos came to be regarded as a cultural proclivity of the Ashaninka people as a whole.32 As a consequence, she asserts, the uncritically repeated idea that the Ashaninka are a messianic people “has achieved the status of a canon in Amazonian anthropology and beyond,” thus creating “a ‘black hole’ in place of ethnography.”33 Veber contends that none of these works have demonstrated ethnographically that the Ashaninka exhibit any of the traits normally associated with messianic movements, and claims that the only sources supporting this notion—the Franciscan chroniclers—are contaminated by self-­interest. Moreover, according to Veber, “Very little of this information comes from firsthand notes and observations by witnesses who actually met Santos and talked to him or to the Ashaninka and other natives following him. Most records appear to be based on secondhand interpretations of rumors and hearsay.”34 This is patently not true, as even a superficial revision of the primary sources on Juan Santos’s uprising collected by Francisco Loayza at the Archivo General de Indias clearly demonstrates.35 Unfortunately, Veber does not seem to have consulted this important work36 and seems to base her claims only on the reading of secondary sources. On the basis of the alleged shortcomings of previous historical and ethnographic works, Veber concludes that the void created by the uncritical characterization of the Ashaninka as a messianic people can only be filled by new studies that take “heed of practices, narrative and structural.”37 What are these messianic traits and practices? According to Veber, the term “messianism” “refers to visions of a new social order mediated by the intervention of a godly representative.” In turn, messianic movements are often characterized as including “rituals, special taboos, forms of prayer, or other kinds of action designed to promote the messianic goal.”38 Veber asserts that there is “practically no evidence of any ritualized or cataclysmic action on the part of the Ashaninka.” And she asks rhetorically, “Did they leave their homes, destroy their crops, build shrines, engage in particular forms of ritual, wear special garments, or perform special and recurring acts of other sorts in order to align themselves with the out-­of-­the-­ordinary transformation to come?” By this sleight of hand Veber reduces the proof of the existence of Ashaninka messianic proclivities from a sustained hope for a new social order to be brought about by a godly representative to a list of various cataclysmic ritual actions.

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I hope to have demonstrated, after a detailed analysis of his message and actions, that Chief José Carlos was acknowledged by the Ashaninka and other Selva Central indigenous peoples as a godly world transformer who sought to alter the internal and external social orders, both to bring about a radical change in the distribution of power, vitality, and wealth and to fulfil the higher gods’ longtime promise to restore humanity’s lost immortality. As a warrior of the Sun god, he sought to achieve these objectives through the destruction of the signs and symbols of white domination, the elimination of the demonic white people (through either burning or their shamanic transformation into wild peccaries), the conversion of Indian slavers into committed liberators, and the reestablishment of communication with the higher gods by means of sacred fires and ayahuasca ceremonies. Later on, as an Adventist people-­ gatherer, he sought to attain these same goals by means of a radical change of strategy, encouraging peaceful but separate cohabitation with white people, demographic nucleation, formal schooling, and economic autonomy, but also promoting changes in food habits, forms of praying, and the religious imaginary. What was common in both instances were Chief José Carlos’s claim to be an interlocutor and spokesman of the creator god; his promotion of ayahuasca consumption as the best means to commune with the ancestors, good spirits, and higher gods; and the expectation of reaching immortality by ascending to heaven and bathing in a celestial river of life. All these elements are explicitly or implicitly present in Tasorentsi’s “Sky River Song,” which the Ashaninka chief composed sometime between the 1912–1914 movement and the 1915 uprising, and continued singing until well into his old age. This should be more than enough to account for that part of Veber’s characterization of messianism as “visions of a new social order mediated by the intervention of a godly representative.” But what about “the ritualized or cataclysmic action” that, according to her, usually characterizes these movements? There is plenty of evidence of that too. In response to Sargento’s summons to see “their god,” in 1912 the Ashaninka abandoned their patrones—and with them their homes and crops—to flock to Sargento’s worshipping house on the Nazarateki River. There, we are told, they drank much manioc beer but ate very little. If more recent movements of this kind are a good indicator, they must have also sung, danced, and consumed ayahuasca.39 Although this heightened state of religious anticipation resulted in many cases of dysentery and other diseases, it did not stop believers from gathering in Sargento’s compound.40 A similar mass response took place when Chief José Carlos, together

Epilogue  [ 189 ]

with many of the leaders who had fought for him in the 1915 uprising, called their followers to join them to receive the promised white god. Hundreds of families abandoned their settlements to gather in a few designated places. Chief Tasorentsi managed to mobilize two hundred people, mostly from the Gran Pajonal region, on the Tambo River. A few months later, seven hundred people had assembled in Cheni summoned by chiefs Tasorentsi, Ompikiri, and Napoleón. There they built a large church and school and engaged in a completely new daily routine that included new prayers, songs, and food taboos. Contemporary sources indicate that praying and singing occupied a large portion of the new converts’ time, in detriment to work in the fields.41 Chief Tasorentsi’s convoking power was so great that he repeated this feat several times during his long life, promoting the creation of new Adventist stations throughout the Tambo, Ucayali, Pachitea, and Pichis Rivers. It must be stressed that these cataclysmic rituals were not unique to the movements inspired by Chief Tasorentsi. Similar practices were also reported during Juan Santos Atahualpa’s uprising, as is clear from a close reading of the documents collected by Loayza.42 So, are the Ashaninka a “messianic” people? In the light of this book’s findings, my answer would be an unequivocal yes. Have Ashaninka people always displayed messianic proclivities? This is a more difficult question and one which I can only partially answer. Despite Veber’s assertions to the contrary, for which she offers no convincing proof, there is solid evidence that the Ashaninka and their neighbors regarded Juan Santos Atahualpa as a divine emissary and powerful world transformer. We do not know whether Juan Santos was made to fit into an older messianic tradition or if it was his extraordinary claims that inaugurated this trend. However, given that messianic hopes and movements have been reported among other Arawak-­speaking peoples throughout Amazonia, it would not be too bold to assert that messianic proclivities are common not only among the Ashaninka but among Arawak peoples in general. World-­ transforming expectations and utopian movements have been reported among several Arawak-­ speaking peoples, including the Wakuénai, Baniwa, Baré, Warekena, and Tariana of northwest Amazonia; the Mojos of eastern Bolivia; the Yanesha and Yine of eastern Peru; and the Palikur of Guiana.43 The northwest Amazon millenarian movements studied by Robin M. Wright and Jonathan D. Hill exhibit important structural and discursive similarities to those led by Chief Tasorentsi, suggesting that Arawakan messianic expectations are not a mere colonial product.44 They probably predate European conquest and form part of what I have called

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the “Arawakan matrix.”45 Be that as it may, what we do know for certain is that since Juan Santos’s times there have been many other personages that were acknowledged as actual or potential messianic leaders.46 If so little has been written about them, it is partly because of the historical amnesia surrounding failed leaders and partly because anthropologists have been more interested in Ashaninka people’s present situation than in their past. Otherwise, it is hard to understand why there is no mention of José Carlos Tasorentsi in any of the many existing Ashaninka ethnographies, with the only exception of John Bodley’s works.47 Such lack of interest seems to extend to Hanne Veber herself. Although in Veber’s compilation, Historias para nuestro futuro, Ashaninka elder Adolfo Gutiérrez claims to have had an uncle named José, whom people called “Tasorentsi, which means, God,” such an intriguing assertion seems not to have sparked Veber’s curiosity, for she does not mention it at all in her otherwise long and comprehensive introduction.48 Is “messianism,” then, an adequate concept to describe the Ashaninka people’s utopian hope for a cataclysmic transformation of the world and the attainment of immortality? Given the long history and the uses and abuses to which they have been submitted, “messiah,” “messianic,” and “messianism” may not be the most accurate terms for depicting this kind of politico-­religious movement. However, as Ton Otto has argued in relation to the notion of “cargo cult,” “the history of anthropology teaches us that it is very hard, if not impossible, to obliterate an analytical term once it has been well established in the literature,” especially if it has been adopted as a popular concept.49 This is the case for the messiah family of terms. So, if as anthropologists we expect to have some public relevance rather than entrench ourselves in long-­drawn-­out and often sterile semantic discussions, we would do much better to use such concepts with analytical care, clearly specifying their meaning, scope, and limitations, instead of vainly attempting to eradicate them. Awareness of the semantic charge of our analytical concepts will be always necessary. But simply rejecting a concept for its biases or vagueness or replacing it with an equally vague and biased notion like, for instance, prophetism or millenarianism does not solve the problem. Whether we use the more foreign “messianic” or the more native “world-­transforming” to characterize Chief Tasorentsi’s actions and discourse, it is clear that a life as complex, dynamic, and innovative as his cannot be reduced to such unidimensional anthropological labels. It should also be clear that despite a general penchant toward world-­ transforming theologies, Ashaninka movements based on such utopian

Epilogue  [ 191 ]

aspirations can never be identical. If anthropological studies on messianic or millenarian movements have taught us anything it is the great variability they display in form and content, and their immense creative potential. Described as “historically situated, cultural processes of innovation”50 and “experiments in social change,”51 these movements may sometimes respond to external forms of domination, sometimes to internal conflicts and inequalities, and sometimes, as in this case, to both external and internal factors—the breach of the rubber compact but also the devastation caused by endo-­slavery.52 Based on “transformative hope,”53 such movements generate, as one author put it, “radical transformations in thoroughly traditional ways.”54 Some scholars have described these transformative impetuses as attempts at “social reform.”55 Although they are careful to distinguish their use of this notion from its more common sociological meaning, I still believe that such leaders as Chief Ta­sorentsi are better described as world “transformers” or “renewers” rather than social reformers, insofar as the innovations they strive to introduce go far beyond the social sphere. Such renewers seek to restore a collective moral sense by appealing to old-­time moral values or advancing novel moralities. More importantly, by encouraging the moral renewal of their followers they strive to reaffirm the existential compact—the lost c­onnection— between their people and the creator god(s), whether these are envisioned as the gods of old or as new and more compelling deities. By blending old and new values, gods, and theologies, such renewers remain faithful to their people’s past, while at the same time creating the conditions that will allow them to successfully confront future challenges. In some instances, as during the 1912–1914 movement and the 1915 uprising, these “transformative movements,” as Bodley, following Aberle, has defined them,56 strive to fight and reverse white domination through a reinforcement of traditional world-­ transforming hopes. In others, as during the 1920s Adventist effervescence, they seek “to wrestle control of Christianity from whites while reshaping it to meet the spiritual needs of Indian peoples.”57 In either case, believers expect their leaders to effect a utopian transformation of the world by means of either their own powers or those of the higher divinities whom they claim to represent. There can be no doubt that the movements inspired by Chief Tasorentsi had such an effect on the worlds of both the Ashaninka and their neighbors, even if today the latter are not fully aware either of his role in bringing about these transformations or the magnitude of the changes he prompted. This, however, in no way diminishes the impact he had on his followers’ lives.

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More importantly, although Chief Tasorentsi may have been defeated and persecuted, died in relative obscurity, and been excluded from his people’s historical memory, this does not seem to have dampened Ashaninka utopian expectations. This is confirmed by the words with which Carlos Pérez Shuma finished telling his account of Chief Tasorentsi’s life to Jeremy Narby: “Such is his story. He fought until old age. Until he could bear it no more. Then he had to keep quiet, for he had suffered too much. Since then we have continued suffering. But the time will come when we will have power once more. That spirit will be born again, here in the forest, once more.”58 As Faulkner well knew, the past is never dead.

Glossary

Sp.: Spanish; Ash.: Ashaninka ayahuasca (Sp.): hallucinogenic vine of the Banisteriopsis genus Campas (Sp.): name by which the various Ashaninka subgroups were generically known before the 1980s casa grande (Sp.): large house; name given to the main dwelling of a patrón, generally located at the center of a rubber entrepôt or rural estate caucheros (Sp.): men dedicated to the extraction of the type of rubber known as caucho caucho (Sp.): rubber extracted from Castilla sp. trees chacra (Sp.): garden, swidden; Hispanicized version of the Quechua term chakra, meaning “area of land cleared for cultivation” Chamas (Sp.): name by which the Pano-­speaking peoples of the Ucayali River were generically known before the 1970s chuncho (Sp.): pejorative generic term by which whites and mestizos refer to native Amazonians civilizado (Sp.): civilized; term used to designate white-­mestizo people as opposed to catechized and wild Indians compadre (Sp.): in Catholic contexts, relation of coparenthood established between a man and the godfather of one of the man’s children correrías (Sp.): slave raids criado(a) (Sp.): term used to refer to those indigenous children acquired through capture, trade, or purchase and raised as domestics by their patrones curaca (Sp.): chief; Hispanicized version of the Quechua term kuraq, meaning “elder,” “older brother,” or “superior” cushma (Sp.): long cotton tunic worn by Ashaninka men and women, and by Conibo and Yine men fundo (Sp.): small to medium-­size rural estate devoted to extractive and productive activities, generally on the basis of an indigenous workforce [ 193 ]

[ 194 ]  Glossa ry gringos (Sp.): usually, foreign white persons, but also any Peruvian white who looks or acts foreign habilitación (Sp.): system by which traders and patrones outfitted workers by making advances of goods in exchange for future services or products, thus creating permanent relations of debt; also known as debt-­peonage hacienda (Sp.): large rural estate; generally more capitalized than a fundo hibataintsiri (Ash.): the first, and by extension paramount, chief or supreme leader ibenki (Ash.): magical plants belonging to the Cyperus sp. indios bravos (Sp.): wild Indians iquiteños (Sp.): inhabitants of Iquitos, capital of the Department of Loreto jebe (Sp.): rubber tapped from Hevea sp. trees loretanos (Sp.): white-­mestizo inhabitants of the Department of Loreto montaña (Sp.): area encompassing the forest-­covered eastern slopes and elevations of the Andean range nampitsi (Ash.): kin-­based local group usually headed by a pinkatsari, or “strong man” obayeri (Ash.): killer, murderer, and by extension, warrior paiche (Sp.): large freshwater fish (Arapaima sp.) paisanos (Sp.): fellow tribespeople (when used by an Indian speaker); indigenous people (when used by a non-­Indian) patrón (pl. patrones) (Sp.): boss; term used to designate employers or traders who control a more or less large number of habilitado indigenous peons or clients pinkatsari (Ash.): the one who commands respect, and by extension, a chief or leader pueblo (Sp.): town, village, settlement sheripiari (Ash.): the one who commands the spirit of tobacco, and by extension, a tobacco shaman tambo (Sp.): Hispanicized version of the Quechua term tampu, meaning “resting place along a road” ucayalinos (Sp.): white-­mestizo inhabitants of the Ucayali River basin vegetal (Sp.): in regional Spanish, term used to refer to medicinal plants in general and ayahuasca in particular

Notes

Prologue 1.  Fernando Santos and Frederica Barclay, eds., Guía etnográfica de la alta amazonía, Vol. 2, Mayoruna, Uni, Yaminahua (Quito: FLACSO-­Sede Ecuador/ Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos, 1994); Guía etnográfica de la alta amazonía, Vol. 3, Cashinahua, Amahuaca, Shipibo-­Conibo (Quito: Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute/Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos/Abya-­Yala, 1998). 2.  Łukasz Krokoszyn´ski, e-­mail message to author, October 22, 2008. 3. Mieczysław B. Lepecki, Na Amazonce i we wschodniem Peru (Lwów-­ Warszawa: Książnica-­Atlas, 1931). 4.  Campa was the exonym by which a large number of Arawak-­speaking peoples of the Andean piedmont of Peru were known until the 1980s. This term was first replaced by the generic self-­designation term “Ashaninka” and, later on, by the endonyms used by the different dialect groups that compose the large Ashaninka collective: Ashaninka, Asheninka, and Nomatsiguenga, among others. Unless otherwise specified, here I use the term “Ashaninka” to designate the collective as a whole. 5.  For the purposes of this book, by “Selva Central” I understand the region limited on the west by the eastern slopes of the Andes below 2,500 meters above sea level, on the east with the divortia aquarum between the tributaries of the Upper Ucayali/Lower Urubamba and those of the Yurúa/Purús, and on the north and south by parallels 8° and 12° south latitude. 6.  In Peru, the term montaña designates the tropical forest areas east of the Andes between 600 and 2,500 meters above sea level. 7. Fernando Santos-­Granero, “Anticolonialismo, mesianismo y utopía en la sublevación de Juan Santos Atahuallpa, siglo XVIII,” Data: Revista del Instituto de Estudios Andinos y Amazónicos 4 (1993): 133–152. 8.  Patrones is the Spanish term used in Peruvian Amazonia to refer to a large variety of bosses—rubber extractors, farm owners, merchants, river traders, loggers, etc.—with whom the speaker is engaged in a relation of debt-peonage. It thus entails [ 195 ]

[ 196 ]  Not es to pages 4 – 6 a kind of dependence and subordination not present in the English expression “boss.” For this reason, I will use the terms patrón (sing.) and patrones (pl.) throughout the book to refer to this particular kind of bosses. 9.  Dionisio Ortiz, Alto Ucayali y Pachitea: Visión histórica de dos importantes regiones de la selva peruana (Lima: Imprenta Editorial “San Antonio,” 1974), 2:483. 10.  Most sources agree that Tasorentsi was of mixed Yine-­Ashaninka heritage. However, since he spent most of his life among the Ashaninka and since most of his followers were Ashaninka, in this work I will refer to him as an “Ashaninka leader.” 11.  Neil L. Whitehead, Lords of the Tiger Spirit: A History of the Caribs in Colonial Venezuela and Guyana, 1498–1820 (Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1988); Whitehead, ed., Wolves from the Sea: Readings in the Anthropology of the Native Caribbean (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1995); Whitehead, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana by Sir Walter Raleigh (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); Whitehead, Of Cannibals and Kings: Primal Anthropology in the Americas (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011). 12. Jonathan D. Hill, ed., Rethinking History and Myth: Indigenous South American Perspectives on the Past (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988); Jonathan D. Hill, ed., History, Power, and Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492– 1992 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996); Bruce Albert and Alcida Rita Ramos, eds., Pacificando o branco: Cosmologias do contato no Norte-­Amazônico (São Paulo: Editora UNESP/Imprensa Oficial do Estado, 2002). 13.  Peter Gow, Of Mixed Blood: Kinship and History in Peruvian Amazonia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Gow, An Amazonian Myth and Its History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Carlos Fausto and Michael Heckenberger, eds., Time and Memory in Indigenous Amazonia: Anthropological Perspectives (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007); Aparecida Vilaça, Strange Enemies: Indigenous Agency and Scenes of Encounters in Amazonia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 14.  Blanca Muratorio, The Life and Times of Grandfather Alonso: Culture and History in the Upper Amazon (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991); Janet W. Hendricks, To Drink of Death: The Narrative of a Shuar Warrior (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993); Steven Rubenstein, Alejandro Tsakimp: A Shuar Healer in the Margins of History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); Suzanne Oakdale, I Foresee My Life: The Ritual Performance of Autobiography in an Amazonian Community (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005); María Susana Cipolletti, La fascinación del mal: Historia de vida de un shamán secoya de la amazonía ecuatoriana (2008); Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). For an excellent biographical study of an indigenous shaman outside the Amazon region, see Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, Thunder Shaman: Making History with Mapuche Spirits in Chile and Patagonia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016). 15.  Neil L. Whitehead, ed., History and Historicities in Amazonia (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), x.

Not es to pages 6 – 9  [ 197 ] 16.  Bruce Albert, “Introdução: Cosmologias do contato no Norte-­A mazônico,” in Pacificando o branco: Cosmologias do contato no Norte-­Amazônico, eds. Bruce Albert and Alcida Rita Ramos (São Paulo: Editora UNESP/Imprensa Oficial do Estado, 2002), 9. 17. Hill, Rethinking History and Myth, 3. 18. Gow, An Amazonian Myth and Its History, 23. 19.  Ibid., 20. 20.  Haruki Murakami, The Wind-­Up Bird Chronicle. New York: Vintage, 1998). 21. Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), thesis VI. 22.  Guido Ruggiero, Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 18. 23.  John Brewer, “Microhistories and the Histories of Everyday Life,” Cultural and Social History 7(1) (2010): 87–109. 24.  Ibid., 89. 25. Joanna Overing and Alan Passes, eds., The Anthropology of Love and Anger: The Aesthetics of Conviviality in Native Amazonia (London: Routledge, 2000); Luisa Elvira Belaunde, Viviendo bien: Género y fertilidad entre los Airo-­Pai de la Amazonía Peruana (Lima: CAAAP/Banco Central de Reserva del Perú, 2001); Cecilia McCallum, Gender and Sociality in Amazonia: How Real People Are Made (Oxford: Berg, 2001); Joanna Overing, “In Praise of the Everyday: Trust and the Art of Social Living in an Amazonian Community,” Ethnos 68(3) (2003): 293–316. 26.  Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-­ Century Miller (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980); Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); Stella Tillyard, Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox, 1740–1832 (London: Vintage, 1995); Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York: Vintage, 1996); Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-­Century Lives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Jonathan D. Spence, Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man (New York: Viking Penguin, 2007). 27.  Jerome Brooks, “Chinua Achebe, The Art of Fiction No. 139” (interview), The Paris Review 133 (1994), accessed November 2015, http://​w ww​.theparisreview​.org​ /interviews​/1720​/chinua​-­­achebe​-­­t he​-­­art​- ­­of​-­­fiction​-­­no​-­­139​- ­­chinua​-­­achebe. 28.  Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, “Conceptual Blending, Form, and Meaning,” in Cognitive Semiotics, ed. Pierre Fastrez, special issue, Recherches en Communication 19 (2004): 57–86. 29.  See Nathan Wachtel, “Le retour des ancêtres. Les Indiens Urus de Bolivie, XXe-­X VIe siècle. Essai d’histoire régressive,” Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 46(6) (1991): 1455–1458. 30.  Hanne Veber, “Asháninka Messianism: The Production of a ‘Black Hole’ in Western Amazonian Ethnography,” Current Anthropology 44(2) (2003): 183–211.

[ 198 ]  Not es to pages 10 –13 31. But see Peter Gow, “Autodenominations: An Ethnographer’s Account from Peruvian Amazonia,” Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 11(1): 45–57, for a discussion on the validity of some of these new ethnonyms. 32.  Naakapero Kipatsiki, “Alfabeto Asháninka,” accessed November 25, 2016, http://​imatlife​.blogspot​.com​/2011​/09​/alfabeto​-­­ashaninka​.html. 33.  The Chicago Manual of Style Online, accessed January 21, 2015, http://​ www​.chicagomanualofstyle​.org​/tools​_citationguide​.html. 34.  The analysis was carried out by Eugenio Valdes using the Betaface API face detection and recognition web service (https://​w ww​.betafaceapi​.com/), with help from other biometric open source libraries (https://​ cmusatyalab​ .github​ .io​ /openface/; http://​openbiometrics​.org/).

Ch a p ter 1 1. Mieczysław B. Lepecki, Na Amazonce i we wschodniem Peru (Lwów-­ Warszawa: Książnica-­Atlas, 1931), 207. Capt. Mieczysław Bohdan Lepecki, born on November 16, 1897, was a renowned Polish traveler, writer, and publicist. During World War I he enlisted in the Polish Legions, created as an independent formation of the Austro-­Hungarian Army, in order to fight for the independence of Poland. In 1917, he was interned in a prisoner’s camp for refusing to swear an oath of allegiance and obedience to the Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany. After Poland regained its independence in 1918, he was transferred to the reserve. In 1925 and 1926 he traveled extensively through Paraguay to assess the country’s suitability for the establishment of Polish colonies. After his return to Poland he was appointed as a clerk to the Cabinet of the Minister of Military Affairs. In January 1, 1928, he received unpaid leave to participate, as a government representative, in a research expedition organized by the Polish-­A merican Syndicate, a private company that had obtained from Peru a large land concession in the Upper Ucayali region to establish a Polish colony. It was in that occasion that he spent ten months in Peruvian Amazonia. 2. Lepecki, Na Amazonce, 141. 3. Ibid. 4.  Ibid., 155. 5. Fernando Santos-­Granero and Frederica Barclay, Tamed Frontiers: Economy, Society, and Civil Rights in Upper Amazonia (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001), 171; Expediente seguido por José Enrique Urresti, solicitando cuarenta mil hectáreas de terrenos de montaña para colonizarlas; June 18, 1928 (AGN: MF/TM 2/00035). 6.  Term used to refer to the white-­mestizo inhabitants of the Ucayali River basin. 7. Lepecki, Na Amazonce, 126. 8.  Term meaning “the civilized ones” used to designate white-­mestizo people as opposed to “wild Indians.”

Not es to pages 1 4 –18  [ 199 ] 9. Paredes was only half right. Although it is true that Vargas’s Yine peons remained mostly faithful to him, others joined the rebels. 10. Lepecki, Na Amazonce, 142–143. 11.  In Peru the notions of white and mestizo are quite relative, and the classification of a person in one or the other category will greatly depend on how the person classifying situates him-­or herself in the general racial hierarchy. The Ashaninka and other native Amazonian peoples often consider mestizos as belonging to the same category as white people, for in classifying non-­Indians, they place greater emphasis on their modes of behavior than on their physical features. Since mestizos behave very much like white people, they are classified together as birakochas. As such they are opposed to the ashaninka, fellow tribespeople, and to the chori, Andean indigenous people. See Gerald Weiss, Campa Cosmology: The World of a Forest Tribe in South America (New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1975), 232, 239. 12.  Odorico Saiz, “Últimas exploraciones de los misioneros franciscanos en la montaña,” Colección Descalzos 5 (1943): 107. 13. Lepecki, Na Amazonce, 182. 14.  Anonymous, “Expedición sueco-­peruana,” Boletín de la Sociedad Geográfica de Lima 36(4) (1920): 338–346. 15.  Juan M. Uriarte, “Viajando por la montaña y el río Urubamba,” Boletín de la Sociedad Geográfica de Lima 37–38 (1921): 54–56. 16. Ompikiri (Ompiquiri) is the name of a small blue bird with a black head—probably the masked flowerpiercer (Diglossa cyanea)—that is worshipped by Ashaninka people as one of the messengers of the solar divinity Pabá; see Lee Kindberg, Diccionario Ashaninca (Yarinacocha: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, 1980), 198. 17. Lepecki, Na Amazonce, 208. 18.  Ibid., 209. 19. Ibid. 20.  Report on the arrest of the Indians Ulises and Manuela, September 13, 1928: Report of the Police Constable of Puerto Ocopa to the Subprefect of Jauja, Jauja, September 3, 1928 (AGN: MI/PR 277/DP/JN). A few days after leaving Cheni, Capt. Lepecki met with Figueroa, who was navigating downriver to arrest the Ashaninka Adventist instigators. 21. Lepecki, Na Amazonce, 209. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24.  Aleksander Freyd, “Garść grażen´ z Amazonji Brazylijskiej Peruan´skiej,” Auto 12 (1928): 652. 25.  The Ashaninka subgroup of the Ashaninka cluster calls these “good spirits” or “creator gods” tasorentsi; see Kindberg, Diccionario Ashaninca, 249. The Asheninka subgroup calls them tasorentsi or tasorintsi; see David L. Payne, Diccionario asheninca-­castellano (Lima: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, 1980), 135; but some

[ 200 ]  Not es to pages 18 –23 authors assert that the Gran Pajonal Asheninka call them tahorentsi; see Hanne Veber, comp., Historias para nuestro futuro: Narraciones autobiográficas de líderes Asháninkas y Ashéninkas (Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, 2009), 337. Finally, the Nomatsiguenga subgroup calls them tosorintsi; see Harold Shaver, Diccionario Nomatsiguenga-­Castellano, Castellano-­Nomatsiguenga (Lima: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, 1996), 197. 26.  Gerald Weiss, Campa Cosmology: The World of a Forest Tribe in South America (New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1975), 258. 27.  Ibid., 266. 28. Gerald Weiss, “Campa Cosmology,” Actas y memorias del 39 Congreso Internacional de Americanistas 4 (1972): 204. 29.  Ibid., 196. 30.  Stefano Varese, “Dos versiones cosmogónicas campas: Esbozo analítico,” Revista del Museo Nacional 36 (1969): 169, 175. 31.  Harold Shaver, “Los Campa Nomatsiguenga de la amazonía peruana y su cosmología,” Folklore Americano 20 (1975): 49, 51. 32. Payne, Diccionario asheninca-­castellano, 135. 33.  France-­Marie Renard-­Casevitz, e-­mail message to author, November 4, 2014. 34.  Esteban Arias Urízar, e-­mail message to author, August 5, 2011. 35.  Renard-­Casevitz, e-­mail, November 4, 2014. 36. Eduardo Fernández, Para que nuestra historia no se pierda: Testimonios de los asháninca y nomatsiguenga sobre la colonización de la región Satipo-­Pangoa (Lima: Centro de Investigación y Promoción Amazónica, 1986), 70. 37.  The name of the Inka solar divinity in Quechua is Inti. It is not clear where Lepecki came up with the idea that its name is Tahuanty. The root of the Quechua word Tahuanty is tawa = four, and the idiom tawanti is found in Tawantinsuyo, a term meaning “the four regions” by which the Inka designated their empire. 38. Weiss, Campa Cosmology, 267. 39.  Ibid., 259; Weiss, “Campa Cosmology,” 192–193. 40.  Weiss, “Campa Cosmology,” 193. 41. Fernández, Para que nuestra historia no se pierda, 69–70, 203–204. 42. Lepecki, Na Amazonce, 212. 43.  Ibid., 136. 44.  Ibid., 138. 45.  Ibid., 137. 46.  Ibid., 211. 47.  Ibid., 137. 48.  Mark Turner, “Blending Box Experiments, Build 1.0,” Working Paper (2010), 1, accessed January 2013, http://​papers​.ssrn​.com​/sol3​/papers​.cfm​?abstract​_id​=​1541062. 49. Ibid. 50. Gilles Fauconnier, “Conceptual Blending,” in The Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, ed. Neil Smelser and Paul Baltes (New York: Elsevier, 2001), 2495–2498.

Not es to pages 23–26  [ 201 ] 51.  Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, “Conceptual Blending, Form, and Meaning,” in Cognitive Semiotics, ed. Pierre Fastrez, special issue, Recherches en Communication 19 (2004): 57. 52. Claude Lévi-­Strauss, “Guerre et commerce,” Renaissance 1(1–2) (1943): 122–139. 53.  Joanna Overing, “Orientation for Paper Topics,” Acts of the 42nd International Congress of Americanists 2 (1977): 9–10; Joanna Overing, “Elementary Structures of Reciprocity: A Comparative Note on Guianese, Central Brazilian, and North-­West Amazon Socio-­Political Thought,” Antropológica 59–62 (1983–1984): 331–348. 54.  Stephen Hugh-­Jones, “Yesterday’s Luxuries, Tomorrow’s Necessities: Business and Barter in Northwest Amazonia,” in Barter, Exchange and Value, ed. Caroline Humphrey and Stephen Hugh-­Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 42–74. 55.  Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Le marbre et le myrte: De l’inconstance de l’âme sauvage,” in Mémoire de la tradition, ed. Aurore Becquelin and Antoinette Molinié (Nanterre: Société d’Ethnologie, 1993), 365–431. 56.  Claude Lévi-­Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 16–22. 57.  Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), xiii, xviii. 58.  Fernando Santos-­Granero, “Captive Identities, or the Genesis of Subordinate Quasi-­Ethnic Collectivities in the American Tropics,” in Ethnicity in Ancient Amazonia: Reconstructing Past Identities from Archaeology, Linguistics, and Ethnohistory, ed. Alf Hornborg and Jonathan D. Hill (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2011), 344. 59.  Carlos Fausto and Emmanuel de Vienne, “Acting Translation: Ritual and Prophetism in Twenty-­First Century Indigenous Amazonia,” HAU-­Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4(2) (2014): 165. 60.  Turner, “Blending Box Experiments,” 10. 61. Lepecki, Na Amazonce, 210.

Ch a p ter 2 1.  The Pichis Trail was a dirt road that connected La Merced with Puerto Bermúdez, providing Lima, the capital, with access to a navigable point of the Pichis River and, through it, to Iquitos on the Upper Amazon 2.  Letter from the Ministry of Public Works to the Ministry of the Interior, forwarding telegram from the Chief of the Pichis Trail, September 6, 1915 (AGN: MI/ PR 175/CM/FO). 3.  The 1908 network was based on five wireless and eleven telegraphic relays, many of them established along the Pichis Trail. See David Brown, “Informe sobre El Comercio de Iquitos correspondiente al año 1912, por el Cónsul Británico

[ 202 ]  Not es to pages 26 –29 interino Sr. David Brown,” in Informes de los cónsules británicos: Gran Bretaña y el Perú, 1826–1919, comp. Heraclio Bonilla (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1912), 3:250. 4.  El Oriente, “Graves sucesos en el Ucayali,” September 6, 1915. 5. Ibid. 6.  La Prensa, “Ataque de los salvajes en el alto Ucayali,” September 6, 1915; El Comercio, “Sublevación de los Campas en el Alto Ucayali,” September 7, 1915. 7.  Narciso Girbal y Barceló, “Nuestro viaje al Ucayali y exploración del Pachitea e intento de pasar al Pozuzo por el Mairo,” in Bernardino Izaguirre, Historia de las misiones franciscanas y narración de los progresos de la geografía en el Oriente del Perú(Lima: Talleres Tipográficos de la Penitenciaría, 1924), 8:308. 8.  La Prensa, “La sublevación de los campas y los cunibos,” September 21, 1915; Pedro Portillo, “Exploración de los ríos Apurímac, Ene, Tambo, Ucayali, Pachitea y Pichis por el prefecto de Ayacucho, coronel don Pedro Portillo,” in Colección de leyes, decretos, resoluciones y otros decretos oficiales referentes al Departamento de Loreto, comp. Carlos Larrabure y Correa (Lima: Imprenta de La Opinión Nacional, 1905), 3:493, 503. 9.  In 1897, Fr. Gabriel Sala reported that the Francchini brothers had thirty Conibo working for them in the casa grande plus one hundred Conibo families that extracted rubber for them under the habilitación system in different locations. Sala estimated that, at the time, the Francchini brothers controlled around one thousand Conibo. See Gabriel Sala, “Exploración de los ríos Pichis, Pachitea, Alto Ucayali y de la región del Gran Pajonal,” in Colección de leyes y decretos, resoluciones y otros documentos oficiales referentes al departamento de Loreto, comp. Carlos Larrabure y Correa (Lima: Imprenta “La Opinión Nacional,” 1907), 7:55. 10. Before the 1920s, most entrepôts, fundos, and haciendas in the Amazon region did not have land titles. Their extension depended on the capacity of their owners to exploit local resources through extractive and productive activities, which in turn depended on the size of the indigenous workforce they controlled. The headquarters of the largest of these estates often became small towns through the aggregation of people not under direct control of the “owner” of the place and  the establishment of such public services as schools, post offices, telegraph stations, justice of the peace courts, police stations, etc. 11.  Hildebrando Fuentes, Loreto: Apuntes geográficos, históricos, estadísticos, políticos y sociales (Lima: Imprenta de La Revista, 1908), 1:134. 12.  Portillo, “Exploración,” 3:492. Neither El Oriente nor other contemporary newspapers mention the “Fitzcarrald brothers” by name, but it is to be assumed that they were not Delfín and Lorenzo, Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald’s brothers, who had died in 1900 and 1905, respectively, but Federico and José, the rubber baron’s sons, who we know returned from France to Peru sometime in the early 1910s to take control of their father’s business; see Ernesto Reyna, Fitzcarrald, el Rey del Caucho (Lima: Taller Gráfico de P. Barrantes C., 1942), 156; and La Prensa, “Sombrío porvenir de nuestro oriente,” November 20, 1913.

Not es to pages 29 –31  [ 203 ] 13.  El Oriente, “Graves sucesos,” September 6, 1915; Peter Gow, Of Mixed Blood: Kinship and History in Peruvian Amazonia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 47. 14.  El Oriente, “Noticias del Ucayali,” October 16, 1915. 15.  Article published in El Oriente on March 14, 1915 and quoted in: El Oriente, “Los sucesos del Ucayali,” September 14, 1915. 16. John H. Bodley, Interview with Horacio Santiago (Ashaninka); Nevati (Nazarateki River), February 9, 1969, in Fieldnotes, 73–75. 17.  Lee Kindberg, Diccionario Ashaninca (Yarinacocha: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, 1980), 199. 18.  H. U. Stevens, “How the Indians of the Amazon Region Keep Track of the Sabbath,” Review and Herald 101(6) (1924): 10. 19.  These sticks, collected among the Ashaninka by Adventist missionary William Schaeffler in the late 1920s, appear in the NMAI records as “notched time beating sticks” under the category of musical instruments. Ethnomusicologist Bernd Brabec de Mori claims, however, that he has found no evidence either in the specialized literature or while doing fieldwork in the Upper Ucayali of the existence of such instruments among the Ashaninka. Citing the Instituto Nacional de Cultura’s Mapa de los instrumentos musicales de uso popular en el Perú (1978: 375), he further claims that rasping sticks are unknown among the indigenous peoples of Peruvian Amazonia. The fact that the sticks collected by Schaeffler have deeper notches every seven marks reinforces the notion that they were meant to keep track of time on a weekly basis. It also suggests that they were introduced by white people in colonial or early republican times. 20.  El Oriente, “Graves sucesos,” September 6, 1915, and La Prensa, “Ataque de los salvajes,” September 6, 1915; complemented by news that appeared in La Prensa, “La situación del alto Ucayali,” September 7, 1915, La Razón, “Buena noticia,” September 25, 1915, and El Oriente, “La masacre del Ucayali,” September 8, and “Noticias,” October 16, 1915. 21.  Arkady Fiedler, Ryby spiewaja w Ukajali (Warszawa: Iskry, 1951), 196. 22. Interviews with Capt. Delgado were published in the Iquitos dailies El Oriente, “La masacre,” September 8, 1915, and La Razón, September 8, 1915. I had access to that day’s edition of El Oriente, but not to that of La Razón. However, since La Razón’s interview with Delgado was reproduced almost entirely by the Lima daily El Comercio, “La masacre en el Ucayali,” November 5, 1915, we have full knowledge of what he reported. 23.  La Prensa, “La sublevación de indios en el alto Ucayali y Urubamba,” September 8, 1915. 24. Mieczysław B. Lepecki, Na Amazonce i we wschodniem Peru (Lwów-­ Warszawa: Książnica-­Atlas, 1931), 141. 25.  In the November 5, 1915, issue of El Comercio, it is said that the Libertad was attacked a second time on its way down to Iquitos at the mouth of the Pacaya River; it is more than probable that this was the site where the fundo of Delgado’s sister was located.

[ 204 ]  Not es to pages 31–3 4 26. Lepecki, Na Amazonce, 144. 27.  El Oriente, “Noticias,” October 16, 1915. These are the names as they should be spelled in Ashaninka. The names as they appear in this source are Tasolinche, Acasharonchi, Pijorato, and Zamoto. 28.  Letter of the Police Constable of Puerto Bermúdez to the Captain of the steam launch Libertad, Puerto Bermúdez, February 17, 1913 (AGN: MI/PR 157DP/JN). 29.  La Prensa, “La situación,” September 7, 1915. 30. Ibid. 31. Guillermo Garland Higginson, “Visita a una comunidad asháninka en 1929” (video) (minutes 4:38 to 4:50), accessed August 11, 2015, https://​www​.youtube​ .com​/watch​?v​=​QSHRp09wq2k. This film was shot during a trip to the Chanchamayo region by the attendants of the Second South American Congress of Tourism held in Lima in 1929. The scenes featuring the steam launch Libertad were probably shot in the Catholic mission of Puerto Ocopa, on the Lower Perené River, for we know that the visitors did not reach the Upper Ucayali and there is evidence that at least on some occasions the Libertad traveled up the Tambo River taking cargo to Puerto Ocopa; see Dionisio Ortiz, Alto Ucayali y Pachitea: Visión histórica de dos importantes regiones de la selva peruana (Lima: Imprenta Editorial “San Antonio,” 1974), 2:572. 32.  It also ventures that the attack might have been planned as revenge by one of the region’s criminals, since the Libertad was one of the ships used by the government to transport convicts to Iquitos. This, however, sounds even less plausible. 33.  “Slavery in Peru.” Message of the President of the United States Transmitting Report of the Secretary of State, with Accompanying Papers, Concerning the Alleged Existence of Slavery in Peru (Washington, DC, 1913), 16. 34.  Letter of the Subprefect of Ucayali to the Prefect of Loreto, Contamana, September 20, 1915 (AGN: MI/PR 174/DP/LR). 35.  Arkady Fiedler, The River of Singing Fish (London: Readers Union with Hodder and Stoughton, 1951), 159. 36. Ibid. 37. Barbara Osborne Westphal, A Bride on the Amazon (Washington, DC: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1948), 150, 107. 38.  El Comercio, “La masacre,” November 5, 1915. 39.  El Oriente, “La masacre,” September 8, 1915; Anonymous, “Sublevación de salvajes en el Ucayali,” El Deber Pro-­Indígena 3(36) (1915): 166. 40.  El Oriente, “La masacre,” September 8, 1915. 41.  El Oriente, “Noticias,” October 16, 1915. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44.  La Prensa, “La sublevación,” September 21, 1915. 45.  La Razón, “Asesinato en el alto Ucayali,” October 1, 1915; El Oriente, “Noticias del Ucayali,” November 24, 1915. 46.  La Prensa, “Las feroces incursiones de los ‘Campas’ en el Ucayali,” October 4, 1915.

Not es to pages 3 4 –38  [ 205 ] 47. Ibid. 48.  La Prensa, “Telegramas interior: De Puerto Bermúdez,” October 30, 1915. 49.  El Comercio, “Itaya,” November 8, 1915; El Oriente, “Noticias del Ucayali,” November 16, 1915. 50.  El Oriente, “Noticias,” November 16, 1915. 51.  El Oriente, “Noticias del Ucayali,” November 29, 1915. 52.  El Oriente, “Noticias del Ucayali,” November 24, 1915. 53.  La Razón, “Buenas noticias,” September 25, 1915; El Oriente, “Noticias,” October 16, 1915. 54.  La Prensa, “Telegramas interior: Iquitos,” October 9, 1915. 55.  El Oriente, “Noticias,” November 16, 1915. 56.  La Razón, “Sobre los sucesos del Alto Ucayali,” December 7, 1915. 57. Lepecki, Na Amazonce, 126. 58.  La Prensa, “La sublevación,” September 8, 1915; El Comercio, “Ecos de la sublevación de los indios,” September 13, 1915. 59.  Aleksander Freyd, “Garść grażen´ z Amazonji Brazylijskiej Peruan´ skiej,” Auto 12 (1928): 652. 60.  El Oriente, “Noticias,” November 24, 1915. 61. Ibid. 62. The names as they appear in the documentary sources: Acasharonchi, Bruno, El Boliviano, Casanto, Francisco el Chino, Chirungama, Chobiri, Chohuahuenga, Cipriano, Crevo, Napoleón, Ompikiri, Pijorato, Tasorentsi, Uribe, and Zamoto. Acasharontsi means “big fish hook” (Kindberg, Diccionario Ashaninca, 9); Kasanto means “yellow-­breasted macaw” (ibid., 25); Shirunkama means “adze” (ibid., 241); Chobiri means “large wasp” (David L. Payne, Diccionario Asheninca-­ Castellano [Lima: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, 1980], 59); Chobabuenga is related to the bird chova (ibid.); Ompikiri means “swallow tanager” (Kindberg, Diccionario Ashaninca, 158); finally, Samoto means “rotten stick” (ibid., 234). 63.  Fernando Santos-­Granero, Vital Enemies: Slavery, Predation, and the Amerindian Political Economy of Life (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 24–25. 64.  La Crónica, “Las rebeliones de los campas,” September 25, 1915; El Oriente, “¿A qué obedece la irrupción de los indios?” December 7, 1915. 65.  El Oriente, “Noticias,” November 24, 1915; El Oriente, “Noticias,” October 16, 1915. 66. Lepecki, Na Amazonce, 210. 67.  El Oriente, “Noticias,” October 16, 1915; El Comercio, “La masacre,” November 5, 1915; El Oriente, “Noticias,” October 16, 1915; Alan K. Craig, “Brief Ethnology of the Campa Indians, Eastern Peru,” América Indígena 27(2) (1967): 232. 68.  El Oriente, “Noticias,” October 16, 1915. 69. Ibid. 70.  El Oriente, “Noticias,” November 29, 1915. 71.  El Oriente, “Noticias,” November 24, 1915. 72.  El Comercio, “La masacre del Ucayali,” November 5, 1915.

[ 206 ]  Not es to pages 38 –4 2 73. Report on the Urubamba, Apurimac, Ene, Perené, and Tambo Rivers according to the studies and explorations by José Gregorio Prada and sons, dedicated to His Excellency Dr. Nicolás de Piérola (BNP: SM F821). 74.  José B. Samanez y Ocampo, Exploración de los ríos peruanos Apurímac, Eni, Tambo, Ucayali y Urubamba (Lima: SESATOR, 1980), 46, 48; Manuel Patiño Samudio, “El caucho y la siringa,” Boletín de la Sociedad Geográfica de Lima 11(1) (1901): 84. 75.  Sala, “Exploración,” 7:59. 76.  El Oriente, “Noticias,” November 24, 1915. 77. Lepecki, Na Amazonce, 137, 208. 78.  Ibid., 210. 79.  Report on the arrest of the Indians Ulises and Manuela, September 13, 1928: Report of the Police Constable of Puerto Ocopa to the Subprefect of Jauja, Jauja, September 3, 1928 (AGN: MI/PR 277/DP/JN). 80.  Certified copies of the reports emitted by the Subprefect of Ucayali, the Police Constable of Urubamba, and the Police Constable of Puerto Ocopa on the activities of Adventist missionaries on the Upper Ucayali River, Iquitos, November 8, 1928 (MRE: 2-­0 -­E, 1928-­Entradas, NN). 81.  Jivataintsiri in previous spelling. See Kindberg, Diccionario Ashaninca, 56. 82.  El Oriente, “La masacre,” September 8, 1915. 83. Polish Capt. Lepecki asserted that Francisco Vargas Hernández was a slave owner and witnessed a transaction in which the latter sold two indigenous girls to a ship captain. See Mieczysław B. Lepecki, Wschodnie Peru czyli Montanja (Warsaw: Naukowy Instytut Emigracyjny, 1930), 38. The Francchini brothers controlled a large workforce of habilitado peons, which could only be achieved by outfitting indigenous adult men or capturing and raising indigenous children. See Gabriel Sala, “Exploración,” 7:55. As to the Fitzcarrald brothers, it is reported that Ashaninka chief Venancio Amaringo Campa, who was a known slaver, worked for them. See Portillo, “Exploración,” 3:497, and Ernesto La Combe, “Expedición de Puerto Bermúdez a Iquitos y de este último puerto al istmo de Fiscarrald–Informe del Coronel La Combe,” in Colección de leyes y decretos, resoluciones y otros documentos oficiales referentes al departamento de Loreto, comp. Carlos Larrabure y Correa (Lima: Imprenta “La Opinión Nacional,” 1907), 12:235. 84. Fiedler, The River of Singing Fish, 159. 85.  Fernando Santos-­Granero, Interview with Adolfo Gutiérrez (Ashaninka, 75 years old); Churingaveni (Perené River), August 20, 2013. 86.  Elena Mihas, Interview with Aurora Quinchori Julio (Ashaninka, resident of Ciudadela, La Merced, 77 years old); Bajo Marankiari, May 2016. 87.  E.  N. Lugenbeal, “The Advent Message in Jungle and Plateau,” Review and Herald 126(11) (1949): 18. 88.  La Prensa, “Increíble audacia de los indios Campas,” January 29, 1914. 89.  Patiño Samudio, “El caucho y la siringa,” 84. 90.  Fernando Santos-­Granero, Interview with Segundo Arroyo (Ashaninka, 70 years old); Santa Teresa (Pachitea River), April 20, 2016; Fernando Santos-­Granero,

Not es to pages 4 2 –47  [ 207 ] Interview with Alcides Calderón (Ashaninka, 58 years old); Puerto Bermúdez (Pichis River), April 16, 2016. 91.  El Comercio, “Iquitos: Reunión interesante,” September 10, 1915. 92.  La Razón, “Buena noticia,” September 27, 1915. 93.  El Oriente, “Noticias del Ucayali,” October 16, 1915. 94. Ibid. 95.  El Oriente, “Noticias del Ucayali,” November 16, 1915. 96.  El Comercio, “Itaya,” February 8, 1916. 97.  El Oriente, “Noticias,” November 16, 1915. 98.  El Oriente, “Los indios del Ucayali,” November 22, 1915. 99.  Quoted in El Comercio, “La despoblación del Alto Ucayali,” April 12, 1916. 100.  La Razón, “Noticias,” November 15, 1915. 101. Lepecki, Na Amazonce, 210. 102.  La Voz del Ucayali, “Editorial,” September 16, 1916. 103.  Letter of Fr. Agustín López to Fr. León Lambrook of Manchester, Lima, August 23, 1922 (APM: B/88). 104. Witold Michalowski, Teki Sarmatów (Piastow: Oficyna Wydawnicza “Rewasz,” 2009), 145 105.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Alcides Calderón; this is confirmed by the inhabitants of the native community of Santa Teresa, on the Pachitea River, who claim that Chief José Carlos first arrived in the area around 1920; see Santa Teresa, Plan del buen vivir: Comunidad nativa Santa Teresa (Lima: USAID/FECONAPIA/ Instituto del Bien Común, 2015), 20. 106.  La Voz del Ucayali, “Editorial,” September 16, 1916. 107. Letter of Fr. Agustín López to Miss Paulina Manuela, Requena, 1922 (APM: B/88); Charles W. Domville-­Fife, Among Wild Tribes of the Amazons (London: Seeley, Service & Co. Limited, 1924), 268.

Ch a p ter 3 1.  Two notable exceptions were El Comercio, “Sublevación de los Campas en el Alto Ucayali,” September 7, 1915, which claimed that, according to their informants, the uprising had been in the making since the assaults to the Pichis Trail a year and half earlier, and La Voz del Ucayali, “Editorial,” September 16, 1916, which postulated that the 1915 Upper Ucayali multiethnic revolt was connected with the 1912–1914 Ashaninka movement. 2.  La Prensa, “Los campas del Pichis y del Pachitea abandonan a sus patrones en actitud de protesta por sus abusos,” September 25, 1912. 3.  La Voz del Ucayali, “Editorial,” September 16, 1916. 4.  John W. Elick, “An Ethnography of the Pichis Valley Campa of Eastern Peru” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1970), 217. 5.  La Voz del Ucayali, “Editorial,” September 16, 1916.

[ 208 ]  Not es to pages 48 –50 6.  La Prensa, “Trájica muerte del Sr. Carlos Corpancho,” October 30, 1912. 7.  Anonymous, “Carlos Corpancho,” Variedades 8(244) (1912). 8.  La Prensa, “El asesinato del Sr. Corpancho en la montaña,” November 2, 1912. 9.  El Comercio, “Un crimen en la montaña—Muerte del Sr. Carlos Corpancho,” October 29, 1912. 10.  La Prensa, “El asesinato,” November 2, 1912. 11. David L. Payne, Diccionario Asheninca-­Castellano (Lima: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, 1980), 104. 12. At present, and due to the influence of the missionary-­linguists of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, the Ashaninka call the Christian God “Tasorentsi,” which, as we have seen, in traditional mythology is the name given to a category of good spirits and creator gods and, sometimes, to one of them in particular. 13.  Eduardo Fernández, Para que nuestra historia no se pierda: Testimonios de los Asháninca y Nomatsiguenga sobre la colonización de la región Satipo-­Pangoa (Lima: Centro de Investigación y Promoción Amazónica, 1986), 69. 14.  As will be explained in chapter 4, the Perené Colony was a half-­million-­ hectare concession that the Peruvian Corporation Co.—formed by the British holders of Peruvian bonds—obtained from the Peruvian government as partial payment of its debt. The Perené Colony overlapped with much of the Yanesha and Ashaninka traditional territories, and the Yanesha and Ashaninka that lived within its limits often worked for the colony as temporary laborers in its coffee plantations. 15.  Gabriel Sala, “Exploración de los ríos Pichis, Pachitea, Alto Ucayali y de la región del Gran Pajonal,” in Colección de leyes, decretos, resoluciones y otros decretos oficiales referentes al Departamento de Loreto, comp. Carlos Larrabure y Correa (Lima: Imprenta “La Opinión Nacional”, 1907), 12:100, 106. 16.  Ibid., 111. 17.  La Prensa, “Trájica muerte,” October 30, 1912  ; La Prensa,  “La trájica muerte del Sr. Carlos Corpancho—Nuevos detalles del criminal suceso,” October 31, 1912. 18.  La Prensa, “El asesinato,” November 2, 1912. 19. Ibid.; La Prensa, “La trájica muerte,” October 31, 1912. 20.  Uñanco and three other Ashaninka men were accused of Carlos’s murder, and the prefect of Junín issued an order for their arrest. Only Uñanco was captured. He was sent to prison but soon managed to escape. See Letter of the Prefect of Junín to the Ministry of the Interior, Cerro de Pasco, December 5, 1912 (AGN: MI/PR 148/DP/JN); La Prensa, “El asesinato,” November 2, 1912. 21. Fernández, Para que nuestra historia no se pierda, 111–112. 22. His name sometimes appears in the documents as Sedelmayer, Zedelmeyer, or Sedel Mayer. 23.  Francisco Irazola, “Viaje de exploración por la zona central de infieles: Apurímac, Ene, Perené, Pangoa,” Boletín de la Sociedad Geográfica de Lima 32(2– 3) (1916): 183–196; Dionisio Ortiz, Reseña histórica de la montaña del Pangoa, Gran Pajonal y Satipo (1673–1960) (Lima: Editorial San Antonio, 1961), 133.

Not es to pages 50 –53  [ 209 ] 24. In the original, “Shire,” a misspelling of Tsiri, meaning “green cicada” in Ashaninka. See Lee Kindberg, Diccionario Ashaninca (Yarinacocha: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, 1980), 260. 25.  La Prensa, “Graves sucesos en Pangoa,” January 4, 1912. 26.  Typed copy of a letter from Oscar Sedlmayer to Dora Mayer, Tambo River, December 1, 1911 (APZ: Series 2000027222). 27.  Irazola, “Viaje,” 191–192. 28.  Ibid., 192. 29.  Letter of the Prefect of Junín to the Ministry of the Interior, Oroya, September 19, 1913: Telegram from the colonists of Pangoa to the Prefect of Junín, Andamarca, September 2, 1913 (AGN: MI/PR 157/DP/JN). 30.  Letter of the Prefect of Junín to the Ministry of the Interior, Oroya, September 22, 1913: Act of the coca farmers of Pangoa to the Subprefect of Jauja, Andamarca, September 7, 1913 (AGN: MI/PR 157/DP/JN). 31.  In the original “Mañuro,” probably a misspelling of “Maniaro,” which in Ashaninka means “green locust.” See Harold Shaver, Diccionario Nomatsiguenga-­ Castellano, Castellano-­Nomatsiguenga (Lima: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, 1996), 169. 32.  In the original “Chura,” a misspelling of “Shora.” See ibid., 192. 33.  Letter of the Prefect of Junín to the Ministry of the Interior, Oroya, September 22, 1913: Letter of the Prefect of Junín to the Ministry of the Interior, Oroya, September 19, 1913 (AGN: MI/PR 157/DP/JN). 34. Fernández, Para que nuestra historia no se pierda, 36. 35.  Letter of the Prefect of Junín to the Ministry of the Interior, Oroya, September 22, 1913: Letter of the Subprefect of Jauja to the Prefect of Junín, Jauja, September 18, 1913 (AGN: MI/PR 157/DP/JN). 36.  Chief Tsiri was accused by the authorities of being in the pay of various white slave traders: Juan Fitkau, Oscar Sedlmayer, and the Spanish Antonio Bezada. But he was considered to be especially close to Fitkau, until their partnership ended violently in May 1913. Shora was a Nomatsiguenga warrior chief from the Urubamba River, who, in the 1910s and 1920s, lived in San Ramón de Pangoa. At the time, he was one of the most important warrior chiefs in the Satipo area and was feared for his raids against the Pichis and Gran Pajonal Ashaninka, and against the Conibo, Piro, and Mashco of the Ucayali and Urubamba Rivers. Of Maniaro, the third Pangoa chief, we know little, except that he also provided captives for Fitkau and Bezada Jr. See Letter of the Prefect of Junín to the Subprefect of Tarma, Cerro de Pasco, November 5, 1913: Letter of the Police Constable of Upper Ucayali to the Prefect of Loreto, August 20, 1913 (ARJ: PR 212, No. 376); Letter of the Prefect, Oroya, September 22, 1913: Act of the coca farmers, Andamarca, September 7, 1913 (AGN: MI/PR 157/DP/JN); La Prensa, “Graves sucesos,” January 4, 1912; Fernández, Para que nuestra historia no se pierda, 65–66. 37.  Letter of the Prefect of Junín to the Subprefect of Tarma, Cerro de Pasco, November 5, 1913: Letter of the Police Constable of Upper Ucayali to the Prefect of Loreto, August 20, 1913 (ARJ: PR 212, No. 376).

[ 210 ]  Not es to pages 53–56 38.  Fernando Santos-­Granero, Interview with Alcides Calderón (Ashaninka, 58 years old); Puerto Bermúdez (Pichis River), April 16, 2016. 39. Ibid. 40.  Fernando Santos-­Granero, Interview with Adolfo Gutiérrez (Ashaninka, 75 years old); Churingaveni (Perené River), August 20, 2013. 41.  François Dumoulin et Cie. was a Belgian firm dedicated to the mass production of inexpensive guns for export that operated in Liege from 1894 to the present. 42.  Fernando Santos-­Granero, Interview with Segundo Arroyo (Ashaninka, 70 years old); Santa Teresa (Pachitea River), April 20, 2016. 43. Benjamín Romero, “Impresiones de una excursión por la montaña de Chanchamayo y de un viaje aéreo a Iquitos,” Boletín de la Sociedad Geográfica de Lima 45(3-­4) (1928): 305–348. 44.  Elena Mihas, Upper Perené Arawak Narratives of History, Landscape, and Ritual (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 4. 45.  Claude Lévi-­Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966), 234–236; Claude Lévi-­ Strauss, The Naked Man (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1971), 606–607. 46.  Jonathan D. Hill, “Ethnogenesis in the Northwest Amazon: An Emerging Regional Picture,” in History, Power, and Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492-­1992, ed. Jonathan D. Hill (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996), 157. 47.  Joanne Rappaport, “Geography and Historical Understanding in Indigenous Colombia,” in Who Needs the Past? Indigenous Values and Archaeology, ed. Robert Layton (London: Routledge, 1989), 88. 48.  Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, Thunder Shaman: Making History with Mapuche Spirits in Chile and Patagonia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016), 11–12. 49.  Lévi-­Strauss, The Naked Man, 607. 50.  We know from oral testimonies that during that period it was not uncommon for parents whose children had been sequestered by slavers to ask another known slaver to rescue them on their behalf; see Fernández, Para que nuestra historia no se pierda, 140. 51.  Alfredo J. Mac Laughlin, “Narratives of Hope: A Philosophical Study of Moral Conversion” (PhD diss. Loyola University Chicago, 2008), xi. 52.  See Fernando Santos-­Granero, Vital Enemies: Slavery, Predation, and the Amerindian Political Economy of Life (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), and Santos-­Granero, “Masters, Slaves, and Real People: Native Understandings of Ownership and Humanness in Tropical American Capturing Societies,” in Ownership and Nurture: Studies in Native Amazonian Property Relations, ed. Marc Brightman, Carlos Fausto, and Vanessa Grotti (London: Berghahn, 2016), 36–62, for the processual character of slave/master relations. 53.  Mac Laughlin, “Narratives of Hope,” 3. 54.  Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 146.

Not es to pages 56 –59  [ 211 ] 55.  César Cipriani, “Estudio de la ruta Perené-­Ucayali,” in Colección de leyes y decretos resoluciones y otros documentos oficiales referentes al departamento de Loreto, comp. Carlos Larrabure y Correa (Lima: Imprenta “La Opinión Nacional,” 1907), 10:208–295. 56.  Report of the Subprefect of Ucayali to the Prefect of Loreto, Contamana, June 5, 1912 (BNP: SM 2000020102). 57.  La Prensa, “Horribles crímenes en el Alto Ucayali,” January 22, 1912. 58.  Letter of the Prefect, Oroya, September 22, 1913: Act of the coca farmers, Andamarca, September 7, 1913 (AGN: MI/PR 157/DP/JN). 59.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Alcides Calderón. 60. Telegram of the Acting Prefect of Junín to the Ministry of the Interior, Cerro de Pasco, December 24, 1913 (ARJ: PR 215, No. 253); La Prensa, “La situación en Chanchamayo,” January 15, 1913. The following are the twelve tambos that existed along the Pichis Trail from the mission town of San Luis de Shuaro to Puerto Bermúdez on the Pichis River: Yapaz (km 8), La Salud (km 33), Eneñas (km 51), Kilómetro 71, El Porvenir (km 93), San Nicolás, Azupizú (km 143), Puchalini (km 153), Miritiriani, Aguachini, Puerto Soto, and Puerto Yessup. 61.  One month earlier, around November 25, a group of Ashaninka attacked Iparia, a rubber entrepôt located on the Upper Ucayali close to its confluence with the Pachitea River, killing the Spanish patrón, Domingo González, and forcing its inhabitants to abandon it; see El Oriente, November 25, 1913. It is not clear, however, whether this was an isolated event or whether it was connected with the Ashaninka concerted offensive in the Pichis-­Perené area. 62.  La Prensa, “La sublevación de los Campas,” January 3, 1914. 63.  The attack to Miritiriani has been preserved in Ashaninka oral memory. It is said that it was caused by the killing of an Ashaninka fisherman at the hands of a group of muleteers who lived in this tambo. According to this version, Miritiriani was attacked by sixty warriors under the leadership of shaman-­chief Iromano. Lucy Trapnell, Interview with Alcides Calderón (Ashaninka, 57 years old); Puerto Bermúdez (Pichis River), November 14, 2015. 64.  Telegram from the Acting Prefect of Junín to the Subprefect of Tarma in San Luis de Shuaro, Cerro de Pasco, January 7, 1914 (ARJ: PR 215, No. 358); Telegram of the Acting Prefect of Junín to Commander Palomino in Tarma, Cerro de Pasco, January 7, 1914 (ARJ: PR 215, No. 359); La Prensa, “Los asaltos de los Campas,” January 24, 1914. 65.  Telegram of the Acting Prefect of Junín to the Ministry of the Interior, Cerro de Pasco, January 20, 1914 (ARJ: PR 215, No. 92); The West Coast Leader, “Indian Forays: Twenty Settlers Killed on Upper Ucayali,” September 9, 1915. 66.  Letter of the Police Constable of Puerto Mayro to the Prefect of Huanuco, Puerto Mayro, February 10, 1914 (AGN: MI/PR 164/DP/HU). 67.  Letter of the Ministry of Public Works to the Ministry of the Interior, Lima, June 30, 1914: Report of the Administrator of the Perené Colony to the representative of the Peruvian Corporation, Perené Colony, June 15, 1914 (AGN: MI/PR 167/CM/CS).

[ 212 ]  Not es to pages 59 – 61 68.  Gerald Weiss, Campa Cosmology: The World of a Forest Tribe in South America (New York: The American Museum of Natural History, 1975), 237. 69.  La Crónica, “El correo de Iquitos a Lima asaltado por los salvajes,” February 4, 1914. 70.  La Prensa, “Los Campas de Chanchamayo,” January 31, 1914; La Crónica, “El correo,” February 4, 1914. 71.  La Prensa, “Increíble audacia,” January 29, 1914. 72. Ibid. 73.  Walter E. Hardenburg, The Putumayo: The Devil’s Paradise. Travel in the Peruvian Amazon Region and an Account of the Atrocities Committed Upon the Indians Therein (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912), 191. 74.  El Oriente, “Noticias del Ucayali,” November 11, 1915. 75.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Alcides Calderón. 76.  John H. Bodley, Interview with Ramón Carrión (white-­mestizo patrón); Nevati (Nazarateki River), February 1, 1969, in Fieldnotes, 50-­53. 77.  Elick, “An Ethnography,” 188–190; Ronald J. Anderson, comp., Cuentos folklóricos de los Ashéninca (Yarinacocha: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, 1986), 2:21–23; Santos-­Granero, Interview with Adolfo Gutiérrez. 78.  John W. Elick, “Down in the ‘Colonia Campa,’” South American Bulletin (1951) 26:4–5. 79. Anderson, Cuentos folklóricos, 21–23. 80.  Gregorio Santos Pérez, Interview with his parents, Ines Pérez de Santos (Ashaninka, 75 years old) and Moisés Santos Rojas (Ashaninka, 75 years old); Bajo Marankiari (Perené River); May 2016. 81.  La Prensa, “Los Campas,” January 31, 1914. 82.  La Crónica, “El levantamiento de los Campas en Chanchamayo,” January 30, 1914; Telegram of the Prefect of Junín to the Ministry of the Interior, Cerro de Pasco, February 18, 1914 (ARJ: PR 216, No. 59). 83.  La Prensa, “Temores de una invasión de indios,” March 10, 1914. 84.  La Crónica, “Sobre la sublevación de los Campas,” June 19, 1914; La Prensa, “Los crímenes de los chunchos,” May 14, 1914. 85.  Telegram of the Prefect of Junín to the Ministry of the Interior, Lima, June 1, 1914 (ARJ: PR 216, No. 136). 86.  Telegram of the Prefect of Junín to the Ministry of the Interior, Lima, June 2, 1914 (ARJ: PR 216, No. 137). 87.  Bernardino Izaguirre, Historia de las misiones franciscanas y narración de los progresos de la geografía en el Oriente del Perú (Lima: Talleres Tipográficos de la Penitenciaría, 1926), 12:351–352. 88.  Telegram of the Prefect of Junín to the Police Constable of Puerto Yessup, Cerro de Pasco, August 11, 1916 (ARJ: PR 238, No. 166). 89.  La Voz del Ucayali, “Editorial,” September 16, 1916. 90.  La Prensa, “La travesía de Lima a Iquitos,” September 20, 1914. 91.  La Prensa, “Nuevos ataques de los Campas,” June 2, 1914.

Not es to pages 61– 63  [ 213 ] 92. Telegram of the Prefect of Junín to the Ministry of the Interior, Cerro de Pasco, May 13, 1914 (ARJ: PR 216, No. 117). Bobby Crawford was an Irishman who settled in the Pichis valley to extract rubber around 1896. See Harry L. Foster, The Adventures of a Tropical Tramp (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, Ltd., 1922), 267. He owned a rubber post on the mouth of the Apurucayali River and controlled 300 Ashaninka peons. For this reason, he was considered to be the “rubber king of the district.” During the height of the rubber boom, Crawford had been much appreciated by his Ashaninka peons because he paid them splendidly. See El Comercio, “Los ataques de los campas a Cahuapanas y Puchalini,” June 3, 1914; La Prensa, “La travesía de Lima a Iquitos,” September 20, 1914. This, however, generated very high expectations among the Ashaninka, which, when the rubber prices declined, Crawford could no longer fulfil. This explains, at least partly, why the Ashaninka sought to kill him. 93. Izaguirre, Historia, 12:351–352. 94. Buenaventura Luis Uriarte, La montaña del Perú (Lima: Gráfica 30, 1982), 203. 95.  Alberto Gridilla, “Aportación de los misioneros franciscanos descalzos al progreso de la geografía del Perú,” Colección Descalzos 5 (1938): 86; Anales de la obra de la propagación de la fe en el Oriente del Perú: Memoria del año 1915 a 1916 (Lima: Imp. “La Providencia,” 1916), 209; La Prensa, “La sublevación de los Campas,” July 23, 1914. 96.  Letter of the Prefect of Junín to the Subprefect of Tarma, Cerro de Pasco, July 9, 1914: Letter of the Administrator of the Perené Colony to the representative of the Peruvian Corporation, Perené Colony, June 15, 1914 (ARJ: PR 214, No. 436). 97. Letter of Capt. Parodi, Chief of the Pichis Garrison, to the Prefect of Junín, La Merced, December 7, 1914 (AGN: MI/PR 172/DP/JN). 98.  Letter of the Prefect of Junín: Letter of the Administrator of the Perené Colony (ARJ: PR 214, No. 436); Telegram of the Prefect of Junín to the Inspector Puente Olavegoya in Perené, Cerro de Pasco, July 14, 1914: Telegram of the Administrator of the Perené Colony to the Ministry of Public Works, ND (ARJ: PR 217, No. 499). 99.  La Prensa, “La vida entre los Campas y Amueshas,” July 18, 1914. 100.  The indigenous leaders were interviewed, among others, by José Carlos Mariátegui, who by then wrote under the pen name Juan Croniqueur and was still not the acclaimed revolutionary ideologist that he was to become in later years; see La Prensa, “Entre salvajes,” July 19, 1914. 101.  La Prensa, “Asaltan en Puchalini al Ing. Bustamante,” June 4, 1914. 102.  Telegram of the Prefect of Junín to the Ministries of the Interior and Public Works, Lima, June 4, 1914 (ARJ: PR 216, No. 168). 103.  Telegram of the Prefect of Junín to the Ministry of the Interior, Lima, June 4, 1914 (ARJ: PR 216, No. 182). 104.  Telegram of the Prefect of Junín to the Ministry of the Interior, Cerro de Pasco, June 20, 1914 (ARJ: PR 217, No. 398).

[ 214 ]  Not es to pages 63– 66 105.  La Prensa, “La travesía,” September 20, 1914. 106.  Bodley, Interview with Ramón Carrión, 51. 107. One of the few rebels captured by the police was an Ashaninka chief called Díaz Vicente, accused of having killed many civilizados along the Pichis Trail; see Telegram of the Prefect of Junín to the Colonel Chief of the Zone of Lima, Cerro de Pasco, June 4, 1916 (AGN: MI/PR 238/DP/JN); a picture of him appeared in Variedades 12(417) (1916): 267. 108.  The West Coast Leader, “Indian Forays,” September 9, 1915. 109.  Dionisio Ortiz, Oxapampa: Estudio de una provincia de la selva del Perú (Lima: Imprenta Editorial “San Antonio,” 1967), 2:290. 110.  Fernando Santos-­Granero, Interview with Armando del Arca Huamani (Ashaninka, resident of Kirishari, 84 years old); Puerto Bermúdez (Pichis River), April 12, 2016. 111. Ibid. 112.  La Voz del Ucayali, “Editorial,” September 16, 1916. 113.  Telegram of the Prefect of Junín (ARJ: PR 216, No. 168). 114.  Elick, “An Ethnography,” 188, 192. 115.  Ibid., 191–192. 116.  Frederica Barclay, Interview with Alejandro Calderón. 117.  Elick, “An Ethnography,” 217. 118. Fernández, Para que nuestra historia no se pierda, 69. 119.  Ibid., 75. 120.  Ibid., 70, 197. 121.  John H. Bodley, Interview with Nataniel Sarmiento (Ashaninka, 56 years old); Shahuaya (Ucayali River), July 10–11, 1966, in Fieldnotes, 23–24, 62–65. 122. Kindberg, Diccionario Ashaninca, 303. 123. Fernández, Para que nuestra historia no se pierda, 197; see also narrative “En defensa de la religión nativa” in Gerald Weiss, “Los Campa Ribereños,” in Guía etnográfica de la alta amazonía, Vol. 5, Campa Ribereños/Ashéninka, ed. by Fernando Santos and Frederica Barclay (Lima: Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute/Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos, 2005), 65–73. 124. Fernández, Para que nuestra historia no se pierda, 198. 125.  Ibid., 202. 126.  La Voz del Ucayali, “Editorial,” September 16, 1916. 127.  According to Lucy Trapnell, who witnessed one such event while doing fieldwork in an Upper Perené community in 1976, after the local shaman had announced that the time to ascend to heaven had finally arrived, his followers embarked on a quest for immortality that entailed the frequent consumption of ayahuasca in all-­night-­long celebrations. In such ritual gatherings, usually held on nights of a full moon, participants danced and sang, asking the divinities to sweep them off to their celestial abode. In a state of permanent mystical euphoria, believers focused their energies on their ritual quest, neglecting everyday subsistence activities, such as hunting and gardening. For months people stopped eating regularly. This, according

Not es to pages 66 –70  [ 215 ] to Trapnell, affected many adults, who contracted tuberculosis. Aggravated by malnutrition, the disease killed several members of the community. When this happened, believers started to suspect that their quest had failed and, as a result, the movement gradually fizzled. According to Trapnell, it was under these circumstances that she and her companion, Amelia Villanueva, collected a story in which the narrator— brother of the shaman that had inspired the movement—asked the tasorentsi gods to send him shotguns with which to hunt; see Amelia Villanueva and Lucy Trapnell, “Todas las escopetas me van a mandar los tasorentsi,” Amazonía Peruana 1(1) (1976): 133–134. Lucy Trapnell, e-­mail message to the author, February 7, 2014. 128.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Armando del Arca Huamani. 129.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Segundo Arroyo. 130.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Alcides Calderón. 131.  Gerald Weiss, “Shamanism and Priesthood in the Light of the Campa Ayahuasca Ceremony,” in Hallucinogens and Shamanism, ed. by Michael J. Harner (London: Oxford University Press, 1978), 43–45. 132.  John H. Bodley, Interview with Meyando Vásquez (Ashaninka, 40 years old); Shahuaya (Ucayali River), August 21, 1966, in Fieldnotes, 63-­69. 133.  Elena Mihas, Interview with Aurora Quinchori Julio (Ashaninka, resident of Ciudadela, La Merced, 77 years old); Bajo Marankiari; May 2016. 134. Weiss, Campa Cosmology, 470. 135. Vaincoshi means “bream”; see Payne, Diccionario, 148; now spelled “Baincoshi.” 136.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Adolfo Gutiérrez. 137. Elena Mihas, Interview with Elias Meza Pedro (Ashaninka, resident of Mariscal Cáceres, 75 years old) and his son-­in-­law, Gregorio Santos Pérez (Ashaninka, resident of Villa Perené, born and grew up in Bajo Marankiari, 55 years old); Bajo Marankiari (Perené River), May 2016. 138.  El Oriente, “Noticias,” November 24, 1915.

Ch a p ter 4 1.  Fernando Santos-­Granero, Interview with Segundo Arroyo (Ashaninka, 70 years old); Santa Teresa (Pachitea River), April 20, 2016. 2.  Lucy Trapnell, Interview with Alcides Calderón (Ashaninka, 57 years old); Puerto Bermúdez (Pichis River), November 14, 2015; Fernando Santos-­Granero, Interview with Alcides Calderón (Ashaninka, 58 years old); Puerto Bermúdez (Pichis River), April 16, 2016. 3. Gregorio Santos Pérez, Interview with his parents, Moisés Santos Rojas (Ashaninka, 75 years old) and Ines Pérez de Santos (Ashaninka, 75 years old); Bajo Marankiari (Perené River), May 2016. 4. Elena Mihas, Interview with Elias Meza Pedro (Ashaninka, resident of Mariscal Cáceres, 75 years old) and his son-­ in-­ law, Gregorio Santos Pérez

[ 216 ]  Not es to pages 70 –74 (Ashaninka, resident of Villa Perené, born and grew up in Bajo Marankiari, 55 years old); Bajo Marankiari (Perené River), May 2016. 5.  Fernando Santos-­Granero, Interview with Adolfo Gutiérrez (Ashaninka, 75 years old); Churingaveni (Perené River), August 20, 2013. 6.  Fernando Santos-­Granero, “El enigma de la endoguerra asháninca: ¿accidente histórico o paradigma cultural?” (paper presented at the Primer Congreso Internacional de Historia de la Amazonía Peruana, Lima, Perú, July 14, 2017). 7.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Segundo Arroyo. 8.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Adolfo Gutiérrez. 9. Fernando Santos-­Granero, Interview with Armando del Arca Huamani (Ashaninka, resident of Kirishari, 84 years old); Puerto Bermúdez (Pichis River), April 12, 2016. 10.  Fernando Santos-­Granero and Frederica Barclay, Selva Central: History, Economy and Land-­Use in Peruvian Amazonia (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), 49. 11.  Frederica Barclay, La Colonia del Perené: Capital inglés y economía cafetalera en la configuración de la región de Chanchamayo (Iquitos: Centro de Estudios Teológicos de la Amazonía, 1989), 28–33. 12.  Ibid., 38. 13.  Joaquín Capelo, La Vía Central del Perú (Lima: Imprenta Masías, 1895), 2: 17–18. 14.  Ibid., 2:30. 15. Guido Pennano, La economía del caucho (Iquitos: Centro de Estudios Teológicos de la Amazonía, 1988), 76. 16.  Warren Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 9. 17.  Fernando Santos-­Granero and Frederica Barclay, Tamed Frontiers: Economy, Society, and Civil Rights in Upper Amazonia (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000), 20. 18.  Ibid., 22. 19. Because of their diverse natural properties, these two rubber varieties required different methods of extraction, which in turn generated different economic practices and settlement patterns. Whereas Hevea could be tapped regularly and encouraged more sedentary and stable economic fronts, Castilla had to be felled in order to be tapped, driving rubber extractors to a more nomadic life, always in search of new rubber stands. 20.  Santos-­Granero and Barclay, Tamed Frontiers, 37–38. 21.  Peter Gow, Of Mixed Blood: Kinship and History in Peruvian Amazonia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 41; Santos-­Granero and Barclay, Tamed Frontiers, 40–42. 22.  Santos-­Granero and Barclay, Tamed Frontiers, 29–30. 23.  Ibid., 31. 24.  Ricardo García Rosell, “Índice de los descubrimientos, expediciones, estudios y trabajos llevados a cabo en el Perú para el aprovechamiento y cultura de sus

Not es to pages 75–78  [ 217 ] montañas . . .” in Colección de leyes, decretos, resoluciones y otros decretos oficiales referentes al Departamento de Loreto, comp. Carlos Larrabure y Correa (Lima: La Opinión Nacional, 1908), 15:44. 25.  José B. Samanez y Ocampo, Exploración de los ríos peruanos Apurímac, Eni, Tambo, Ucayali y Urubamba (Lima: SESATOR, 1980), 79. 26.  Ibid., 91. 27.  Ibid., 81–82. 28.  Ibid., 57, 66. 29.  Ibid., 66. 30.  Ibid., 83. 31.  Ibid., 82. 32.  Fernando Santos-­Granero, “The Arawakan Matrix: Ethos, Language, and History in Native South America,” in Comparative Arwakan Histories: Rethinking Language Family and Culture Area in Amazonia, ed. Jonathan D. Hill and Fernando Santos-­Granero (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 32. 33.  Samanez y Ocampo, Exploración, 83. 34.  Ovantzincari in the original; see Elena Mihas, Upper Perené: Arawak Narratives of History, Landscape, and Ritual (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 366. 35.  Hildebrando Fuentes, Loreto: Apuntes geográficos, históricos, estadísticos, políticos y sociales (Lima: Imprenta de La Revista, 1908), 2:201. 36. Ibid. 37.  Ibid., 200. 38.  Ibid., 140. 39.  Bernardino Izaguirre, Historia de las misiones franciscanas y narración de los progresos de la geografía en el Oriente del Perú (Lima: Talleres Tipográficos de la Penintenciaría, 1926), 12:212. 40.  Peter Gow, e-­mail message to the author, January 15, 2014. 41.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Adolfo Gutiérrez. 42. Mieczysław B. Lepecki, Na Amazonce i we wschodniem Peru (Lwów-­ Warszawa: Książnica-­Atlas, 1931), 210. 43. Dossier gathered by the Pro-­Indian Association on the abuses committed against indigenous people in the Upper Ucayali region, Lima, June 20, 1911: Report of the Subprefect of Upper Ucayali, Contamana, October 3, 1911 (APL: Secretaría. Mesa de Partes y Archivo. Libro FG, Letra V, No. 144). I was able to consult this important document thanks to the generosity of Pilar García Jordán, who provided me with a photocopy of the transcript of the document that she made while doing research at the old archive of the Prefecture of Loreto (Iquitos), whose contents were burned, unfortunately, during the popular riots that followed the signing of the peace treaty between Peru and Ecuador in October 1998. 44. Lepecki, Na Amazonce, 210. 45. Barbara Osborne Westphal, A Bride on the Amazon (Washington, DC: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1948), 166.

[ 218 ]  Not es to pages 78 – 81 46.  John H. Bodley, Interview with Nataniel Sarmiento (Ashaninka, 56 years old); Shahuaya (Ucayali River), July 10–11, 1966, in Fieldnotes, 23–24, 62–65. 47.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Adolfo Gutiérrez. 48.  Adventist pastor, Alejandro Bullón Páucar, refers to Tasorentsi during his Adventist years as Tashuninqui (Tashuninki); see Alejandro Bullón Páucar, Él nos amaba: La aventura misionera de Stahl entre los Campas (Lima: Asociación Peruana Central de la Iglesia Adventista del Séptimo Día, 1976), 99, 166. It is not clear whether Tashuninki is a variation of the name Tasorentsi. We know, however, that Tashuninki is a common Ashaninka name in the Perené area; see Pablo Edwin Jacinto Santos, “Estudio del sistema de denominación antroponímica de la cultura asháninka” (Tesis de Licenciatura, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 2009), 74. 49.  To wit: Tasolinche, Tasulinchi, Tasolinch, Tasolinchi, Tasorinche, Tasorinchi, Tasorintzi. 50.  Jeremy Narby, Interview with Carlos Pérez Shuma (Ashaninka, 45 years old); Kirishari (Pichis River), June 13, 1985, in Fieldnotes, 2:11. 51.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Adolfo Gutiérrez. 52.  V. E. Peugh, “Through the Jungles to Iquitos (Part 3),” Review and Herald 106(2) (1929): 13. 53.  John H. Bodley, Interview with Mariano Bautista (Conibo, 39 years old); Shahuaya (Ucayali River), August 14, 1966, in Fieldnotes, 115-­117. 54.  Nataniel Sarmiento, María Paredes, and Meyando Vásquez. 55.  He mentions “José Carlos Tasurinchi” as uncle of Catosho Machari, later known as Abel Fieta; see Bullón Páucar, Él nos amaba, 118. 56.  Pablo Edwin Jacinto Santos, “Onomástica: Estudio sobre apellidos y nombres propios de personas en la comunidad ashéninka del Gran Pajonal” (MA thesis, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2013), 33–34, 37–38. 57. Marc Lenaerts, Anthropologie des Indiens Ashéninka d’Amazonie (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004), 199. 58.  John W. Elick, “An Ethnography of the Pichis Valley Campa of Eastern Peru” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1970), 178. 59. Westphal, A Bride on the Amazon, 91. 60.  Ibid., 162; Letter of the Prefect of Loreto to the Ministry of the Interior, Iquitos, April 23, 1929 (AGN: MI/PR 286/DP/LR). 61. Letter of Jaime Morón de la Fuente to the Police Constable of the Urubamba River, Unini, August 20, 1928 (MRE: 2-­0 -­E, 1928-­Entradas, NN). 62. Ibid. 63.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Segundo Arroyo. 64. Westphal, A Bride on the Amazon, 165. 65. Ibid. 66.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Segundo Arroyo. It must be noted, however, that Arroyo asserted that someone had once told him that his father’s “real” surname was Samanez. I could not confirm this information.

Not es to pages 81– 86  [ 219 ] 67.  Víctor Almirón, “Resumen de las exploraciones que del año 1896 a 1902 practicó en los ríos Ituxi, Curuquetá i alto Purús el Señor Don . . .”, in Colección de leyes, decretos, resoluciones y otros decretos oficiales referentes al Departamento de Loreto, comp. Carlos Larrabure y Correa (Lima: Imprenta “La Opinión Nacional”, 1905), 4:376. 68.  Gabriel Sala, Exploración de los ríos Pichis, Pachitea, y Alto Ucayali y de la región del Gran Pajonal (Lima: Imprenta “La Industria,” 1897), 96, 104. 69.  Tribus del Ucayali, Lima, September 7, 1922 (APM: A/11, No. 2). 70. Sala, Exploración, 96. 71.  Ibid., 104. 72.  Ibid., 112; Ernesto La Combe, “Expedición de Puerto Bermúdez a Iquitos i de este último puerto al istmo de Fiscarrald-­Informe del Coronel La Combe,” in Colección de leyes, decretos, resoluciones y otros decretos oficiales referentes al Departamento de Loreto, comp. Carlos Larrabure y Correa (Lima: Imprenta “La Opinión Nacional”, 1907), 12:235. 73.  Manuel Patiño Samudio, “El caucho y la siringa,” Boletín de la Sociedad Geográfica de Lima 11(1) (1901): 84. 74. A. Estanislao Granadino, “Exploraciones en el río Piedras por Carlos Scharff,” Boletín de la Sociedad Geográfica de Lima 32(4) (1916): 353. 75.  Manfred Schäfer, “Ayompari, Amigos und die Peitsche. Die Verflechtung der ökonomischen Tauschbeziehungen der Ashéninga in der Gesellschaft des Gran Pajonal/Ostperu” (PhD diss., Ludwig-­Maximillans-­Universität, 1988), 78, 172. 76.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Adolfo Gutiérrez. 77. Sala, Exploración, 129–130. 78. Ibid. 79.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Adolfo Gutiérrez. 80. Lepecki, Na Amazonce, 211. 81. Westphal, A Bride on the Amazon, 166. 82. Lepecki, Na Amazonce, 211. 83.  See a photograph of Fr. Sala in Izaguirre, Historia de las misiones franciscanas, 10:404. 84. Lepecki, Na Amazonce, 212–213. 85. Rubén Cushimariano Romano and Richer C. Sebastián Q. Diccionario Asháninka-­Castellano (parcial) (Electronic document, 2008), 27, accessed March 2015, http://​w ww​.lengamer​.org​/publicaciones​/diccionarios​/ Dic​_ Prelim​_ Ashaninka​.pdf; Lee Kindberg, Diccionario Ashaninca (Yarinacocha: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, 1980), 165; Stefano Varese, The Salt of the Mountain: Campa Ashaninka History and Resistance in the Peruvian Jungle (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), 25. 86. Varese, The Salt of the Mountain, 25. 87. Lepecki, Na Amazonce, 236. 88. Hanne Veber, comp., Historias para nuestro futuro: Narraciones autobiográficas de líderes Asháninkas y Ashéninkas (Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, 2009), 178, 182.

[ 220 ]  Not es to pages 86 – 91 89.  Cushimariano Romano and Sebastián, Diccionario, 27. 90.  Adventist missionary William Schaeffler collected two of these Ashaninka horn tinder carriers in the Upper Ucayali in the late 1920s. See William Schaeffler Collection at the National Museum of the American Indian, Catalog Nos. 196015.000 and 196016.000. 91.  Elick, “An Ethnography,” 138. 92.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Adolfo Gutiérrez. 93.  Søren Hvalkof and Hanne Veber, “Los Asheninka del Gran Pajonal,” in Guía etnográfica de la alta amazonía, Vol. 5, Campa Ribereños, Ashéninka, ed. Fernando Santos and Frederica Barclay, 77–279 (Lima: Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute/Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos, 2005), 145. 94. Fr. Sala was a great explorer and a very efficient missionary, having founded several missions in the Chanchamayo region throughout his extended life. Unlike other Franciscan missionaries, however, he felt little empathy for the indigenous people he worked with. For him evangelization was not only about saving souls but, above all, a means of transforming savage people into disciplined workers who could contribute to the incorporation of the Amazon region into the national economy. If the savages resisted assimilation, they should be simply eliminated. Such radical views were not shared by all Franciscan missionaries. 95.  Jeremy Narby, Interview with Carlos Pérez Shuma, in Fieldnotes, 2:9. 96.  Dossier gathered by the Pro-­Indian Association (APL: Secretaría. Mesa de Partes y Archivo. Libro FG, Letra V, No. 144). 97.  Typed copy of a letter from Oscar Sedlmayer to Dora Mayer, Tambo River, December 1, 1911 (APZ: Series 2000027222). 98.  Jeremy Narby, Interview with Carlos Pérez Shuma, in Fieldnotes, 2:9.

Ch a p ter 5 1. For most contemporary Peruvians, “the Indian problem” was the challenge posed by the lack of integration of highland indigenous people—mainly ­Quechua-­and Aymara-­speaking—who were generally monolingual and illiterate; worked under servile conditions in large haciendas, plantations, and mines; and led a degraded life due to extreme poverty and the excessive consumption of alcohol and coca leaves. See José Carlos Mariátegui, 7 ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (Lima: Empresa Editora Amauta, 1998), 35–49, for a summary and criticism of the debate on “the Indian problem.” 2.  El Comercio, “Una carta sobre las sublevaciones de los chunchos,” November 23, 1915. 3.  El Comercio, “Campas asesinos,” January 29, 1914. 4.  La Crónica, “Carta interesantísima de un viejo colono,” January 17, 1914. 5.  Report on the state and works of the Apostolic Prefecture of San Francisco of Ucayali, August 27, 1915 (APM: A/16, No. 1).

Not es to pages 91– 9 4  [ 221 ] 6.  Letter of Capt. Parodi, Chief of the Pichis Garrison, to the Prefect of Junín, La Merced, December 7, 1914 (AGN: MI/PR 172/DP/JN). 7.  La Razón, “La masacre en el Ucayali,” September 8, 1915; reproduced in El Comercio, “La masacre en el Ucayali,” November 5, 1915. 8. Hildebrando Fuentes, Loreto: Apuntes geográficos, históricos, estadísticos, políticos y sociales (Lima: Imprenta de La Revista, 1908), 1:75. 9.  It is not clear what the relationship between El Comercio of Iquitos and El Comercio of Lima was. Since I have not been able to find copies of El Comercio of Iquitos in any of the archives consulted, all the references I know about the paper’s positions derive from other sources. Whatever the relationship between the two papers might have been, it is evident that they were quite independent. At times, as in the above case, they adopted opposite positions, but on other occasions—as in relation to the debate on the criminal responsibility of indigenous people—El Comercio of Iquitos adopted political positions that were even more progressive than those of El Comercio of Lima. 10.  El Oriente, “Los indios,” September 14, 1915. 11.  El Comercio, “Editorial,” November 5, 1915. 12. Fuentes, Loreto, 1:122. 13.  Ibid., 2:141. 14.  This was the case of the rubber entrepreneur Carlos Scharff, killed by a party of aggrieved Yine warriors in the Curiyacu post (Piedras River) on July 22, 1909; see Estanislao Granadino, “Carlos Scharff,” La Crónica, November 15, 1915. 15.  La Prensa, “Sombrío porvenir de nuestro Oriente,” November 20, 1913. 16.  La Crónica, “Sobre la sublevación de los Campas,” June 19, 1914. 17. Ibid. 18.  La Prensa, “Sombrío,” November 20, 1913. 19.  Fernando Santos-­Granero and Frederica Barclay, Tamed Frontiers: Economy, Society, and Civil Rights in Upper Amazonia (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000), 126–127. 20.  Ibid., 29. 21.  David Brown, “Informe sobre el comercio de Iquitos correspondiente al año 1912,” in Informes de los cónsules británicos: Gran Bretaña y el Perú, 1826–1919, ed. Heraclio Bonilla (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1975), 3:247–248. 22.  G. B. Mitchell, “Informe sobre el comercio de Iquitos correspondiente al año 1911,” in Informes de los cónsules británicos: Gran Bretaña y el Perú, 1826–1919, ed. Heraclio Bonilla (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1975), 3:227–228. 23.  Ibid., 3:229. 24.  Brown, “Informe,” 3:247. 25.  Ibid., 3:248. 26.  Ibid., 3:258. 27.  Ibid., 3:259. 28.  V. Huckin, “Informe sobre el intercambio comercial de Iquitos para el año de 1914,” in Informes de los cónsules británicos: Gran Bretaña y el Perú, 1826–1919, ed. Heraclio Bonilla (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1975), 3:284.

[ 222 ]  Not es to pages 9 4 – 98 29.  Ibid., 3:292. 30.  El Comercio, “La situación económica de Loreto,” June 23, 1914. 31.  William Curtis Farabee, Indian Tribes of Eastern Peru (Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, 1922), 65. 32.  Huckin, “Informe,” 3:285. 33.  V. Huckin, “Informe sobre el movimiento mercantil de Iquitos para el año de 1913,” in Informes de los cónsules británicos: Gran Bretaña y el Perú, 1826–1919, ed. Heraclio Bonilla (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1975), 3:257. 34.  Roger Rumrrill, Carlos Dávila, and Fernando Barcia, Yurimaguas: Capital histórica de la Amazonía peruana (Yurimaguas: Concejo Provincial de Alto Amazonas, 1986), 161. 35.  La Voz del Ucayali, “Editorial,” September 16, 1916. 36.  Letter of the Subprefect of Ucayali to the Prefect of Loreto, Contamana, September 20, 1915 (AGN: MI/PR 174/DP/LR). 37. Camilo Habert, “La travesía de Lima a Iquitos: El por qué de la sublevación de los campas,” La Prensa, September 20, 1914. 38.  Bernardino Izaguirre, Historia de las misiones franciscanas y narración de los progresos de la geografía en el Oriente del Perú (Lima: Talleres Tipográficos de la Penitenciaría, 1926), 12:351. 39.  Santos-­Granero and Barclay, Tamed Frontiers, 35. 40. See ibid., 35, 38; Bartholomew Dean, “Multiple Regimes of Value: Unequal Exchange and the Circulation of Urarina Palm-­Fiber Wealth,” Museum Anthropology 18(1) (1994): 3–20; Evan Killick, “Godparents and Trading Partners: Social and Economic Relations in Peruvian Amazonia,” Journal of Latin American Studies 40 (2008): 303–328; and Harry Walker, “Demonic Trade: Debt, Materiality, and Agency in Amazonia,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society 18 (2012): 140–159. 41.  Walker, “Demonic Trade,” 140; Dean, “Multiple Regimes of Value,” 11. 42.  Killick, “Godparents,” 312. 43.  Santos-­Granero and Barclay, Tamed Frontiers, 266. 44.  Dossier gathered by the Pro-­Indian Association on the abuses committed against indigenous people in the Upper Ucayali region; Lima, June 20, 1911: Report of the Subprefect of Upper Ucayali, Contamana, October 3, 1911 (APL: Secretaría. Mesa de Partes y Archivo. Libro FG, Letra V, No. 144). 45. Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, “Apresentação,” in Pacificando o branco: Cosmologias do contato no Norte-­Amazônico, eds. Bruce Albert and Alcida Rita Ramos (São Paulo: Editora UNESP/Imprensa Oficial do Estado, 2002), 7. 46.  Walker, “Demonic Trade,” 156. 47.  Ibid., 146; Killick, “Godparents,” 317. 48.  Letter of the Subprefect of Ucayali, September 20, 1915 (AGN: MI/PR 174/ DP/LR). 49.  For a discussion of the notions of “struggle for vitality” and indigenous “political economies of life,” see Fernando Santos-­Granero, Vital Enemies: Slavery, Predation, and the Amerindian Political Economy of Life (Austin: University of Texas

Not es to pages 98 –101  [ 223 ] Press, 2009). For a discussion of how these notions play out among contemporary Ashaninka, see Fernando Santos-­Granero and Frederica Barclay, “Bundles, Stampers, and Flying Gringos: Amazonian Perceptions of Capitalist Violence,” Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 16(1) (2011): 143–167. 50.  La Voz del Ucayali, “Editorial,” September 16, 1916. 51.  La Crónica, “Sobre la sublevación de los Campas,” June 19, 1914. 52.  César Cipriani, “Estudio de la ruta Perené-­Ucayali,” in Colección de leyes, decretos, resoluciones y otros decretos oficiales referentes al Departamento de Loreto, comp. Carlos Larrabure y Correa (Lima: Imprenta “La Opinión Nacional”, 1907) 10:293; see also Gabriel Sala, Exploración de los ríos Pichis, Pachitea, y Alto Ucayali y de la región del Gran Pajonal (Lima: Imprenta “La Industria,” 1897), 122, 182; and Anales de la obra de la propagación de la fe en el Oriente del Perú: Memoria del año 1906 a 1907 (Lima: Imp. “La Providencia,” 1907), 381. 53.  El Oriente, “Noticias del Ucayali,” October 16, 1915. 54.  La Prensa, “Las feroces incursiones de los “Campas,” October 4, 1915. 55.  La Prensa, “Telegramas interior: De Puerto Bermúdez,” October 30, 1915. 56.  El Oriente, “Noticias del Ucayali,” November 24, 1915. 57.  El Oriente, “Noticias del Ucayali,” November 16, 1915. 58.  The term cholos referred to the descendants of Indians catechized in colonial times or to tribal Indians captured in correrías and raised in a white-­mestizo environment. In the Upper Ucayali and Lower Urubamba this category of people was known as mozos or moza gente; see Peter Gow, Of Mixed Blood: Kinship and History in Peruvian Amazonia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 86–87; also Santos-­Granero and Barclay, Tamed Frontiers, 271–272. 59.  Gerald Weiss, Campa Cosmology: The World of a Forest Tribe in South America (New York: The American Museum of Natural History, 1975), 432. 60.  Ibid., 435. 61.  John W. Elick, “An Ethnography of the Pichis Valley Campa of Eastern Peru” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1970), 215. 62.  Elena Mihas, El idioma del Alto Perené (Milwaukee, WI: Clarks Graphics, 2011), 118. 63.  Harold Shaver and L. Dodd, Los Nomatsiguenga de la Selva Central (Lima: Ministerio de Educación/Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, 1990), 103. 64. Weiss, Campa Cosmology, 435; see also Elena Mihas, Upper Perené Arawak Narratives of History, Landscape, and Ritual (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 99–112, for the story of a female witch who was resurrected after being killed. 65.  Buenaventura Luis de Uriarte, La Montaña del Perú (Lima: Gráfica 30, 1982), 212. 66.  Fernando Santos-­Granero, “Anticolonialismo, mesianismo y utopía en la sublevación de Juan Santos Atahuallpa, siglo XVIII,” Data: Revista del Instituto de Estudios Andinos y Amazónicos, 4 (1993): 133–152. 67. Jeremy Narby, Interview with Carlos Pérez Shuma (Ashaninka, 45 years old); Kirishari (Pichis River), June 13, 1985, in Fieldnotes, 2:8–9; see also

[ 224 ]  Not es to pages 101–104 Jeremy Narby, “Visions of Land: The Ashaninca and Resource Development in the Pichis Valley in the Peruvian Central Jungle” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1989). 68.  This is an abridged version of Carlos Pérez Shuma’s interview, in which repetitions and circumlocutions have been eliminated to make its reading easier. 69.  Juan Ansión, ed., Pishtacos: De verdugos a sacaojos (Lima: Tarea, 1989), 69. 70.  Ibid., 9. 71. Farabee, Indian Tribes, 38. 72. Gerald Weiss, “Campa Cosmology,” Actas y memorias del 39 Congreso Internacional de Americanistas 4 (1972): 200. 73. Peter Gow, “Gringos and Wild Indians: Images of History in Western Amazonian Cultures,” L’Homme 33(126–128) (1993): 335; Juan Pablo Sarmiento Barletti, “Kametsa Asaiki: The Pursuit of the ‘Good Life’ in an Ashaninka Village (Peruvian Amazonia)” (PhD diss., University of St. Andrews, 2011), 187. 74.  Gow, “Gringos and Wild Indians,” 335. 75. Evan Killick, “Living Apart: Separation and Sociality amongst the Ashéninka of Peruvian Amazonia” (PhD diss., London School of Economics, 2005), 125. 76.  Weiss, “Campa Cosmology,” 200. 77.  Ibid., 284. 78.  Ibid., 198. 79.  Elick, “An Ethnography,” 203; Jacques M. Chevalier, Civilization and the Stolen Gift: Capital, Kin, and Cult in Eastern Peru (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 424. 80.  La Prensa, “Los Campas de Chanchamayo,” January 31, 1914; The West Coast Leader, “Indian Forays: Twenty Settlers Killed on Upper Ucayali,” September 9, 1915. 81.  Letter of the Police Constable of Puerto Mayro to the Prefect of Huanuco, Puerto Mayro, February 10, 1914 (AGN: MI/PR 164/DP/HU). 82.  Letter of the Prefect of Junín to the Subprefect of Tarma, Cerro de Pasco, March 10, 1914 (ARJ: PR 214, No. 127). 83.  La Prensa, “La trájica [sic] muerte del Sr. Carlos Corpancho,” October 31, 1912. 84.  Letter of the Prefect of Junín to the Subprefect of Tarma, Cerro de Pasco, November 5, 1913 (ARJ: PR 212, No. 376). 85. Francisco Irazola, “Viaje de exploración por la zona central de infieles: Apurímac, Ene, Perené, Pangoa,” Boletín de la Sociedad Geográfica de Lima 32(2–3) (1916): 192. 86.  For detailed analyses of the indigenous notion of “ensoulment,” see Fernando Santos-­Granero, ed., The Occult Life of Things: Native Amazonian Theories of Materiality and Personhood (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2009). 87.  La Prensa, “Los Campas,” January 31, 1914. 88.  Fernando Santos-­Granero, Interview with Raúl Tepa (Ashaninka, 74 years old); Caserío Zungaroyali (Pichis River), April 14, 2016.

Not es to pages 104 –106  [ 225 ] 89.  I asked Ashaninka specialists Søren Hvalkof, Lucy Trapnell, Evan Killick, and Juan Pablo Sarmiento if they had ever heard of this practice, and all of them said that they had not, not even in the context of the violent confrontations between the Ashaninka and the insurgent groups Shining Path and Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement during the 1980s and early 1990s. 90.  Article reproduced in La Prensa, “Los Campas de Chanchamayo,” January 31, 1914. 91.  Letter of the Police Constable of Puerto Mayro, February 10, 1914 (AGN: MI/PR 164/DP/HU); my emphasis. 92.  Marja Bochdan-­Niedenthal, Ucayali: Raj czy piek Conad Amazonką (Warsaw: Polish Book House, 1935), 105. 93.  Letter of the Prefect of Junín to the Ministry of the Interior, Oroya, September 22, 1913: Act of the coca farmers of Pangoa to the Subprefect of Jauja, Andamarca, September 7, 1913 (AGN: MI/PR 157/DP/JN). 94.  Anonymous, “Los sucesos del Ucayali,” Variedades 11(394) (1915): 2631. 95.  La Voz del Ucayali, “Editorial,” September 16, 1916. 96.  Hechos curiosos y raros de las misiones recogidos por el P. Agustín López (APM: A/11, unnumbered). 97.  Manuel Biedma, La conquista franciscana del Alto Ucayali (Lima: Milla Batres, 1981), 95; José Amich, Historia de las misiones del convento de Santa Rosa de Ocopa (Lima: Editorial Milla Batres, 1975), 108. 98. Frederica Barclay, Interview with Alejandro Calderón (Ashaninka, 50 years old); Puerto Bermúdez (Pichis River), 1988. 99.  El Oriente, “Noticias del Ucayali,” October 16, 1915. 100.  Harold Shaver, “Los Campa Nomatsiguenga de la Amazonía peruana y su cosmología,” Folklore Americano 20 (1975): 51. 101.  Marc Lenaerts, Anthropologie des Indiens Ashéninka d’Amazonie (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004), 150. 102. Fernando Santos-­ Granero, “Introduction: Amerindian Constructional Views of the World,” in The Occult Life of Things: Native Amazonian Theories of Materiality and Personhood, ed. Fernando Santos-­Granero (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009) 4, 6. 103.  Eusebio Laos Ríos, “Aliento del sol vivo,” in El ojo verde: Cosmovisiones amazónicas, ed. Gredna Landolt (Lima: Programa de Formación de Maestros Bilingües/AIDESEP/Fundación Telefónica, 2000), 57–58. Born in the San Carlos Range, close to the ancient Pichis Trail, Don Eusebio was for many years the Ashaninka specialist at the Program for the Formation of Peruvian Amazon Bilingual Teachers (FORMABIAP), founded in Iquitos in 1988. 104.  Ibid., 58; see also Peter M. I. B. Beysen, “Kitarentse: Pessoa, Arte e Estilo de Vida Ashaninka do Oeste Amazônico” (PhD diss., Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, 2008), 181, on the life-­giving power of Pabá’s breath. 105.  Also known as Nabireri or Mabireri. 106. Weiss, Campa Cosmology, 310; Shaver, “Los Campa Nomatsiguenga,” 52. Others say that it was Moon, known as Kashiri or Manchakori, who transformed the

[ 226 ]  Not es to pages 106 –110 primordial humans into animals. See Stefano Varese, “Dos versiones cosmogónicas campas. Esbozo analítico,” Revista del Museo Nacional 36 (1969): 167–169. 107.  On the perspectival nature of native Amazonian ontologies, see Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4(3) (1998): 469–488, and Tânia Stolze Lima, “The Two and its Many: Reflections on Perspectivism in a Tupi Cosmology,” Ethnos 64(1) (1999): 107–131. 108. Weiss, Campa Cosmology, 289. 109. Lenaerts, Anthropologie, 144–145. 110.  Elick, “An Ethnography,” 225. 111.  Ibid., 210. 112.  Ibid., 212. 113.  Ibid., 199. 114.  Ibid., 48, 53–54. 115.  Ibid., 49. 116.  Ibid., 46. 117. Weiss, Campa Cosmology, 264. 118.  Laos Ríos, “Aliento,” 62. 119.  Elick, “An Ethnography,” 49–50, 211. 120.  Fernando Santos-­Granero, “Epidemias y sublevaciones en el desarrollo demográfico de las misiones amuesha del Cerro de la Sal, siglo XVIII,” Histórica 11(1) (1987): 35. 121. Biedma, La conquista franciscana, 131-­132. 122.  Francisco de San Joseph, “Copia de un informe hecho por el V.P. Fr. Francisco de San Joseph, Comissario de Missiones del Cerro de la Sal, y Prefecto de la Sagrada Congregación de Propaganda Fide, en el Reyno del Perú, y Provincia de los doce Apóstoles de Lima: al Rmo. Padre Fr. Joseph Sanz, Comissario General de Indias (1716),” in Colección de informes sobre las missiones del Colegio de Santa Rosa de Ocopa, comp. Joseph de San Antonio (Madrid: NP, 1750). 123. Hanne Veber, comp., Historias para nuestro futuro: Narraciones autobiográficas de líderes Asháninkas y Ashéninkas (Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, 2009), 178. 124.  These perceptions have not disappeared and have found new expressions as recently as 2009; see Santos-­Granero and Barclay, “Bundles, Stampers, and Flying Gringos,” 154.

Ch a p ter 6 1.  For the sake of brevity, in this text I will refer to the “creator god(s)” rather than to the “creator/transformer god(s),” but it should be borne in mind that in native Amazonian constructional ontologies, these gods are not creators in the same sense as the Christian creator god, but mainly transformers of preexisting things who

Not es to pages 110 –11 4  [ 227 ] through their extraordinary powers have shaped the world as it appears today. I also use the term “god(s),” with the plural in parentheses, because when talking about their creator/transformer deities, Ashaninka, Yine, and Shipibo-­Conibo people fluctuate between the idea that there are numerous gods who have similar creative/transformative powers and the notion that one of them is above the rest in terms of power and preeminence: e.g., tasorentsi/Tasorentsi, goyakalune/Goyakalu, inkas/Inka. 2.  La Voz del Ucayali, “Editorial,” September 16, 1916. 3.  El Oriente, “Noticias del Ucayali,” October 16, 1915. 4. Jeremy Narby, Interview with Carlos Pérez Shuma (Ashaninka, 45 years old), Kirishari (Pichis River), June 13, 1985, in Fieldnotes, 2:11. 5.  Particularly helpful were Bernd Brabec de Mori, Mark Friesen, Peter Gow, Elena Mihas, Lucy Trapnell, Pilar Valenzuela, and Mary Ruth Wise. 6.  Note that this transcription is based on English phonetics. 7.  Lucy Trapnell, e-­mail message to the author, September 10, 2013. 8.  Mark Friesen, e-­mail message to the author, October 6, 2013. 9.  Bernd Brabec de Mori, “Die Lieder der Richtigen Menschen: Musikalische Kulturanthropologie der indigenen Bevölkerung im Ucayali-­Tal, Westamazonien” [Songs of the Real People: A Musical Anthropology of Indigenous People in the Ucayali Valley, Western Amazon] (PhD diss., University of Vienna, 2011). 10.  Bernd Brabec de Mori, e-­mail message to the author, September 18, 2013. 11.  Peter Gow, e-­mail message to the author, January 15, 2014. 12. Possibly a mix of the Asheninka varieties spoken in the Pichis, Gran Pajonal, and Upper Ucayali regions; see David L. Payne, Diccionario Ashéninca-­ Castellano (Lima: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, 1980), 4. 13.  John Bodley, Interview with Nataniel Sarmiento (Ashaninka, 56 years old), Shahuaya (Ucayali River), July 10–11, 1966, in Fieldnotes, 23-­2 4, 62-­65. 14.  Jeremy Narby, Interview with Carlos Pérez Shuma (Ashaninka, 45 years old), Kirishari (Pichis River), July 19, 1985, in Fieldnotes, 3:2–4. 15.  Jeremy Narby, Interview with Carlos Pérez Shuma (Ashaninka, 45 years old), Kirishari (Pichis River), October 15, 1985, in Fieldnotes, 5:1. 16. Payne, Diccionario, 130, also 93; Payne indicates that the verb shiritaantsi with the meaning of “seek/believe/have faith in” is common in the Apurucayali valley, within the general area in which Chief José Tasorentsi operated; in other Ashaninka areas, however, the action of “seeking” is expressed by the root amen/ amin, and the action of “believing/having faith in/obeying” is expressed by the root kimisant; Elena Mihas, e-­mail message to the author, August 1, 2016. 17. Payne, Diccionario, 159. 18.  Ibid., 98. 19. Joyce Nies, Diccionario Piro (Lima: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, 1986), 163; James Loriot, Erwin Lauriault, and Dwight Day, Diccionario Shipibo-­ Castellano (Lima: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, 1993), 313. 20. Nies, Diccionario, 42; note that while the song’s transcription is based on English phonetics, the transcription of indigenous terms in the dictionaries

[ 228 ]  Not es to pages 11 4 –116 prepared by the Summer Institute of Linguistics are usually based on Spanish phonetics. For this reason, he-­ and ge-­sound the same. 21. Payne, Diccionario, 98, 161. 22. Ibid., 38; Lee Kindberg, Diccionario Ashaninca (Yarinacocha: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, 1980), 218, 346. 23. Jananequijá in Spanish phonetics; see Harold Shaver, Diccionario Nomatsiguenga-­Castellano, Castellano-­Nomatsiguenga (Lima: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, 1996), 141. 24. Ibid. 25.  Janequi or jananequi in Spanish phonetics; see Kindberg, Diccionario, 53. 26.  Janta; see Payne, Diccionario, 157, 70. 27. Nies, Diccionario, 121; see also Peter Gow, Of Mixed Blood: Kinship and History in Peruvian Amazonia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 88. 28.  Cocoji in Ashaninka (see Kindberg, Diccionario, 27); coco/cocoini in Asheninka (see Payne, Diccionario, 48); and noconguiri in Nomatsiguenga (see Shaver, Diccionario, 153). 29.  J-­in Spanish phonetics (see Payne, Diccionario, 157). 30.  See Nies, Diccionario, 592; Payne, Diccionario, 159; Kindberg, Diccionario, 465; Shaver, Diccionario, 33. 31.  Elena Mihas, e-­mail message to the author, July 29, 2016. 32.  Coqui in Ashaninka (see Kindberg, Diccionario, 29); coqui/conqui in Asheninka (see Payne, Diccionario, 51); and coquí in Nomatsiguenga (see Shaver, Diccionario, 91). 33.  Loriot et al., Diccionario, 145. 34.  Huapa in Spanish phonetics; see Martha Duff-­Tripp, Diccionario Yanesha’ (Amuesha)-­Castellano (Lima: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, 1998), 212. 35.  Mary Ruth Wise, e-­mail message to the author, October 2, 2013. 36.  Bernd Brabec de Mori, e-­mail messages to the author, September 18 and 19, 2013. 37.  According to Brabec de Mori, although weshiriantsi (beshiriantsi) is not a standard Ashaninka name for this kind of song, most Ashaninka would understand that the term refers to the repertoire of worshipping songs; see Bernd Brabec de Mori, “Tracing Hallucinations: Contributing to a Critical Ethnohistory of Ayahuasca Usage in the Peruvian Amazon,” in The Internationalization of Ayahuasca, ed. Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Henrik Jungaberla (Zurich: Lit Verlag, 2011), 36; Gerald Weiss mentions this kind of song as oveširianci, a kind of sacred panpipe song “specifically intended to be acts of homage to Pává”; see Weiss, Campa Cosmology: The World of a Forest Tribe in South America (New York: The American Museum of Natural History, 1975), 470. 38.  Harry Tschopik Jr., Indian Music of the Upper Amazon (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Ethnic Folkways Library, Album No. FE 4458, 1954). 39.  Dorothy J. Shaler, “Analysis of the Musical System of the Pajonal Campas of Perú” (MA thesis, Wheaton College, Illinois, 1985).

Not es to pages 116 –119  [ 229 ] 40.  Bernd Brabec de Mori, e-­mail message to the author, September 21, 2013. 41.  Ibid., September 23, 2013. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44.  Gabriel Sala, Exploración de los ríos Pichis, Pachitea, y Alto Ucayali y de la región del Gran Pajonal (Lima: Imprenta “La Industria”, 1897), 118–121. 45.  See, Weiss, Campa Cosmology, 407, 494, on Ashaninka people; Peter Gow, An Amazonian Myth and Its History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 155, on Yine people; and Peter G. Roe, The Cosmic Zygote: Cosmology in the Amazon Basin (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1982), 113, on Shipibo-­Conibo people. 46. Weiss, Campa Cosmology, 495. 47.  Although myths are subject to changes, additions, and structural transformations in response to new historical events, they are extremely resilient, as is shown by the fact that in 1983 I collected a Yanesha myth on the causes of the death of Yompor Santo, the mythical hero corresponding to the historical figure of Juan Santos Atahuallpa, that was identical in its main traits to one collected by Ernesto La Combe, a Belgian officer, almost a century before, in 1891; see Fernando Santos-­Granero, The Power of Love: The Moral Use of Knowledge amongst the Amuesha of Central Peru (London: Athlone, 1991), 82; La Combe, Ernesto, “Informe que presenta el Coronel Don Ernesto de La Combe a la Sociedad Geográfica, dándole cuenta de su expedición al río Azupizú y del camino que a él conduce,” Boletín de la Sociedad Geográfica de Lima 1(10–12) (1892): 419. 48. Weiss, Campa Cosmology, 267. 49.  See ibid., 419, on Inka; and Stefano Varese, La sal de los cerros: Una apro­ ximación al mundo campa (Lima: Ediciones Retablo de Papel, 1973), 309–311, on Pachakamaite. 50.  Evan Killick, e-­mail message to the author, May 8, 2013. 51.  Pierrette Bertrand-­Ricoveri, Mitología shipibo: Un viaje en el imaginario de un pueblo amazónico (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010), 56. 52. Françoise Morin, “Los Shipibo-­Conibo,” in Guía etnográfica de la alta amazonía, Vol. 3, Cashinahua/Amahuaca/Shipibo-­Conibo, ed. Fernando Santos and Frederica Barclay (Quito: Smithsonian Tropical Research Institue/Ediciones Abya-­Yala/Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos, 1998), 370; see also Bertrand-­ Ricoveri, Mitología shipibo, 44–46. 53.  Françoise Morin, “L’attente de l’Inca ou l’exemple d’un messianisme raté,” in L’autre et l’ailleurs. Hommage à Roger Bastide, ed. Jean Poirier and François Raveau (Paris: Berger-­Levrault, 1976), 418. 54.  Ibid.; see also Anne-­Marie Colpron, “Dichotomies sexuelles dans l’étude du chamanisme: Le contre-­exemple des femmes chamanes shipibo-­conibo” (PhD diss., Université de Montréal, 2004), 236; and Peter G. Roe, “Mythic Substitution and the Stars: Aspects of Shipibo and Quechua Ethnoastronomy Compared,” in Songs from the Sky: Indigenous Astronomical and Cosmological Traditions in the

[ 230 ]  Not es to pages 119 –1 21 World, ed. Von del Chamberlain, John B. Carlson, and M. Jane Young (Bognor Regis: Ocarina Books Ltd., 2005), 195. 55. Esther Matteson, “The Piro of the Urubamba,” Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 10 (1954): 72; see also Juan Sebastián Pérez and Morán Zumaeta Bastín, Gwacha Ginkakle: Historia de los Yine (Lima: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, 1974), 152. 56.  Esther Matteson, “Piro Myths,” Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 4 (1951): 47–49. 57. Ricardo Alvarez, Los Piros: Leyendas, mitos, cuentos (Lima: Litografía Universo S.A., 1960), 21. 58. Gow, An Amazonian Myth, 318. 59.  Minna Opas, e-­mail message to the author, July 3, 2014. 60.  Esther Matteson, The Piro (Arawakan) Language (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 210–215. 61. Weiss, Campa Cosmology, 375–397. 62.  Other versions state that in mythical times, the ancestors of the Ashaninka could visit the upper world where the creator gods lived in order to celebrate and rejoice with them. But when this earth started to be contaminated by the evil forces originating in the underworld and the latter threatened to enter heaven, the creator god(s) decided to cut Omoito Inkite, the “Navel of Heaven,” which until then had served as a ladder between both worlds; see John W. Elick, “An Ethnography of the Pichis Valley Campa of Eastern Peru” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1970), 202. 63.  Ibid., 407. 64.  Ibid., 424. 65.  Ibid., 419. 66.  Bertrand-­Ricoveri, Mitología shipibo, 230–231; César Bardales Rodríguez, Leyendas de los Shipibo-­Conibo sobre los tres Incas (Lima: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, 1979), 47–52. 67.  Bertrand-­Ricoveri, Mitología shipibo, 230. 68.  Bardales Rodríguez, Leyendas, 49–51. 69. Peter G. Roe, “The Josho Nahuanbo Are All Wet and Undercooked: Shipibo Views of the Whiteman and the Incas in Myth, Legend, and History,” in Rethinking History and Myth. Indigenous South American Perspectives on the Past, ed. Jonathan D. Hill (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 112. 70. Michael Harner, “Waiting for Inca God: Culture, Myth, and History.” in Leadership in Lowland South America, ed. Waud H. Kracke. South American Indian Studies 1:53–60 (Bennington, VT: Bennington College, 1993), 54. 71.  Colpron, “Dichotomies sexuelles,” 236. 72.  Roe, “The Josho Nahuanbo,” 89. 73.  Ibid., 112. 74.  Bertrand-­Ricoveri, Mitología shipibo, 228. 75.  Ricardo Alvarez, Hijos de dioses (Lima: Secretariado de Misiones Dominicanas del Perú, 1970), 36.

Not es to pages 1 2 2 –1 26  [ 231 ] 76.  Ibid., 60. 77. Matteson, The Piro Language, 213. 78. Alvarez, Los Piros, 13–14. 79. Ibid., 28–31; Gow, An Amazonian Myth, 244; Matteson, The Piro Language, 156–157. 80.  See Gow, An Amazonian Myth, 176, on the Yine notion of “land of death.” 81. Matteson, The Piro Language, 213; Sebastián and Zumaeta, Gwacha Ginkakle, 152; Opas, e-­mail message to the author, July 3, 2014. 82.  Ricardo Alvarez, Tsla: Estudio etno-­histórico del Urubamba y Alto Ucayali (Salamanca: Editorial San Esteban, 1984), 42, 202. 83.  Willard Kindberg, Ronald Anderson, Janice Anderson, and Larry Rau, Leyendas de los Campa Asháninca (Lima: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, 2008), 11. 84.  Pablo Edwin Jacinto Santos, “Estudio del sistema de denominación antroponímica de la cultura asháninka” (Licentiate diss., Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 2009), 82. 85.  Roe, “The Josho Nahuanbo,” 112. 86. Alvarez, Hijos de dioses, 60. 87.  Harold Shaver and Lois Dodds, Los Nomatsiguenga de la Selva Central (Lima: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, 1990), 98. 88.  Evan Killick, e-­mail message to the author, July 23, 2014. 89. Ibid. 90.  Kindberg et al., Leyendas, 10–11. 91.  Jananeria in Spanish phonetics; see Ronald J. Anderson, Cuentos folklóricos de los Asheninca (Yarinacocha: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, 1985), 1:109–111. 92. Jananerya and Janabeni in Spanish phonetics; see Eusebio Laos Ríos, “Aliento del sol vivo,” in El ojo verde: Cosmovisiones amazónicas, ed. Gredna Landolt (Lima: Programa de Formación de Maestros Bilingües/AIDESEP/Fundación Telefónica, 2000), 59. 93.  Kindberg et al., Leyendas, 2. 94. Weiss, Campa Cosmology, 254. 95.  Ibid., 270. 96.  Weiss, “Campa Cosmology,” 159. 97. Weiss, Campa Cosmology, 254. 98.  Ibid., 270. 99.  Elick, “An Ethnography,” 202. 100.  Eduardo Fernández, “Águilas, jaguares, incas y viracochas: Toponimia e identidad entre los Ashanincas,” Extracta 6 (1987): 17. 101.  Peter M. I. B. Beysen, “Kitarentse: Pessoa, arte e estilo de vida Ashaninka do oeste amazônico” (PhD diss., Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, 2008), 157–158. 102.  Colpron, “Dichotomies sexuelles,” 235; Roe, “Mythic Substitution,” 196; Bertrand-­Ricoveri, Mitología shipibo, 55–56.

[ 232 ]  Not es to pages 1 26 –130 103.  Roe, “Mythic Substitution,” 196. 104.  Pierrette Bertrand-­Ricoveri, “Vision blanche, vision indienne: Traversée anthropologique d’une culture amazonienne: les Shipibo de l’Ucayali” (PhD diss., Université René Descartes, Paris 5, 1994), 237; also: Pierrette Bertrand-­Ricoveri, e-­mail message to the author, October 8, 2014. 105.  Roe, “Mythic Substitution,” 201. 106.  Ibid.; see also Bertrand-­Ricoveri, Mitología shipibo, 69. Andean people regard the Milky Way’s dark clouds as a river and thus call it Mayu; see Gary Urton, At the Crossroads of the Earth and the Sky: An Andean Cosmology (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 103. 107.  Carolyne Heath, “Los hijos del sol y la luna,” accessed September 2014, http://​w ww​.shipibo​- ­­conibo​.com​/ hijos​.htm#. 108. Miguel A. Ortega, “Entrevista: Carolyne Heath, antropóloga: Las mujeres Shipibo traducen el lenguaje cósmico a través de los sueños,” accessed September 2014, http://​plantando​-­­conciencia​.blogspot​.com​.es​/2011​/11​/carolyne​-­­heath​ -­­antropologa​-­­las​-­­mujeres​.html. 109. Alvarez, Los Piros, 50–51; Matteson, The Piro Language, 164–169; Joyce Nies, Los antiguos perros y otros cuentos (Lima: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, 1972), 111–113; for a detailed discussion of these myths, see Gow, An Amazonian Myth, chap. 2. 110. Alvarez, Los Piros, 50–51. 111. Nies, Los antiguos perros, 111–113. 112. Matteson, The Piro Language, 164–169. 113.  Opas, e-­mail message, July 3, 2014. 114. Matteson, The Piro Language, 210–215. 115.  Matteson, “The Piro of the Urubamba,” 72. 116. Nies, Diccionario, 77. 117.  Pete Gow, e-­mail message to the author, July 26, 2014. 118. Gow, An Amazonian Myth, 60. 119.  Ibid., 205–207. 120. See: Gerald Weiss, “Shamanism and Priesthood in the Light of the Campa Ayahuasca Ceremony,” in Hallucinogens and Shamanism, ed. Michael J. Harner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 40–47; Anne-­Marie Colpron, “Cosmologies chamaniques et utilisation de psychotropes parmi les Shipibo-­Conibo de l’Amazonie occidentale,” Drogues, Santé et Société 8(1) (2009): 57–91; Gow, An Amazonian Myth, 138–140. 121. Eduardo Fernández, Para que nuestra historia no se pierda: Testimonios de los Asháninca y Nomatsiguenga sobre la colonización de la región Satipo-­ Pangoa (Lima: Centro de Investigación y Promoción Amazónica, 1986), 197–198; Ashaninka people refer to the act of singing under the influence of ayahuasca by the term imarentaca (see Kindberg, Diccionario, 304). 122.  See www​.moonpage​.com 123.  See www​.astroviewer​.com

Not es to pages 130 –133  [ 233 ] 124.  See website CalculatorSoup, http://​w ww​.calculatorsoup​.com​/calculators​ /time​/sunrise​_ sunset​.php. 125.  That day the moon rose at 1:23 a.m. and did not set until 1:02 p.m., so it was still visible before dawn. Calculations made through Geoscience Australia. See http://​w ww​.ga​.gov​.au​/geodesy​/astro​/moonrise​.jsp​#lat.

Ch a p ter 7 1.  Fernando Santos-­Granero and Frederica Barclay, Tamed Frontiers: Economy, Society, and Civil Rights in Upper Amazonia (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000), 150. 2.  La Voz del Ucayali, “Editorial,” September 16, 1916. 3.  File initiated by Francisco Vargas Hernández requesting a one-­hundred-­ hectare lot by the name of “Santaniari” located on the left bank of the Ucayali River, Province of Ucayali, District of Cumaría, initiated on March 10, 1920 (AGN: MF/TM 15/00415) 4.  Dionisio Ortiz, Alto Ucayali y Pachitea: Visión histórica de dos importantes regiones de la selva peruana (Lima: Imprenta Editorial San Antonio, 1974), 2:502. 5.  File initiated by Francisco Rivero de la Guarda requesting a land concession to colonize the Unini River basin with 126 families, initiated on October 19, 1920 (AGN: MF/TM 40/01389) 6.  Sustentation Fund Application, 1939 (GCA: RG 33, Box 9789; Stahl). 7.  Letter from Brother Ferdinand A. Stahl to Elders A. G. Daniells, W. A. Spicer, and T. E. Bowen, Puno, January 22, 1920 (GCA: RG 21, Box 3326; Stahl-­1920). 8. Alejandro Bullón Páucar, Él nos amaba: La aventura misionera de Stahl entre los Campas (Lima: Asociación Peruana Central de la Iglesia Adventista del Séptimo Día, 1976), 52. 9.  For a comprehensive analysis of the development, significance, and impact of Seventh-­Day Adventist missions in the Perené region during the 1920–1948 period, see Juan Carlos La Serna Salcedo, Misiones, modernidad y civilización de los campas: Historia de la presencia adventista entre los asháninkas de la selva central peruana (1920–1948) (Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 2012). For a study of the relation between the Adventist missions and the Perené Colony, see Frederica Barclay, La Colonia del Perené: Capital inglés y economía cafetalera en la configuración de la región de Chanchamayo (Iquitos: Centro de Estudios Teológicos de la Amazonía, 1989). 10.  For a cogent analysis of the Adventist effervescence generated by Stahl’s preaching, see the pioneering study by John H. Bodley, “A Transformative Movement among the Campa of Eastern Peru,” Anthropos 67 (1972): 220–228. 11.  For a more detailed analysis of Capt. Cervantes’s revolution, see Fernando Santos-­Granero and Frederica Barclay, Tamed Frontiers: Economy, Society, and Civil Rights in Upper Amazonia (Boulder, CO: Westview), 136–138.

[ 234 ]  Not es to pages 133–137 12.  Roger Rumrrill, Carlos Dávila, and Fernando Barcia, Yurimaguas: Capital histórica de la Amazonía peruana (Yurimaguas: Concejo Provincial de Alto Amazonas, 1986), 229. 13.  Genaro Matos, Operaciones en la selva peruana: La revolución de Iquitos y su debelación, 1921–1922 (Lima: Imprenta del Ministerio de Guerra, 1963), 19. 14.  Ibid., 29. 15.  Fernando Santos-­Granero, Interview with Alcides Calderón (Ashaninka, 58 years old); Puerto Bermúdez (Pichis River), April 16, 2016. 16.  Others claim that Chief José hid in the Gran Pajonal (see chapter 2). These two versions are not, however, necessarily contradictory. Chief José might have first escaped to the Gran Pajonal and, later on, moved on to the Pachitea River. This was not the last time he took refuge in the Pachitea, confirming that he regarded the area as a good place to hide. 17. Matos, Operaciones, 59, 81. 18.  Ibid., 105. 19.  Bullón Páucar, Él nos amaba, 38. 20.  Carlyle B. Haynes, “Come with me to the Andes (Part 2),” Youth’s Instructor 77(2) (1929): 13; Carlyle B. Haynes, “The Millennium Is at Hand,” Signs of the Times 48(1) (1921): 1–3, 12. 21. SDA General Conference, Seventh-­Day Adventists Believe: An Exposition of the Fundamental Beliefs of the Seventh-­Day Adventist Church (Boise: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 2006), 190–197. 22.  These include the prohibition of eating animals that do not have a split hoof or those having a split hoof that do not eat grass, birds of prey or scavengers, fish or water animals that do not have fins and scales, and most insects. 23.  Haynes, “Come with me to the Andes (Part 2),” 13. 24. SDA, Seventh-­Day Adventists Believe, 371–427; see also Haynes, “The Millennium,” 1–3, 12. 25.  Ferdinand A. Stahl, “Progress in the Perene,” Review and Herald 100(51) (1923): 22. 26.  Letter of Brother Ferdinand A. Stahl to Elder T. E. Bowen, Lima, August 12, 1924 (GCA: RG 21: Box 3505, Stahl-­1924). 27.  Letter of Superintendent V. E. Peugh to Elder W. A. Spicer, Lima, September 24, 1929 (GCA: RG 11: Box 3122, Peugh-­1929). 28.  Ferdinand A. Stahl, “The Medical Work Makes Friends,” Review and Herald 101(22) (1924): 11. 29.  Ferdinand A. Stahl, In the Amazon Jungles (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 1932), 92–101. 30.  Bullón Páucar, Él nos amaba, 76. 31.  Ibid., 64. 32.  Ibid., 71, 73. 33.  Ibid., 74.

Not es to pages 137–139  [ 235 ] 34. Barbara Osborne Westphal, A Bride on the Amazon (Washington, DC: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1948), 177. 35.  Juan Carlos La Serna Salcedo, Interview with Adventist pastor Alejandro Bullón Páucar, Lima, July 20, 2004. 36. Ibid. 37.  A similar identification seems to account for the enormous success that New Tribes Mission missionary, Sophie Muller, had among the Baniwa and other peoples of northwest Amazon; see Robin M. Wright, Cosmos, Self, and History in Baniwa Religion: For Those Unborn (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 283, and Wright, História indígena e do indigenismo no Alto Rio Negro (Campinas: Mercado de Letras, 2005), chap. 6, accessed May 24, 2017, http://​works​.bepress​.com​ /robinmwright​/5/. 38. Mieczysław B. Lepecki, Na Amazonce i we wschodniem Peru (Lwów-­ Warszawa: Książnica-­Atlas, 1931), 211. 39.  Peter Gow, “Forgetting Conversion: The Summer Institute of Linguistics Mission in the Piro Lived World,” in The Anthropology of Christianity, ed. Fenella Cannell (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 225. 40.  Bullón Páucar, Él nos amaba, 93, 108, 121. 41. Stahl, In the Amazon Jungles, 52. 42.  The exact date of the Metraro mission’s foundation is not clear. In one of his writings, Stahl claims that it was founded in March 1921; see Ferdinand A. Stahl, “Among the Heathen Tribes of the Upper Amazon,” Review and Herald 103(27) (1926): 14. We know, however, that it was only in May 1922 that the Perené Colony leased Stahl a 16-­hectare lot to establish a mission in the “Pajonal Chico de Metraro”; see Memorandum from Mr. Cooper, representative of the Perené Colony in Lima, 1922 (APC: Box 8: Lease of lands to Seventh-­Day Adventists). And the first mission buildings were not erected until 1923; see La Serna Salcedo, Misiones, 77. 43.  Stahl, “Among the Heathen Tribes,” 14. 44.  Fernando Santos-­Granero, The Power of Love: The Moral Use of Knowledge amongst the Amuesha of Central Peru (London: Athlone Press, 1991), 24, 80–83. 45.  From Apu Inka, a Quechua term meaning “Inka God”; see Elena Mihas, Diccionario temático ilustrado Alto Perené Asheninka-­Castellano (Milwaukee, WI: Clark Graphics, 2014), 88. 46.  From Jesús Sacramentado, a Spanish term referring to “Jesus’ presence in the Eucharist”; see Enrique C. Rojas Zolezzi, “Los ciclos de Pachakama, Inka y Sacramentaro en la mitología campa ashaninka como interpretaciones de los procesos de reemplazo tecnológico y subordinación económica surgidos de la colonización,” Anthropológica 11 (1994): 146. 47.  Although there is no written evidence that Juan Santos Atahuallpa explicitly claimed to be “son of the Sun god,” this is implicit in his assertion that he was Apu Inka, the powerful Inka, since Andean peoples considered the Inka to be son

[ 236 ]  Not es to pages 139 –1 40 of Inti, the Sun god. A later source asserts that Juan Santos presented himself as son of the Sun god; see the quotation from J. F. Pazos Varela in Francisco A. Loayza, Juan Santos, el invencible: Manuscritos del año de 1742 al año de 1755 (Lima: Editorial D. Miranda, 1942), 68. This identification is confirmed by Alonso Zarzar, “Apo Capac Huayna, Jesús Sacramentado”: Mito, utopía y milenarismo en el pensamiento de Juan Santos Atahualpa (Lima: Ediciones CAAAP, 1989), 38. In present-­day Ashaninka traditions, Juan Santos Atahuallpa is always regarded as son of the Sun god. One of these sources asserts that when Juan Santos died, his followers cried: “Juan Santos Atahualpa, son of the Sun God, do not abandon us”; see Pablo Macera and Enrique Casanto, El poder libre asháninca: Juan Santos Atahualpa y su hijo Josecito (Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Universidad San Martín de Porres, 2009), 68. 48.  Albino Carranza, “Geografía descriptiva y estadística industrial de Chanchamayo,” Boletín de la Sociedad Geográfica de Lima 4(1–3) (1894): 23; Pazos Varela as quoted in Loayza, Juan Santos, el invencible, xiv. 49.  Federico E. Remy, Apuntes sobre el clima y flora de la región del Pichis (Lima: Imprenta del “Monitor Popular,” 1898), 9–10 ; Bernardino Izaguirre, Historia de las misiones franciscanas y narración de los progresos de la geografía en el Oriente del Perú (Lima: Talleres Tipográficos de la Penitenciaría, 1926), 12:184. 50. Enrique Casanto Shingari, e-­ mail message to the author, September 26, 2013. 51.  Jeremy Narby, Interview with Carlos Pérez Shuma (Ashaninka, 45 years old); Kirishari (Pichis River), July 19, 1985, in Fieldnotes, 3:2. 52. Anderson collected a story among the Pichis Asheninka confirming this identification: “Everyone who came to Metraro came to see him [Stahl]. He seemed to be the return of [Juan Santos] Atahuallpa, Navireri. They think Metraro is a sacred place, where they fought in the past. That is why they thought he had returned”; see Ronald J. Anderson, Ashéninka Stories of Change (Dallas: SIL International, 2000), 28. 53.  La Serna Salcedo, Interview with Bullón Páucar. 54.  Ibid.; Bullón Páucar, Él nos amaba, 58, 93. 55.  Juan Carlos La Serna Salcedo, e-­mail message to the author, July 13, 2013. 56.  V. E. Peugh, “Through the Jungles to Iquitos (Part 4),” Review and Herald 106(3) (1929): 18. 57.  H. U. Stevens, “Advancing toward the Kingdom in the Inca Union,” Missions Quarterly 14(3) (1925): 12; Ferdinand A. Stahl, “God’s Marvelous Providences in the Mighty Amazon Valley,” South American Bulletin 5(2) (1929): 2; Letter from Brother Ferdinand A. Stahl to Elder T. E. Bowen, Lima, August 12, 1924 (GCA: RG 21: Box 3505; Stahl-­1924). 58.  John H. Bodley, Interview with Nataniel Sarmiento (Ashaninka, 56 years old); Shahuaya (Ucayali River), July 10–11, 1966, in Fieldnotes, 23–24, 62–65. 59. Ibid.; see also Haynes, “Come with Me to the Andes (Part 2),” 13; Ferdinand A. Stahl, “Missionary Work among the Indians of the Amazon Forests of Peru,” South American Bulletin 4(10) (1928): 5.

Not es to pages 1 40 –1 4 2  [ 237 ] 60.  John H. Bodley, Interview with Meyando Vásquez (Ashaninka, 40 years old); Shahuaya (Ucayali River), August 21, 1966, in Fieldnotes, 63-­69. 61.  Bullón Páucar, Él nos amaba, 118. 62.  Luis Román Villanueva, “Pendencias y dependencias en la Amazonía sur del Perú,” Anthropológica 4(4) (1987): 31. 63. Hanne Veber, comp., Historias para nuestro futuro: Narraciones autobiográficas de líderes Asháninkas y Ashéninkas (Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, 2009), 246. 64.  This term was developed by Luis Román to refer to Yine preacher Ulises Díaz, but it could be equally applied to describe the role of this small group of early converts; see Román Villanueva, “Pendencias,” 32. 65.  Bodley, Interview with Nataniel Sarmiento. In other sources, Jaromi sometimes appears as Sarume. 66.  This does not seem to be the same Shirunkama that joined Chief Tasorentsi in the 1915 uprising. 67.  Bodley, Interview with Nataniel Sarmiento. 68. Veber, Historias para nuestro futuro, 244. In another interview, this same informant asserted that Santana had been raised by Perené Colony foreman Néstor Bergani; see Fernando Santos-­Granero, Interview with Adolfo Gutiérrez (Ashaninka, 75 years old); Churingaveni (Perené River), August 20, 2013. 69. Bodley, Interview with Nataniel Sarmiento; John H. Bodley, Interview with María Paredes (Ashaninka, 46 years old); Shahuaya (Ucayali River), no date, 1966, in Fieldnotes, 15-­20. 70. Ibid. 71.  Fernando Santos-­Granero, Interview with Raúl Tepa (Ashaninka, 74 years old); Zungaroyali (Pichis River), April 14, 2016. 72. Elena Mihas, Interview with Elias Meza Pedro (Ashaninka, resident of Mariscal Cáceres, 75 years old) and his son-­ in-­ law, Gregorio Santos Pérez (Ashaninka, resident of Villa Perené, 55 years old), Bajo Marankiari (Perené River), May 2016. 73.  Bodley, Interview with Nataniel Sarmiento. 74.  Ferdinand A. Stahl, “What Became of Olisas and Manuela,” South American Bulletin 5(9) (1929): 5. 75.  Letter of Brother Ferdinand A. Stahl to Elder T. E. Bowen, Lima, August 12, 1924 (GCA: RG 21: Box 3505, Stahl-­1924). 76.  Ferdinand A. Stahl, “Itinerating in the Amazon Basin,” South American Bulletin 7(5) (1931): 5. 77.  Fernando Santos-­Granero, Interview with Segundo Arroyo (Ashaninka, 70 years old); Santa Teresa (Pachitea River), April 20, 2016. 78.  V. E. Peugh, “Through the Jungles to Iquitos (Part 3),” Review and Herald 106(2) (1929): 12–13. 79.  Bullón Páucar, Él nos amaba, 99. 80.  Bodley, Interview with Meyando Vásquez.

[ 238 ]  Not es to pages 1 43–1 47 81. Fernando Santos-­Granero, Interview with Armando del Arca Huamani (Ashaninka, resident of Kirishari, 84 years old), Puerto Bermúdez (Pichis River), April 12, 2016. 82. Such skepticism is explained by the fact that del Arca is a practicing Adventist. 83.  Aparecida Vilaça, Praying and Preying: Christianity in Indigenous Amazonia (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 10. 84.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Armando del Arca. 85.  Bodley, Interview with Nataniel Sarmiento. 86.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Armando del Arca. 87.  Oscar Greulich, “De Iquitos por los ríos Alto Ucayali y Tambo a Concepción en agosto y setiembre de 1925,” Boletín de la Sociedad Geográfica de Lima 43(2) (1926): 131. 88. Stahl, In the Amazon Jungles, 83; Ferdinand A. Stahl, “Did Not Know What a School Was,” Missions Quarterly 22(1) (1933): 23. 89.  Juan Carlos La Serna Salcedo, e-­mail message to the author, September 29, 2013. 90.  Bodley, Interview with Meyando Vásquez. 91.  John H. Bodley, Interview with Mariano Bautista (Conibo, 39 years old), Shahuaya (Ucayali River), July 24, 1966, in Fieldnotes, 105–106. 92.  Letter of the Subprefect of Ucayali to the Prefect of Loreto; Contamana, June 21, 1928 (AGN: MI/PR 278/DP/LR); Report of the Police Constable of the Urubamba River to the Subprefect of Ucayali, Mouth of the Tambo, August 23, 1928 (MRE: 2-­0 -­E, 1928-­Entradas, NN). 93.  Bodley, Interview with Mariano Bautista. 94.  Bodley, Interview with Meyando Vásquez. 95.  Ferdinand A. Stahl, “Missionary Prospects in the Amazon Region,” South American Bulletin 2(1) (1926): 4–5. 96. W.  H. Anderson and Ferdinand A. Stahl, “God’s Opening Providences Our Opportunity,” Review and Herald 103(55) (1926): 14. 97.  Carlyle B. Haynes, “Come with Me to the Andes (Part 2),” Youth’s Instructor 77(2) (1929): 7. 98.  Stahl, “Missionary Prospects,” 4. 99.  Minutes of 208th South American Executive Board of the General Conference Committee, Buenos Aires, December 17, 1926 (GCA: RG 1: Box 6644, Minutes 1926); V. E. Peugh, “Through the Jungles to Iquitos (Part 4),” Review and Herald 106(3) (1929): 18. 100.  Minutes of 125th South American Executive Board of the General Conference Committee, Buenos Aires, March 7, 1927 (GCA: RG 1, Box 6644; Minutes 1927). 101. Westphal, A Bride on the Amazon, 64, 150; Juan Próspero Ramos Gago, El comienzo de la obra misionera adventista en la selva peruana (Lima: Universidad Peruana Unión, 2005), 51. 102.  V. E. Peugh, “Through the Jungles to Iquitos (Part 3),” 12.

Not es to pages 1 47–150  [ 239 ] 103. Ibid. 104. Witold Michałowski, Teki Sarmatów (Piastow: Oficyna Wydawnicza “Rewasz,” 2009), 145. 105.  Bodley, Interview with María Paredes. 106. Ibid. 107.  Peugh, “Through the Jungles to Iquitos (Part 3),” 12. 108.  Ferdinand A. Stahl, “God’s Marvelous Providences in the Mighty Amazon Valley,” South American Bulletin 5(2) (1929): 2. 109. Ibid. 110.  Ferdinand A. Stahl, “God’s Guiding Hand,” Review and Herald 106(34) (1929): 18–19. 111.  Bullón Páucar, Él nos amaba, 181. 112.  Diario del P. Alberto Gridilla (1925–1928) (APM: B/48), 222. 113.  Ibid., 228. 114.  Report on the arrest of the Indians Ulises and Manuela, September 13, 1928: Report of the Police Constable of Puerto Ocopa to the Subprefect of Jauja, Jauja, September 3, 1928 (AGN: MI/PR 277/DP/JN). 115.  Letter of the Police Constable of the Urubamba River to the Prefect of Loreto, Mouth of the Tambo, October 8, 1928 (MRE: 2-­0 -­E, 1928-­Entradas, NN). The presence of Chief Napoleón in Cheni is confirmed by another, independent source; see Michałowski, Teki Sarmatów, 145. 116. Westphal, A Bride on the Amazon, 164. 117. Estanislao Granadino, “Exploraciones en el río Piedras por Carlos Scharff,” Boletín de la Sociedad Geográfica de Lima 32(4) (1916): 352–353. 118.  Peter Gow, Of Mixed Blood: Kinship and History in Peruvian Amazonia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 68. 119.  Stahl, “God’s Guiding Hand,” 18. 120.  Letter of the Prefect of Loreto to the Ministry of the Interior, Iquitos, June 27, 1928 (AGN: MI/PR 278/DP/LR). 121.  Letter of the Prefect of Junín to the Ministry of the Interior, Cerro de Pasco, May 29, 1928 (ARJ: PR 314, No. 401); Letter of the Prefect of Junín to the General Director of the Civil Guard and Police, Cerro de Pasco, May 29, 1928 (ARJ: PR 314, No. 403). 122.  Letter of the Police Constable of Puerto Ocopa to the Prefect of Loreto, Atalaya, October 19, 1928 (MRE: 2-­0 -­E, 1928-­Entradas, NN). 123.  Creation of the District of Upper Ucayali, Province of Ucayali, begun on September 3, 1927, by Congressman Abraham A. de Rivero (ACRP: CD/EL: Ley 6251). 124.  Waldemar Soria Rodríguez and Sadith Soria del Castillo, Atalaya: La Esmeralda del Ucayali, Tomo I (Atalaya: Imprenta Soria y Wong, 2012), 7. 125. Certified copy of the memorial submitted to the Prefect of Loreto by the landowners and neighbors of the Tambo, Urubamba, and Upper Ucayali rivers on the activities of Adventist missionaries, Mouth of the Tambo, October 13, 1928 (MRE: 2-­0 -­E, 1928-­Entradas, NN).

[ 240 ]  Not es to pages 150 –151 126.  AIDESEP, “Esclavitud indígena en la región Atalaya,” Amazonía Indígena 11(17–18) (1991): 3–13; Pedro García Hierro, “Atalaya: una historia en dos tiempos,” in Liberación y derechos territoriales en Ucayali, Perú, ed. Pedro García Hierro, Søren Hvalkof, and Andrew Gray (Copenhagen: IWGIA, 1998), 15–82; Søren Hvalkof, “De la esclavitud a la democracia: Antecedentes del proceso indígena del Alto Ucayali y Gran Pajonal,” in Liberación y derechos territoriales en Ucayali, Perú, eds. Pedro García Hierro, Søren Hvalkof, and Andrew Gray (Copenhagen: IWGIA, 1998), 85–167. 127.  Telegram of Francisco Vargas Hernández to Ucayali Congressman Abraham Rivero; Masisea, May 23, 1928 (AGN: MI/PR 278/DP/LR). 128. Lepecki, Na Amazonce, 235. 129.  Ibid.; see also Eduardo Fernández, Para que nuestra historia no se pierda: Testimonios de los Asháninca y Nomatsiguenga sobre la colonización de la región Satipo-­Pangoa (Lima: Centro de Investigación y Promoción Amazónica, 1986), 63. 130.  Report on the arrest of the Indians Ulises and Manuela, Cerro de Pasco, September 13, 1928: Telegram of the Ministry of the Interior to the Prefect of Junín, Lima, August 29, 1928 (AGN: MI/PR 277/DP/JN). 131.  Bullón Páucar, Él nos amaba, 181–183. 132.  Since it is said that, in 1916, when he was twelve, Ulises was sold to a patrón who had a cotton plantation in Atalaya, it is quite probable that the patrón in question was Pancho Vargas; see Román Villanueva, “Pendencias,” 31. 133.  Ibid., 32. 134.  Bodley, Interview with María Paredes. 135.  This version is partially confirmed by Barbara Westphal, who claims that “several Indians, one of them a teacher, are in prison, and they are being offered only pork and beer—two things they have been taught not to use”; see Westphal, A Bride on the Amazon, 78–79. 136. Lepecki, Na Amazonce, 210. 137.  Certified copy of the appeal presented by Adventist Pastor Ferdinand Stahl to the Prefect of Loreto, Iquitos, August 23, 1928 (MRE: 2-­0 -­E, 1928-­Entradas, NN). 138. The Adventist effervescence gave rise to all kinds of indigenous and nonindigenous prophets. Franciscan historian Bernardino Izaguirre mentions an Adventist colonist of Satipo by the name of Aurelio Espinoza, who claimed to be a divine emissary and urged the Ashaninka to abandon their patrones, to reject Catholic symbols, to keep the Sabbath, and to work for him. He asserted that those who obeyed him would be happy here and in the afterlife, but those who did not he would destroy with fire and earthquakes; see Bernardino Izaguirre, “Los Protestantes en el Perú: Tuercen un artículo de la Constitución del Estado,” Floreci­ llas de San Antonio 17(197) (1928): 119. Esteban Arias Urízar mentions that around this same time, a Nomatsiguenga man started preaching among the Matsigenka of the Upper Picha River, claiming that he was the creator god Tasorintsi and a saankarite, or “invisible pure spirit.” He brought with him a printed text and said it was God’s word. People believed and obeyed him until he seduced the wife of one of

Not es to pages 151–15 4  [ 241 ] his followers, at which point they gradually abandoned him; Esteban Arias Urízar, Interview with Carlos Ríos (Matsigenka), Mayapo (Picha River), 2013. 139. Letter of William Schaeffler to the Subprefect of Ucayali, Santaniari, August 18, 1928 (MRE: 2-­0 -­E, 1928-­Entradas, NN) 140. Ibid. 141.  Report of the Subprefect of Ucayali to the Prefect of Loreto, Contamana, September 14, 1928 (MRE: 2-­0 -­E, 1928-­Entradas, NN). 142.  Report of the Police Constable of the Urubamba River, October 8, 1928 (MRE: 2-­0 -­E, 1928-­Entradas, NN). 143.  Report of 2nd Lt. Carlos Gensollen of the Civil Guard to the Subprefect of Ucayali, Contamana, October 30, 1928 (MRE: 2-­0 -­E, 1928-­Entradas, NN). 144.  Report of the Subprefect of Ucayali to the Prefect of Loreto, Contamana, September 21, 1928 (MRE: 2-­0 -­E, 1928-­Entradas, NN). 145.  Stahl, “God’s Guiding Hand,” 18. 146.  This can be deduced from the picture’s caption, which reads “F. A. Stahl and Officer among the Piro Indians near the Tampo Mission, Peru”; see Stahl, “God’s Guiding Hand,” 19. This picture was also reproduced but slightly cropped in Stahl, In the Amazon Jungles, 90. 147. Report of 2nd Lt. Carlos Gensollen of the Civil Guard (MRE: 2-­0 -­E, 1928-­Entradas, NN). 148. Westphal, A Bride on the Amazon, 91. 149. Letter of the Police Constable of Puerto Ocopa to the Subprefect of Ucayali, Atalaya, October 10, 1928 (MRE: 2-­0 -­E, 1928-­Entradas, NN). 150.  William Schaeffler, “Among the Campa Indians,” Pacific Union Recorder 29(47) (1930): 3. 151. Westphal, A Bride on the Amazon, 164. 152.  See Peter Worsley, The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of “Cargo” Cults in Melanesia (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1968); Peter Worsley and Jean Guiart, “La répartition des mouvements millénaristes en Mélanésie,” Archives de Sociologie des Religions 5 (1958): 38–46; I. C. Jarvie, “Theories of Cargo Cults: A Critical Analysis,” Oceania 34(1) (1963): 1–31. 153. Lepecki, Na Amazonce, 212. 154.  Peter Gow, e-­mail message to the author, September 12, 2013. 155.  Letter of the Police Constable of the Urubamba, October 8, 1928 (MRE: 2-­0 -­E, 1928-­Entradas, NN). 156. Ibid. 157.  Statement by Sangama, a Yine man who in the 1920s claimed that he could read, as reported by Yine leader Morán Zumaeta; see Peter Gow, An Amazonian Myth and Its History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 198; and Peter Gow, “Could Sangama Read? The Origin of Writing among the Piro of Eastern Peru,” History and Anthropology 5 (1990): 87–103. 158.  Letter of the Police Constable of Puerto Ocopa, October 10, 1928 (MRE: 2-­0 -­E, 1928-­Entradas, NN).

[ 242 ]  Not es to pages 15 4 –157 159.  Letter of the Police Constable of Puerto Ocopa, October 19, 1928 (MRE: 2-­0 -­E, 1928-­Entradas, NN). 160.  Bodley, Interview with María Paredes. 161.  Amaru Tincopa, “Alas de la montaña: La aviación en el Oriente  peruano,” accessed July 2013, http://​alasandinas​.wordpress​.com​/2012​/05​/23​/alas​- ­­de​-­­la​ -­­montana​-­­la​-­­historia​-­­de​-­­la​-­­aviacion​-­­en​-­­el​-­­oriente​-­­peruano/. Journalist Benjamín Romero reported that when the first airplane landed in San Ramón in 1927, the local Ashaninka thought that it was the mythical bird Aramendotse, which they believed would appear before the world’s end; see Benjamín Romero, “Impresiones de una excursión por la montaña de Chanchamayo y de un viaje aéreo a Iquitos,” Boletín de la Sociedad Geográfica de Lima 45(3–4) (1928): 317. Airplanes also made a great impression among Yine people; see the story “El primer avión,” in Joyce Nies, Los antiguos perros y otros cuentos (Lima: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, 1972), 24–27. Images of “flying steamboats” also circulated among the Yine before the first planes arrived in the region; see Gow, “Could Sangama Read?,” 87–103. 162.  Barbara Westphal reports that indigenous people imagined heaven as a place with “fine yucca and banana plantations”; see Westphal, A Bride on the Amazon, 166. 163.  Letter of the Police Constable of Tambo and Upper Ucayali to the Prefect of Loreto, Mouth of the Tambo, November 3, 1928 (MRE: 2.0.E, 1929-­Entradas, No. 73). 164. Letter of Jaime Morón de la Fuente to the Police Constable of the Urubamba River, Unini, August 20, 1928; Letter of Pedro Pinho to the Police Constable of the Urubamba River, Sapani, April 29, 1928; Letter of Hilario Casternoque to the Police Constable of the Urubamba River, Unini, August 20, 1928; Letter of Dolores Rojas to the Police Constable of the Urubamba River, Unini, Fundo Sumidero, August 28, 1928 (MRE: 2-­0 -­E, 1928-­Entradas, NN). 165.  Letter of the Prefect of Loreto to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Iquitos, November 13, 1928 (MRE: 2-­0 -­E, 1928-­Entradas, No. 8653). 166. Westphal, A Bride on the Amazon, 113. 167.  Ibid., 114.

Ch a p ter 8 1. Wilhelm Schaeffler, Als pionier in der grünen Hölle (Hamburg: Advent-­ Verlag, 1940), 59; E. N. Lugenbeal, “Up the Upper Amazon (Part 2),” The Youth’s Instructor 96(47) (1948): 6; Ferdinand A. Stahl, “The Amazon Mission,” Review and Herald 109(4) (1932): 11. 2. O. Montgomery, “Miracles of God’s Grace,” Review and Herald 110(22) (1933): 12. 3.  Juan Carlos La Serna Salcedo, Misiones, modernidad y civilización de los campas: Historia de la presencia adventista entre los asháninkas de la selva central

Not es to pages 157–160  [ 243 ] peruana (1920–1948)(Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 2012), 90–91. 4.  J. T. Thompson, “Work among the Campas,” South American Bulletin 7(7) (1931): 4. 5.  Fernando Santos-­Granero, Interview with Segundo Arroyo (Ashaninka, 70 years old), Santa Teresa (Pachitea River), April 20, 2016. 6. Letter of Jaime Morón de la Fuente to the Police Constable of the Urubamba River, Unini, August 20, 1928 (MRE: 2-­0 -­E, 1928-­Entradas, NN); Certified copy of the memorial presented to the Prefect of Loreto by the landowners and neighbors of the Tambo, Urubamba, and Upper Ucayali rivers about the activities of the Adventist missionaries, Mouth of the Tambo, October 13, 1928 (MRE: 2-­0 -­E, Año 1928-­Entradas, NN). 7. Santos-­Granero, Interview with Segundo Arroyo; José Carlos Amaringo Chico and Lucrecia Pérez Noriega had eleven children, six boys (Ricardo, Rubén, Bernabé, César, Fernando, and Segundo) and five girls (two of them called Anita and Cecilia). The eldest child was Ricardo; the youngest, Segundo. 8. Barbara Osborne Westphal, A Bride on the Amazon (Washington, DC: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1948), 164. 9. Ibid. 10.  Ibid., 162–163. 11.  Ibid., 165. 12. Ibid. 13.  See Fernando Santos-­Granero, Images of Public Wealth or the Anatomy of Well-­Being in Native Amazonia (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2015). 14.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Segundo Arroyo. 15.  John H. Bodley, Interview with Mariano Bautista (Conibo, 39 years old); Shahuaya (Ucayali River), July 24, 1966, in Fieldnotes, 105–106. 16.  John H. Bodley, Interview with Meyando Vásquez (Ashaninka, 40 years old); Shahuaya (Ucayali River), August 21, 1966, in Fieldnotes, 63–69. 17. Ibid. 18.  Marja Bochdan-­Niedenthal, Ucayali: Raj czy piekło nad Amazonką (Warsaw: Polish Book House, 1935), 45. Bochdan-­Niedenthal was a member of the Po­lish colony established in Cumaría, where the government had granted them a large land concession. According to Bochdan-­Niedenthal, a first group of eleven Po­lish settlers arrived in Cumaría in May 1930. Two other groups, one composed of twenty-­four settlers and the other of forty families, arrived in July and September, respectively; see also Memoirs of Fr. Agustín López, 1903–1946, entries July 21, 1930, and September 23, 1930 (APM: B/85). 19.  Bochdan-­Niedenthal, Ucayali, 45. 20.  Bodley notes that no exact dates can be supplied for the foundation of Shahuaya and Tasorentsi’s move to Contamana to study at the local mission school, but proposes that these events may have taken place in 1925; see John H. Bodley, “Development of an Intertribal Mission Station in the Peruvian Amazon” (MA

[ 244 ]  Not es to pages 160 –164 thesis, University of Oregon, 1967), 50–51. Bodley is right in asserting that it is difficult to establish exact dates from the oral sources, but it is unlikely that Tasorentsi moved to Contamana in 1925, since there was no Adventist mission school in Contamana until 1928. 21.  Bodley, Interview with Meyando Vásquez. 22.  Ibid.; Tasorentsi’s twelve followers were the following: the siblings Chahuakori, Sani, Nicolás Otsi, and Victoria Otsi; their uncle Daniel and their brother-­ in-­ law, Jacinto Vásquez; Chahuakori’s wife, Mañunga, and her father, Unkari; Nicolás Otsi’s unnamed wife; Nataniel Sarmiento and his wife, María Paredes; and a man called Inkiri. 23. Valentín Uriarte, “Ecos de la selva,” Florecillas de San Antonio 204 (1928): 464. 24. Ibid. 25.  SDA General Conference, Yearbook of the Seventh-­Day Adventist Denomination (Washington, DC: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1928), 191; L.  D.  Minner, “Hardships and Victories in Peru,” Review and Herald 108(48) (1931): 21. 26. Ferdinand A. Stahl, “The Amazon Mission Boat,” Review and Herald 108(5) (1931): 18. 27.  Juan Próspero Ramos Gago, El comienzo de la obra misionera adventista en la selva peruana (Lima: Universidad Peruana Unión, 2005), 51. 28.  Letter of the Prefect of Loreto to the Ministry of the Interior, Iquitos, April 23, 1929: Letter of the Subprefect of Ucayali to the Prefect of Loreto, Contamana, March 27, 1929 (AGN: MI/PR 286/DP/LR). 29.  Minner, “Hardships,” 21. 30. Buenaventura Luis Uriarte, La montaña del Perú (Lima: Gráfica 30, 1982), 203. 31.  Jorge Basadre, Historia de la República del Perú, 1822–1933, Tomo 10 (Lima: Editorial Universitaria, 1983), 320. 32.  Carlos Humberto Camacho Arango, “El Conflicto de Leticia (19321–933) y los ejércitos de Perú y Colombia: Historia-­relato, historia comparada, historia cruzada” (PhD diss., Université Paris I, Panthéon-­Sorbonne, 2013), 120. 33.  Ibid., 118. 34.  Ibid., 182. 35.  Lucy Trapnell, Interview with Alcides Calderón (Ashaninka, 57 years old), Puerto Bermúdez, November 14, 2015. 36. Basadre, Historia, 333–334, 343. 37.  Ibid., 346. 38.  Henry Westphal, “My Paisanos Want God’s Word,” South American Bulletin 6(8) (1930): 5. 39.  Ibid.; see also Westphal, A Bride on the Amazon, 174. 40. We know that Shirunkama held ayahuasca sessions in Aruya, because Meyando Vásquez claims that after Chief Tasorentsi was arrested and tortured in

Not es to pages 164 –167  [ 245 ] 1938, Nicolás Otsi, one of his disciples, and Shirunkama took over and “continued drinking ayahuasca and preaching the word of God at night”; see Bodley, Interview with Meyando Vásquez. 41.  Stahl, “The Amazon Mission,” 11. 42.  Ferdinand A. Stahl, In the Amazon Jungles (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 1932), 81. 43.  Thompson, “Work among the Campas,” 4. 44.  Stahl, “The Amazon Mission,” 11. 45.  L. D. Minner, “A Visit to the Amazon Mission,” South American Bulletin 7(11) (1931): 4. 46. Ferdinand A. Stahl, “Indians of the Amazon Being Won,” The Church Officer’s Gazette 21(4) (1934): 16. 47.  Bodley, Interview with Meyando Vásquez. 48.  Bodley, Interview with Mariano Bautista. 49. Ibid. 50.  Bodley, “Development of an Intertribal Mission Station,” 52. 51.  Bodley, Interview with Mariano Bautista. 52.  Bodley, Interview with Meyando Vásquez. 53.  Bodley, Interview with Mariano Bautista. 54.  Bodley, Interview with Meyando Vásquez. 55.  Arkady Fiedler, The River of Singing Fish (London: Readers Union with Hodder and Stoughton, 1951), 161. 56.  Bodley, Interview with Meyando Vásquez. 57.  Jeremy Narby, Interview with Carlos Pérez Shuma (Ashaninka, 45 years old), Kirishari (Pichis River), June 13, 1985, in Fieldnotes, 2:11. 58.  La Serna Salcedo, Misiones, 157. 59.  Bodley, Interview with Meyando Vásquez. 60.  Bodley, Interview with Mariano Bautista. 61.  Bodley, Interview with Meyando Vásquez. 62.  Bodley, Interview with Mariano Bautista. 63.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Segundo Arroyo. 64.  Dionisio Ortiz, Pucallpa y el Ucayali ayer y hoy, Tomo I (Lima: Editorial Apostolado de la Prensa S.A., 1984), 313. 65.  Ibid., 314. 66.  Ibid., 315. 67.  Bodley, Interview with Mariano Bautista. 68.  Alejandro Bullón Páucar, Él nos amaba: La aventura misionera de Stahl entre los Campas (Lima: Asociación Peruana Central de la Iglesia Adventista del Séptimo Día, 1976), 48. 69.  Ramos Gago, El comienzo, 51. 70.  J. D. Replogle, “Visiting the Tribes in the Upper Amazon Mission,” South American Bulletin 15(3) (1939): 6–7. 71.  Bodley, Interview with Mariano Bautista.

[ 246 ]  Not es to pages 167–171 72.  John H. Bodley, Interview with María Paredes (Ashaninka, 46 years old), Shahuaya (Ucayali River), no date, 1966, in Fieldnotes, 15–20. 73.  La Serna Salcedo, Misiones, 134. 74.  Bodley, Interview with María Paredes. 75.  Westphal, “My Paisanos,” 5. 76.  Report of Engineer Federico Schlappi, November 1931 (APC-­P: Caja 26). 77.  Bodley, Interview with Meyando Vásquez. 78.  Pastor Alejandro Bullón Páucar presents a vivid account of the Adventist preachers’ arrest; see Bullón Páucar, Él nos amaba, 165–67. 79.  Ibid., 167. 80. Narby, Interview with Carlos Pérez Shuma, June 13, 1985, in Fieldnotes, 2:11. 81.  Bodley, Interview with María Paredes. 82. Ibid. 83.  Bodley, “Development of an Intertribal Mission Station,” 55–56. 84.  John H. Bodley, Interview with Nataniel Sarmiento (Ashaninka, 56 years old), Shahuaya (Ucayali River), July 10–11, 1966, in Fieldnotes, 23–24, 62–65. 85.  Bodley, Interview with Meyando Vásquez. 86.  Bodley, Interview with Nataniel Sarmiento. 87.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Segundo Arroyo. 88.  Bodley, Interview with Nataniel Sarmiento. 89.  Luis Gómez, “Notes from the Upper Amazon Mission,” South American Bulletin 16(7) (1940): 6. 90.  Bodley, “Development of an Intertribal Mission Station,” 52. 91.  Françoise Morin, “L’attente de l’Inca ou l’exemple d’un messianisme raté,” in L’autre et l’ailleurs: Hommage à Roger Bastide, ed. Jean Poirier and François Raveau (Paris: Berger Levrault, 1976) 416–421; Michael Harner, “Waiting for Inca God: Culture, Myth, and History,” in Leadership in Lowland South America, ed. Waud H. Kracke. South American Indian Studies 1:53–60 (Bennington, VT: Bennington College Press, 1993), 53–60. 92.  La Razón, “Fue inaugurada oficialmente la Carretera de Pucallpa—Por el Presidente de la República Dr. Manuel Prado,” September 8, 1943. 93.  Harner, “Waiting for Inca God,” 56. 94.  I asked Françoise Morin and Michael Harner whether Tasorentsi’s name appeared in any of the materials they had collected in Utucuru and Tamaya, respectively. Both replied that it did not, noting that, apparently, the movement did not have an identified leader. 95. Santos-­Granero, Interview with Segundo Arroyo; according to this version, they came via the Ucayali, Tambo, and Gran Pajonal, which makes little sense if they were living in the Pachitea basin. It is more likely that they came upriver along the Pachitea and Pichis Rivers. 96.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Adolfo Gutiérrez. 97. Ibid.

Not es to pages 172 –175  [ 247 ] 98.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Segundo Arroyo; Santos-­Granero, Interview with Adolfo Gutiérrez. 99.  Montgomery, “Miracles,” 12. 100.  Thompson, “Work among the Campas,” 4. 101.  Also Sutziqui and Sutziki. 102. J.  T. Thompson, “The Peruvian Mission,” Review and Herald 108(11) (1931): 21. 103.  Thompson, “Work among the Campas,” 4. 104.  La Serna Salcedo, Misiones, 100. 105. O. Montgomery, “Visiting South America, No. 7,” Review and Herald 110(23) (1933): 9. 106.  Frederica Barclay, La Colonia del Perené: Capital inglés y economía cafetalera en la configuración de la región de Chanchamayo (Iquitos: Centro de Estudios Teológicos de la Amazonía, 1989), 126–128; La Serna Salcedo, Misiones, 106–114. 107. Barclay, La Colonia del Perené, 128; La Serna Salcedo, Misiones, 115–116. 108.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Adolfo Gutiérrez. 109.  Jeremy Narby, Interview with Carlos Pérez Shuma (Ashaninka, 45 years old), Kirishari (Pichis River), October 11, 1985, in Fieldnotes, 4:8; Fernando Santos-­ Granero, Interview with Raúl Tepa (Ashaninka, 74 years old), Zungaroyali (Pichis River), April 14, 2016; Fernando Santos-­Granero, Interview with Alcides Calderón (Ashaninka, 58 years old), Puerto Bermúdez (Pichis River), April 16, 2016. 110.  Narby, Interview with Carlos Pérez Shuma, June 13, 1985, in Fieldnotes, 1:9. 111.  Narby, Interview with Carlos Pérez Shuma, October 11, 1985, in Fieldnotes, 4:8; for a vivid account of the earthquake, see Manuel F. Pérez Marcio, Los hijos de la selva (Buenos Aires: Casa Editora Sudamericana, 1953), 122–124. 112. L.  H. Olson, “Opportunities among the Campa Indians,” Review and Herald 127(54) (1950): 16. 113.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Adolfo Gutiérrez. 114.  César Calvo, Las tres mitades de Ino Moxo y otros brujos de la Amazonía (Iquitos: Proceso Editores, 1981), 252–253. 115. Narby, Interview with Carlos Pérez Shuma, October 11, 1985, Fieldnotes, 4:8. 116.  La Serna Salcedo, Misiones, 151. 117.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Raúl Tepa. 118.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Alcides Calderón. 119.  Jeremy Narby, Interview with Carlos Pérez Shuma (Ashaninka, 45 years old), Kirishari (Pichis River), July 19, 1985, in Fieldnotes, 3:1. 120.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Adolfo Gutiérrez; John W. Elick, “A City of Refuge in the Jungles of Peru,” Review and Herald 131(44) (1954): 17. 121.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Raúl Tepa. 122. Ibid.; Narby, Interview with Carlos Pérez Shuma, October 17, 1985, in Fieldnotes, 6:1–4.

[ 248 ]  Not es to pages 175–180 123. Hanne Veber, comp., Historias para nuestro futuro: Narraciones autobiográficas de líderes Asháninkas y Ashéninkas (Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, 2009), 247. 124.  Fernando Santos-­Granero, Interview with Armando del Arca Huamani (Ashaninka, resident of Kirishari, 84 years old), Puerto Bermúdez (Pichis River), April 12, 2016. 125.  Narby, Interview with Carlos Pérez Shuma, October 17, 1985. 126.  Narby, Interview with Carlos Pérez Shuma, July 19, 1985. 127. Ibid. 128.  Narby, Interview with Carlos Pérez Shuma, October 17, 1985. Although this figure may be exaggerated, it is clear that the exodus involved several hundred families, since it is said that all the Ashaninka of Sotziki and its environs moved to the Upper Pichis. 129.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Adolfo Gutiérrez. 130.  La Serna Salcedo, Misiones, 141–142. 131.  SDA General Conference, Yearbook of the Seventh-­Day Adventist Denomination (Washington, DC: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1949), 163. 132.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Segundo Arroyo. 133.  John W. Elick, “Down in the ‘Colonia Campa.’” South American Bulletin 26 (1951): 5. 134.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Segundo Arroyo. 135. Ibid. 136.  Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, History of the Incas (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999), 54. 137.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Segundo Arroyo. 138.  Peter M. I. B. Beysen, “Kitarentse: Pessoa, Arte e Estilo de Vida Ashaninka do Oeste Amazônico” (PhD diss., Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, 2008), 211–212. 139.  Ibid., 213. 140.  José Pimenta, “‘Viver em comunidade’: O processo de territorialização dos Ashaninka do rio Amônia,” Anuário Antropológico, Rio de Janeiro (2006): 127; José Pimenta, “’Parentes diferentes’: Etnicidade e nacionalidade entre os Ashaninka na fronteira Brasil-­Peru,” Anuário Antropológico, Rio de Janeiro (2012): 114. 141. Ortiz, Alto Ucayali y Pachitea, 2:599. 142. Santos-­Granero, Interview with Segundo Arroyo. 143.  Santos-­Granero, Interview with Armando del Arca Huamani. 144. Ibid.

Epilogue 1.  Between September 6, 1915, and April 12, 1916, when the first and last news of the Upper Ucayali revolt appeared in the national press, more than fifty articles on the insurrection were published in El Comercio, La Prensa, and La Crónica.

Not es to pages 180 –183  [ 249 ] 2.  See, for instance, Manuel Yarlequé Espinoza, “El trato de los salvajes,” El Comercio, November 8, 1915; Chamayro, “La sublevación de los indios en la montaña,” El Comercio, November 21, 1915; J. M. C., “El gamonalismo y la sublevación de los indígenas,” La Protesta, December 4, 1915. 3.  The most relevant parts of Herrera’s report appeared in El Comercio, “Editorial: La responsabilidad de los salvajes,” August 30, 1915. 4.  See Atilio Sivirichi, Derecho indígena peruano (Lima: Ediciones Kuntur, 1946), 122; Pedro García Hierro, “Justicia indígena y derecho penal: Estándares internacionales,” paper presented at the seminar Justicia comunal e indígena en el marco del nuevo Código Procesal Penal, organized by the Superior Court of Justice of Loreto, June 2012. 5.  Henry Westphal, “My Paisanos Want God’s Word,” South American Bulletin 6(8) (1930): 5. 6.  Fernando Santos-­Granero, Interview with Segundo Arroyo (Ashaninka, 70 years old), Santa Teresa (Pachitea River), April 20, 2016; see also Santa Teresa, Plan del buen vivir: Comunidad nativa Santa Teresa (Lima: USAID/FECONAPIA/Instituto del Bien Común, 2015), 23. 7. Mieczysław B. Lepecki, Na Amazonce i we wschodniem Peru (Lwów-­ Warszawa: Książnica-­Atlas, 1931), 212. 8.  Raúl Casanto Shingari, “25 años de experiencia organizativa en la sociedad ashaninka del Perené,” in Balances amazónicos: Enfoques antropológicos, ed. Jürg Gasché and José M. Arroyo (Iquitos: CIAAP/UNAP, 1985), 225–237. 9.  José Amich, Compendio histórico de los trabajos fatigas, sudores y muertes que los ministros evangélicos de la seráfica religión han padecido por la conversión de las almas de los gentiles, en la montaña de los Andes, pertenecientes a las provincias del Perú (Paris: Librería de Rosa y Bouret, 1854). 10.  Fernando Rodríguez Tena, Crónica de las misiones franciscanas del Perú, siglos XVII y XVIII, 2 vols. (Iquitos: CETA, 2004). 11.  Fernando Pallarés and Vicente Calvo, Noticias históricas de las Misiones de fieles e infieles del colegio de Propaganda Fide de Santa Rosa de Ocopa (Barcelona: Imprenta de Magriña y Subirona, 1870). 12.  Bernardino Izaguirre, Historia de las misiones franciscanas y narración de los progresos de la geografía en el Oriente del Perú. 14 vols. (Lima: Tipografía de la Penitenciaría, 1922–1929). 13. Dionisio Ortiz’s vast production includes the following Works: Reseña histórica de la montaña de Pangoa, Gran Pajonal y Satipo (Lima: Editorial “San Antonio,” 1961); Oxapampa: Estudio de una provincia de la selva del Perú. 2 vols. (Lima: Imprenta Editorial “San Antonio,” 1967); Chanchamayo: Estudio de una región de la selva del Perú. 2 vols. (Lima: Imprenta y Litografía “Salesiana,” 1969); Alto Ucayali y Pachitea: Visión histórica de dos importantes regiones de la selva peruana. 2 vols. (Lima: Imprenta Editorial “San Antonio,” 1974); Las montañas del Apurímac, Mantaro y Ene. 2 vols. (Lima: Imprenta Editorial “San Antonio,” 1975); El Perené: Reseña histórica de una importante región de la selva peruana (Lima: Imprenta Editorial “San Antonio,” 1978); La montaña de Ayacucho: Etnografía,

[ 250 ]  Not es to pages 183–185 geografía, historia (Lima: Gráfica 30, 1981); Pucallpa y el Ucayali ayer y hoy. 2 vols. (Lima: Editorial Apostolado de la Prensa, 1984). 14.  Anales de la obra de la propagación de la fe en el Oriente del Perú (Lima: Imprenta “La Providencia,” 1897–1937). 15. Amich, Compendio histórico, 433. 16.  Ibid., 470. 17. Letter of the Apostolic Prefect of Ucayali to the Franciscan Provincial, Ocopa, June 10, 1914 (APM: A/16, No. 1). 18. Izaguirre, Historia de las misiones, 12:362. 19.  Anales de la obra de la propagación de la fe en el Oriente del Perú: Memoria del año 1915 a 1916 (Lima: Imp. “La Providencia,” 1916), 215. 20. Ortiz, Alto Ucayali y Pachitea, 1:483. 21. See Núria Sala i Vila, “Territorios y estrategias étnicas en la hoya del Madre de Dios,” in Las poblaciones indígenas en la conformación de las naciones y los Estados en la América Latina decimonónica, ed. Ingrid de Jong and Antonio Escobar Ohmstede (México, DF: El Colegio de México/CIESAS/El Colegio de Michoacán, 2016), 455–456. 22.  Colonial sources indicate that Juan Santos Atahualpa was a mestizo from Cuzco (others say Huanta or Cajamarca) who had been educated by Jesuit priests and spoke Quechua, Spanish, and a native Amazonian language (possibly Yanesha or Ashaninka), and who, after killing a man (others say his Jesuit master), escaped to the Selva Central region, where, claiming to be son of God and having been sent by his father, Huayna Capac, and the Holy Ghost, he persuaded the Yanesha, Ashaninka, Yine, Conibo, and Shipibo to unite in order to fight the Spaniards with the promise of eliminating the heavy colonial burdens imposed on them and guaranteeing that all those who supported him would be “saved,” that is, would attain eternal life; see Francisco Loayza, Juan Santos, el invencible (Lima: Lib. e Imp. D. Miranda, 1942). 23.  Fernando Santos-­Granero, Interview with Adolfo Gutiérrez (Ashaninka, 75 years old), Churingaveni (Perené River), August 20, 2013. 24. Elena Mihas, Interview with Elias Meza Pedro (resident of Mariscal Cáceres, 75 years old) and his son-­in-­law, Gregorio Santos Pérez (resident of Villa Perené, born and grew up in Bajo Marankiari, 55 years old), Ashaninkas, Bajo Marankiari (Perené River), May 2016. 25.  In contrast, those Ashaninka informants like Carlos Pérez Shuma, who abandoned the Adventist Church, disappointed by its conservative politics, have no qualms in acknowledging Chief José Carlos’s status as a divine emissary. 26.  See, for instance, the work on Juan Santos Atahualpa and his son Josecito by Ashaninka thinker Enrique Casanto; Pablo Macera and Enrique Casanto, El poder libre asháninca: Juan Santos Atahualpa y su hijo Josecito (Lima: Fondo Editorial Universidad San Martín de Porres, 2009). It is worth noting, however, that in more recent years Ashaninka perceptions of the mythical figure of Apinka seem to have been changing, probably as the result of Adventist and Evangelical efforts

Not es to pages 186 –187  [ 251 ] to delegitimize traditional world-­transforming expectations. According to Elena Mihas, the three versions of the Apinka myth she collected are “mute with regard to indigenous messianic aspirations”; see Elena Mihas, Upper Perené Arawak Narratives of History, Landscape and Ritual (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 10. This is clearly not the case for myths and oral traditions collected by previous scholars; see, for instance, Enrique Rojas Zolezzi, “Los ciclos de Pachakama, Inka y Sacramentaro en la mitología campa ashaninka como interpretaciones de los procesos de reemplazo tecnológico y subordinación económica surgidos de la colonización,” Anthropológica 11 (1994): 128–129; or Ronald James Anderson, Ashéninka Stories of Change (Dallas: SIL International, 2000), 28. Hanne Veber, “Asháninka Messianism: The Production of a ‘Black Hole’ in Western Amazonian Ethnography,” Current Anthropology 44(2) (2003): 183. 27. See, for instance, Eduardo Fernández, Para que nuestra historia no se pierda: Testimonios de los Asháninca y Nomatsiguenga sobre la colonización de la región Satipo-­Pangoa (Lima: Centro de Investigación y Promoción Amazónica, 1986); and Michael F. Brown and Eduardo Fernández, War of Shadows: The Struggle for Utopia in the Peruvian Amazon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 28.  Veber, “Asháninka Messianism,” 183. 29.  Ibid., 184. 30. Ibid. 31.  Stefano Varese, La sal de los cerros: Una aproximación al mundo campa (Lima: Retablo de Papel, 1973). 32.  Veber, “Asháninka Messianism,” 187. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35.  Loayza’s collection of documents makes it clear that several Franciscan and Jesuit missionaries, including Santiago Vásquez de Caicedo, Juan Antonio de Irusta, Francisco Otazuo, Salvador Pando, Francisco Suárez, Mauricio Gallardo, and Juan de Dios Fresneda, met with the rebel and rendered their testimonies to the authorities (“como nosotros oímos estando en presencia del mismo Rebelde”); see Loayza, Juan Santos, el invencible, 9, 67, 108–109, 131, 214–217. Other missionaries corresponded with the rebel and informed about the tenor of his letters; see Loayza, Juan Santos, el invencible, 61, 106, 122. In addition, many Spaniards, African slaves, highland Indians, and Amazon “chunchos” were interrogated and rendered their testimonies to the Spanish authorities; see Loayza, Juan Santos, el invencible, 1, 27, 33, 37, 60–61, 85–105, 98, 192, 202, 206–207. More importantly, the Segunda relación de la doctrina, errores y heregías, que enseña el fingido Rey Juan Santos Atagualpa, Apuinga, Guainacapac, which is the basis of characterizing the rebel’s discourse as messianic, was collected by three Franciscan priests after meeting the rebel in Quimirí; see Joseph de San Antonio, comp., Colección de informes sobre las missiones del Colegio de Santa Rosa de Ocopa (Madrid, 1750). 36.  Veber never mentions Loayza’s work in her article and does not list it in her bibliography.

[ 252 ]  Not es to pages 187–190 37.  Veber, “Asháninka Messianism,” 183. 38.  Ibid., 187 39.  As we saw in chapter 3, Lucy Trapnell witnessed one such movement in 1976 in which followers embarked on a quest for immortality that entailed singing, dancing, and the frequent consumption of ayahuasca in all-­night-­long celebrations. 40.  La Voz del Ucayali, “Editorial,” September 16, 1916. 41. In a letter denouncing Adventist agents, Francisco Vargas claimed that Cheni chief Ompikiri “forced Indian peons to abandon their work [in Vargas’s cotton and manioc plantations] and sing songs all day long”; see Letter of Francisco Vargas Hernández to the Police Constable of the Urubamba River, La Huayra, August 31, 1928 (MREE: 2-­0 -­E, 1928-­Entradas, NN). 42.  This is evidenced by the fact that many of Juan Santos’s followers abandoned their villages to settle with him first in Quisopango and, later on, in Metraro (“fueron a darle la obediencia dejando desiertos sus pueblos”); that his army was formed not only by Ashaninka warriors but by hundreds of other Selva Central indigenous people who left their homes to follow him (“que vinieron a su favor los Simirinches, Pirros, Mochobos y Conibos, todos los del Pajonal, y todos los Andes de las conversiones”); and by the fact that the rebels were said to be in a constant state of celebration (“hacen los indios . . . muchos bailes,” “tuvieron los indios . . . grandes festejos, bailes y borracheras, celebrando como los chunchos, la venida de su Inca”); see Loayza, Juan Santos, el invencible, 3, 9, 15, 19. 43. See Robin M. Wright, “Prophetic Traditions among the Baniwa and Other Arawakan Peoples of the Northwest Amazon,” in Comparative Arawakan Histories: Rethinking Language Family and Culture Area in Amazonia, ed. Jonathan D. Hill and Fernando Santos-­Granero (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 269– 293; Zulema Lehm Ardaya, La búsqueda de la Loma Santa y la Marcha Indígena por el Territorio y la Dignidad (Santa Cruz de la Sierra: APCOB-­CIDDEBENI/ Oxfam America, 1999); Fernando Santos-­Granero, The Power of Love: The Moral Use of Knowledge amongst the Amuesha of Central Peru (London: Athlone, 1991); Peter Gow, An Amazonian Myth and its History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Artionka Manuela Góes Capiberibe, “Os Palikur e o cristianismo” (M.Sc. thesis, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 2001). 44. Robin M. Wright and Jonathan D. Hill, “History, Ritual, and Myth: Nineteenth-­ Century Millenarian Movements in the Northwest Amazon,” Ethnohistory 33(1) (1986): 31–54; and Jonathan D. Hill and Robin M. Wright, “Time, Narrative and Ritual: Historical Interpretations from an Amazonian Society,” in Rethinking History and Myth: Indigenous South American Perspectives on the Past, ed. Jonathan D. Hill (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 78–105. 45.  Fernando Santos-­Granero, “The Arawakan Matrix: Ethos, Language, and History in Native South America,” in Comparative Arawakan Histories: Rethinking Language Family and Culture Area in Amazonia, ed. Jonathan D. Hill and Fernando Santos-­Granero (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 47.

Not es to pages 190 –192  [ 253 ] 46. See Fernández, Para que nuestra historia no se pierda; and Brown and Fernández, War of Shadows. 47.  See John H. Bodley, “Development of an Intertribal Mission Station in the Peruvian Amazon” (MA thesis, University of Oregon, 1967); and John H. Bodley, “A Transformative Movement among the Campa of Eastern Peru,” Anthropos 67 (1972): 220–228. 48. Hanne Veber, comp., Historias para nuestro futuro: Narraciones autobiográficas de líderes Asháninkas y Ashéninkas (Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, 2009), 247. 49.  Ton Otto, “What Happened to Cargo Cults? Material Religions in Melanesia and the West,” Social Analysis 53(1) (2009): 82. 50.  Wright and Hill, “History, Ritual, and Myth,” 32. 51.  Michael F. Brown, “Beyond Resistance: A Comparative Study of Utopian Renewal in Amazonia,” Ethnohistory 38(4) (1991): 388. 52.  By “endo-­slavery” I mean the enslavement of people belonging to one’s own ethnic group. 53.  Norman E. Whitten Jr., Millennial Ecuador: Critical Essays on Cultural Transformations and Social Dynamics (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2003), xi. 54.  Dan Jorgensen, “Locating the Divine in Melanesia: An Appreciation of the Work of Kenelm Burridge,” Anthropology and Humanism 19(2) (1994): 133. 55.  See Carlos Fausto, Caco Xavier, and Elena Welper, “Can We Speak of Social Reform in Indigenous Amazonia? Conflict, Messianism and the Ordinary Utopia of Living Well,” unpublished manuscript, 2014. 56.  Bodley, “A Transformative Movement,” 220. 57.  Brown, “Beyond Resistance,” 401. 58.  Jeremy Narby, Interview with Carlos Pérez Shuma (Ashaninka, 45 years old), Kirishari (Pichis River), June 13, 1985, in Fieldnotes, 2:11.

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A rchiv es Consulted ACRP: Archivo del Congreso de la República del Perú (Lima, Peru) AGN: Archivo General de la Nación (Lima, Peru) AHM: Archivo Histórico Militar (Lima, Peru) APC: Archivo de la Peruvian Corporation (Lima, Peru) APL: Archivo de la Prefectura de Loreto (Iquitos, Peru) APM: Archivo de la Provincia Misionera San Francisco Solano (Lima, Peru) APZ: Archivo Pedro Zulen (Biblioteca Nacional-­Sección Manuscritos; Lima, Peru) ARJ: Archivo Regional de Junín (Huancayo, Peru) AUPS: Archivo de la Presidencia de la Unión Peruana Sur (Lima, Peru) BNP: Biblioteca Nacional del Perú GCA: Seventh-­Day Adventist General Conference Archives (Silver Spring, MD, USA)

[ 272 ]  R efer ences MRE: Archivo Central del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores (Lima, Peru) NAA: National Anthropological Archives (Washington, DC, USA) NMAI: National Museum of the American Indian (Washington, DC, USA)

A rchiv es & Series Codes ACRP: Archivo del Congreso de la República del Perú (Lima, Peru) Series: Cámara de Diputados (CD): Legislatura Ordinaria (LO), Legislatura Extraordinaria (LE): Gobierno (GB), Relaciones Exteriores (RE) Series: Cámara de Diputados (CD): Expedientes de Leyes (EL) Series: Cámara de Senadores (CS): Legislatura Ordinaria (LO), Legislatura Extraordinaria (LE): Gobierno (GB), Relaciones Exteriores (RE) Series: Cámara de Senadores (CS): Expedientes de Leyes (EL) Series: Libros Toma de Razón (LTR) AGN: Archivo General de la Nación (Lima, Peru) Series: Ministerio del Interior (MI): Prefecturas (PR): Departamentos (DP): Loreto (LR), Junín (JN), Huánuco (HU) Series: Ministerio del Interior (MI): Prefecturas (PR): Cámaras y Ministerios (CM): Correos (CO), Corte Superior (CS), Cámara Diputados (CD), Fomento (FO), Guerra (GU), Relaciones Exteriores (RE), Cámara Senadores (CS) Series: Ministerio de Fomento (MF): Tierras de Montaña (TM) AHM: Archivo Histórico Militar (Lima, Peru) Cajas año 1915, Nos. 1–16B Cajas año 1921, Nos. 1-­16 APC: Archivo de la Peruvian Corporation (Lima, Peru) Caja 8: Lease of lands to Seventh Day Adventists Caja 26: Informes zona de Satipo APL: Archivo de la Prefectura de Loreto (Iquitos, Peru)1 Secretaría (S)-­Mesa de Partes y Archivo (MPA) APM: Archivo de la Provincia Misionera San Francisco Solano (Lima, Peru) Carpeta A/11, No. 2: Gobierno de las misiones: PP. Agustín López y Agustín M. Alemany. Carpeta A/11, No. 3: Datos de las misiones por el P. Agustín López. Carpeta A/16, No. 1: Prefectura y Vicariato Apostólico del Ucayali (1872–1932). Carpeta A/16, No. 2: Vicariato Apostólico del Ucayali (1932–1940). 1. Notes generously provided by Pilar García Jordán.

R efer ences  [ 273 ] Carpeta A/16, No. 3: Vicariato Apostólico del Ucayali (1940–1945). Carpeta A/25: Libro II de Actas capitulares y definitoriales (1928–1944). Carpeta B/48: Diario del P. Alberto Gridilla (1925–1928). Carpeta B/85: Libro de memorias del P. Agustín López (1903–1946). Carpeta B/88: Cartas de Requena-­Contamana (1900–1946). Carpeta B/89: Documentos de Requena (1928–1976). APZ: Archivo Pedro Zulen (Biblioteca Nacional-­Sección Manuscritos, Lima, Peru) Asociación Pro-­Indígena (API) Series 2000027145: Documentación administrativa de la API: Actas, 1902–1915. Series 2000027149: Documentación administrativa de la API: Acuerdos, 1910–1917. Series 2000027188: Documentación administrativa de la API: Solicitudes, 1913–1915. Series 2000027192: Cartas remitidas por el Secretario General, Setiembre-­Octubre 1910. Series 2000027195: Cartas remitidas por la API, Enero–Febrero 1911. Series 2000027200: Cartas remitidas por la API, Mayo–Junio 1911. Series 2000027201: Cartas remitidas por la API, Junio 1911. Series 2000027209: Cartas remitidas por la API, Enero–Diciembre 1913. Series 2000027222: Cartas recibidas por la API, Diciembre 1911. Series 2000027225: Cartas recibidas por la API, Marzo–­Mayo 1912. Series 2000027229: Cartas recibidas por la API, Noviembre–Diciembre 1912. Series 2000027230: Cartas recibidas por la API, Enero–Febrero 1913. Series 2000027238: Cartas recibidas por la API, Mayo–Junio 1914. Series 2000027248: Correspondencia de la API: Telegramas recibidos, Diciembre 1910–Diciembre 1911. Series 2000027250: Correspondencia de la API: Telegramas recibidos, Enero– Noviembre 1913. Series 2000027550: Recortes de periódico (Lima, Cuzco, Puno, Iquitos), 1913. ARJ: Archivo Regional de Junín (Huancayo, Peru) Series: Prefecturas (PR) PR 210: Oficios remitidos por la Prefectura a diversos ministerios, 1913–1914. PR 212: Oficios remitidos por la Prefectura a diversas autoridades, 1913–1914. PR 214: Oficios remitidos por la Prefectura a diversas subprefecturas, 1913–1914. PR 215: Telegramas remitidos por la Prefectura a diversas autoridades, 1913–1914. PR 216: Telegramas remitidos por la Prefectura a diversas autoridades, 1914. PR 217: Telegramas remitidos por la Prefectura a diversas autoridades, 1914. PR 218: Telegramas remitidos por la Prefectura a diversas autoridades, 1914. PR 219: Oficios remitidos por la Prefectura a diversos ministerios, 1914–1915. PR 220: Oficios remitidos por la Prefectura a diversas subprefecturas, 1914–1915. PR 222: Oficios remitidos por la Prefectura a diversas autoridades, 1914–1915. PR 224: Cartas remitidas por la Prefectura a diversas autoridades, 1914–1917.

[ 274 ]  R efer ences PR 227: Oficios remitidos por la Prefectura a diversas autoridades, 1915. PR 228: Oficios remitidos por la Prefectura a diversas autoridades, 1915. PR 229: Oficios remitidos por la Prefectura a diversas autoridades, 1915–1916. PR 231: Juicios verbales del Juzgado de Tarma, 1915–1916. PR 233: Oficios remitidos por la Prefectura a diversas autoridades, 1915–1919. PR 234: Oficios remitidos por la Prefectura a diversas autoridades, 1916. PR 235: Oficios remitidos por la Prefectura a diversas autoridades, 1916–1917. PR 236: Oficios remitidos por la Prefectura a diversos ministerios, 1916–1917. PR 238: Telegramas remitidos por la Prefectura a diversas autoridades, 1916–1917. PR 240: Oficios remitidos por la Prefectura a diversas subprefecturas, 1916–1918. PR 312: Telegramas remitidos por la Prefectura a diversas autoridades, 1926–1927. PR 314: Oficios remitidos por la Prefectura a diversos ministerios, 1926–1928. PR 315: Oficios remitidos por la Prefectura a diversas subprefecturas, 1926–1928. PR 322: Oficios remitidos por la Prefectura a diversas autoridades, 1927–1928. PR 324: Oficios remitidos por la Prefectura a diversas subprefecturas, 1927–1930. PR 326: Telegramas remitidos por la Prefectura a diversas autoridades, 1928. PR 328: Oficios remitidos por la Prefectura a diversas subprefecturas, 1928–1929. PR 330: Telegramas remitidos por la Prefectura a diversas autoridades, 1928–1929. PR 333: Cartas y telegramas remitidos por la Prefectura a diversas autoridades, 1928–1930. PR 340: Oficios remitidos por la Prefectura a diversas subprefecturas, 1928–1930. PR 342: Oficios remitidos por la Prefectura a diversos ministerios, 1930. AUPS: Archivo de la Presidencia de la Unión Peruana Sur (Lima, Peru)2 Libros de Actas (LA) LA No. 1 (1917–1929) LA No. 2 (1930–1934) BNP: Biblioteca Nacional del Perú Sección Manuscritos (SM) GCA: Seventh-­Day Adventists General Conference Archives (Silver Spring, MD, USA) Record Group (RG) RG 1: Box 6644: Minutes-­1916–1930. RG 1: Box 6645: Minutes-­1931–1939. RG 11: Box 3118: Haynes-­1927. RG 11: Box 3121: Haynes-­1929. RG 11: Box 3122: Peugh-­1929. RG 21: Box 3306: Stahl-­1918. RG 21: Box 3326: Stahl-­1920. 2. Notes generously provided by Juan Carlos La Serna Salcedo.

R efer ences  [ 275 ] RG 21: Box 3505: Stahl-­1924. RG 21: Box 9905: Schaeffler-­Appointee. RG 21: Box 9911: Stahl-­Appointee. RG 33: Box 9789: Stahl-­Sustentee. MRE: Archivo Central del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores (Lima, Peru)3 Series 2–0: Presidencia de la República: Ministerio de Gobierno Series 2–0-­A: Presidencia de la República: Ministerio de Gobierno: Secretaria de Gobierno Series 2–0-­E: Presidencia de la República: Ministerio de Gobierno: Prefecturas Series 2–0-­ F: Presidencia de la República: Ministerio de Gobierno: Correos, Telégrafos, Radio Series 2–3: Presidencia de la República: Ministerio de Fomento Series 6–2: Servicio Diplomático Extranjero en el Perú: Legación de Brasil Series 6–3: Servicio Diplomático Extranjero en el Perú: Legación de Estados Unidos Series 6–5: Servicio Diplomático Extranjero en el Perú: Legación de Alemania Series 6–16: Servicio Diplomático Extranjero en el Perú: Legación de Italia Series 6–17: Servicio Diplomático Extranjero en el Perú: Legación de Gran Bretaña Series 6–29: Servicio Diplomático Extranjero en el Perú: Legación de Polonia Series 8–42-­A: Consulado del Perú en el Extranjero: Consulado del Perú en Polonia Series 9–31: Servicio Consular Extranjero Residente en el Perú: Consulado de Polonia en el Perú

In terviews Arias Urízar, Esteban. Interview with Carlos Ríos (Matsigenka), Mayapo (Picha River), no date, 2013. Barclay, Frederica. Interview with Alejandro Calderón (Ashaninka, 50 years old), Puerto Bermúdez (Pichis River), 1988. Bodley, John H. Interview with Nataniel Sarmiento (Ashaninka, 56 years old), Shahuaya (Ucayali River), July 10–11, 1966, in Fieldnotes, 23–24, 62–65. ———. Interview with Mariano Bautista (Conibo, 39 years old), Shahuaya (Ucayali River), July 24, 1966, in Fieldnotes, 105–106; August 14, 1966, in Fieldnotes, 115–117 ———. Interview with Meyando Vásquez (Ashaninka, 40 years old), Shahuaya (Ucayali River), August 21, 1966, in Fieldnotes, 63–69. ———. Interview with María Paredes (Ashaninka, 46 years old), Shahuaya (Ucayali River), no date, 1966, in Fieldnotes, 15–20. 3. These series are organized by year and according to “Entradas” (mail received) and “Salidas” (mail sent).

[ 276 ]  R efer ences ———. Interview with Ramón Carrión (white-­mestizo patrón), Nevati (Nazarateki River), February 1, 1969, in Fieldnotes, 50-­53. ———. Interview with Horacio Santiago (Ashaninka), Nevati (Nazarateki River), February 9, 1969, in Fieldnotes, 73–75. La Serna Salcedo, Juan Carlos. Interview with Adventist pastor Alejandro Bullón Páucar, Lima, July 20, 2004. Mihas, Elena. Interview with Elias Meza Pedro (Ashaninka, resident of Mariscal Cáceres, 75 years old) and his son-­in-­law, Gregorio Santos Pérez (Ashaninka, resident of Villa Perené, born and grew up in Bajo Marankiari, 55 years old), Bajo Marankiari (Perené River), May 2016. ———. Interview with Aurora Quinchori Julio (Ashaninka, resident of Ciudadela, La Merced, 77 years old), Bajo Marankiari, May 2016. Narby, Jeremy. Interview with Carlos Pérez Shuma (Ashaninka, 45 years old), Kirishari (Pichis River), June 13, 1985, in Fieldnotes, 1:8–12. ———. Interview with Carlos Pérez Shuma (Ashaninka, 45 years old), Kirishari (Pichis River), July 19, 1985, in Fieldnotes, 3:1–5. ———. Interview with Carlos Pérez Shuma (Ashaninka, 45 years old), Kirishari (Pichis River), October 11, 1985, in Fieldnotes, 4:8 ———. Interview with Carlos Pérez Shuma (Ashaninka, 45 years old), Kirishari (Pichis River), October 15, 1985, in Fieldnotes, 5:1–14. ———. Interview with Carlos Pérez Shuma (Ashaninka, 45 years old), Kirishari (Pichis River), October 17, 1985, in Fieldnotes, 6:1–17. Santos-­Granero, Fernando. Interview with Adolfo Gutiérrez (Ashaninka, 75 years old), Churingaveni (Perené River), August 20, 2013. ———. Interview with Armando del Arca Huamani (Ashaninka, resident of Kirishari, 84 years old), Puerto Bermúdez (Pichis River), April 12, 2016. ———. Interview with Raúl Tepa (Ashaninka, 74 years old), Caserío Zungaroyali (Pichis River), April 14, 2016. ———. Interview with Alcides Calderón (Ashaninka, 58 years old), Puerto Bermúdez (Pichis River), April 16, 2016. ———. Interview with Segundo Arroyo (Ashaninka, 70 years old), Santa Teresa (Pachitea River), April 20, 2016. Santos Pérez, Gregorio. Interview with his parents, Moisés Santos Rojas (Ashaninka, 75 years old) and Inés Pérez de Santos (Ashaninka, 75 years old), Bajo Marankiari (Perené River), May 2016. Trapnell, Lucy. Interview with Alcides Calderón (Ashaninka, 57 years old), Puerto Bermúdez (Pichis River), November 14, 2015.

Index

Adventist: Church, 170, 176, 250n25; doctrine (creed, discourse, dogma, faith, message, religion), xix fig. 3, xliii fig. 40, 5, 16, 22, 24, 54, 67, 111, 135–138, 140, 142–145, 158, 162, 171–172, 174, 176–177, 185; effervescence (euphoria), xliv fig. 42, 24, 111, 133, 134 map 7.1, 140, 147, 153, 168, 174, 176, 191, 233n10, 240n138; ritual practices (observances), 144, 164; subversive activities, xxxix fig. 32, xli fig. 37, 16, 148–150, 155– 156, 182 Adventist missionaries. See Schaeffler, William; Stahl, Ferdinand; Westphal, Henry Adventist missions, xxxvi fig. 27, 141, 160, 176, 233n9, 243n20; Aruya, xliii fig. 40, 163–164, 168, 244n40; Baños, 177; Belén, 171, 173, 175; Cascadas, xxxiv fig. 25, xxxvi fig. 27, 142, 147, 156–158, 172; Cheni, xix–xx figs. 3–4, xxxvi–xxxvii figs. 28–30, xl fig. 35, 12, 15–16, 21, 80, 146–150, 152–153, 157, 166, 189, 199n20, 239n115, 252n41; and churches, 139, 148, 164, 167, 174, 182, 189; Ebenezer, xliii fig. 41, 164, 167; Metraro, xxxv–xxxvi figs. 26–27,

101, 133, 137–143, 145, 147, 164, 172, 181, 235n42, 236n52, 252n42; Nevati, 176–177; San Pablo, 175; Santaniari, xl–xli figs. 35–36, 78, 80, 151–159, 163, 166, 172, 183, 233n3; Santa Teresa, xliv fig. 43, 177–178, 182, 207n105; Shahuaya, xliv fig. 42, 78–80, 142, 145–146, 159–160, 163– 171, 178, 181, 243n20; Sira, 177; Sotziki, 172–176, 248n128; Yamiría, 177; Yarina, 177 Adventist native preachers and people-gatherers, xli fig. 37, 140–141, 146, 148, 151, 153, 158, 177, 237n64; Camacha, 147; Carlos Charice, 147; Ulises Díaz, xxxvii fig. 30, xxxix fig. 33, 140–141, 148, 150–152, 157, 237n64, 240n132; Abel Fieta, 140– 141, 148, 151, 157, 218n55; Jaromi, xliii fig. 40, 140–141, 147, 158, 163, 237n65; Manuela, xxxvii fig. 30, xxxix fig. 33, 140–141, 148, 150– 152, 157; María, 147; Napoleón, 157; Santana, xx fig. 4, 112, 140– 141, 151, 158, 172, 237n68; Shirunkama, xliii fig. 40, 140–141, 147, 158, 163–165, 169, 181, 205n62, 237n66, 244n40; Martín Urquía, 167, 181; Virginia, 147 [ 277 ]

[ 278 ]  Index Adventist non-native preachers: Eduardo Castillo, 174–176; Elena Chávez, 147; Emeterio Cruzate, 145–146, 149, 151–152, 160; Luis Gómez, 170; Rufino Pacho, xliii fig. 41, 164; Juan Ramos, 147, 161–162; Isaías Salazar, 147, 167–169, 186; José Salinas, 145–146, 149, 151–152, 160 Adventist schools, 147–148, 155, 164, 167–168, 170, 174, 176, 181–182, 189, 243n20; and Sabbath (Bible, church) schools, xxxvii fig. 29, xlii fig. 39, 140, 148, 160–162, 164, 169, 181 Aguirrezábal, Fr. José, 167 airplanes, xli fig. 36–37, xlii fig. 38, 54, 102, 155, 242n161; and flying steamboats, 154–155, 242n161 Alemany, Fr. Agustín, 77, 81 Arana, Fr. Ignacio, 61 Arana, Julio César, 59 Ashaninka: alphabet, 10; cluster (collective), 10, 18, 106, 111, 113, 195n4, 199n25; cosmology, 34, 111, 118; cultural values (traditions), 4, 18, 88, 159; history, 8, 54–55; messianism, 9, 186–189; mythology, 24, 118, 184, 208n12; ontologies, 106–108; oral memory, 184–185, 211n63; self-designation term, 195n4; shamanism, 67, 138; song genres, 116–117; subgroups, 59–60, 114, 124–125; theology, 47, 65, 190 Atahualpa, Juan Santos, 2, 70, 82–83, 87, 101, 184–186, 189, 236n47, 250n22, 250n26 ayahuasca, xliii fig. 40, 65, 107, 122, 144–145, 193–194, 232n121; sessions (séances, ceremonies), 65–67, 129, 164–165, 169, 176–177, 185, 188, 214n127, 244n40, 252n39; visions, 5, 143 Bezada, Antonio, 52, 56–57, 63, 209n36; young, 52, 57, 63, 209n36

Bible: and biblical images, 175; as magical object, 138 Bochdan-Niedenthal, Marja, 160, 243n18 cargo cults, 153–154, 186, 190 celestial bodies, deified: Milky Way, xxxiii fig. 23, 125–128, 130–131, 232n106; Moon, 18, 20, 105, 107, 124–126, 131, 225n106; Star People, 125–126, 131; Sun, xxxiv fig. 24, 9, 18–20, 48, 67, 106, 114, 119, 123– 124, 126–127, 131, 177, 188 Cervantes, Guillermo, 44, 133, 233n11 chiefs, Ashaninka: Acasharontsi, 32, 36, 204n27, 205n62; Venancio Amaringo Campa, xxx fig. 19, 41, 81, 206n83; Baincoshi, 67, 215n135; el Boliviano, 36, 38, 205n62; Bruno, 26, 34, 36, 105, 108, 110, 143, 205n62; Cayetano, 150; Francisco el Chino, 32, 36, 38–39, 41, 205n62; Chobabuenga, 36, 205n62; Chobiri, 36, 205n62; Cipriano, 36, 205n62; Gaspar, 59, 63, 103; Iromano, 60, 64–67, 105, 211n63; Kasanto, 36, 205n62; José Kinchori, xxviii fig. 17; Kirebo, 36, 41, 82, 88, 205n62; Santiago López, xxviii fig. 17; Maniaro, 52, 60, 209n31, 209n36; Napoleón, xx fig. 4, xl fig. 35, 36, 149, 153, 157, 166, 189, 205n62, 239n115; Ompikiri, xxix–xx figs. 3–4, xl figs. 34–35, 15–17, 21, 36, 146, 148–149, 152–153, 157, 189, 199n16, 205n62, 252n41; Pihorato, 32, 36, 204n27, 205n62; Samoto, 32, 36, 205n62; Shirampari, 60; Shirunkama, 36, 205n62, 237n66; Shoshokiri, 60, 63, 66–67; Shora, 52, 60, 209n32, 209n36; Tsiri, 50, 52–53, 60, 209n24, 209n36; Tsonkiribantsi, 60, 63; Uribe, 36, 41, 59–60, 205n62; Sargento Verástegui, 45–47, 49, 52, 57,

Index  [ 279 ] 60, 62, 64–66, 68, 90, 95, 98–100, 108, 110, 143, 188; Díaz Vicente, 214n107; Zárate, xxviii fig. 17 Christ’s second coming, xli fig. 36, 16, 22, 135–137, 141, 143, 146–147, 153, 157, 164, 174, 176 civilizados, 13–14, 30, 34, 180, 214n107 conceptual integration (blending), 9, 22–24, 50, 117, 120, 131, 135, 138, 141–142, 149, 165, 169, 176, 191 constructional worldviews, 105, 226n1 conviviality, 123 Corpancho: Carlos, xxv fig. 12, 45, 47–50, 52, 103, 138, 208n6–9, 208n17, 224n83; Oswaldo, 47, 49, 61, 63, 95 correrías, 13, 35, 74, 82, 91, 180–181, 193, 223n58 cosmologies, 4, 34, 114, 118, 120, 123, 129; and cosmological traditions (narratives, notions), 26, 111, 118, 121 counting sticks, xxiv fig. 10, 30, 203n19 Crawford, Robert (Bobby), 61, 95, 213n92 creation and creative acts, 18–19, 105– 106, 119, 226n1 debt-peonage, 37, 40, 63, 74, 87, 91, 96–97, 148, 159, 194; and debt-peons, xliv fig. 42, 4, 9, 88, 168, 182 Delgado brothers: xxiv fig. 11, 32–33, 41; Gregorio, 32–33; Julio César, 13, 30–35, 203n22, 203n25 divine emissaries (messengers), xxv fig. 12, 49, 52, 103, 116, 123, 184–185, 189, 240n138, 250n25 end: of the millennium, 136; of times, 135, 143, 155; of the world, xlii fig. 38, 20, 22, 135, 141, 174, 176, 242n161 eschatological beliefs, 144; message, 174; narratives, 136

firearms, 21, 37, 50, 75–76, 153; carbines, 52, 88; rifles (Winchester), xxvi fig. 13, 13, 30–31, 41, 49, 52, 58, 88, 101, 163; shotguns (Dumoulin), xxvi fig. 13, 30–31, 41, 54–56, 78, 81, 83, 86, 88, 97, 159, 174, 210n41, 214n127 fires, sacred, 65, 67, 138, 188 Fitkau, Juan, 50, 52–53, 57, 63, 103, 209n36 Fitzcarrald: brothers, 30, 35, 41–43, 202n12, 206n83; Carlos Fermín, xxx fig. 19, 16, 29, 74, 76, 81, 104, 202n12; Casa, 27, 29–30, 44, 91; Delfín, 202n12; Federico, 29, 202n12; José, 29, 202n12; Lorenzo, 202n12 Franchini: brothers, 41, 202n9, 206n83; Fernando, xxiii fig. 9, 29; Francisco, xxiii fig. 9, 29–30 Franciscan historians, 96, 167, 183–184, 187, 240n138 Franciscan missionaries, 15, 49, 51, 58, 77, 81–82, 85–86, 91, 96, 117–118, 148, 161, 167, 220n94, 251n35. See also Aguirrezábal, Fr. José; Alemany, Fr. Agustín; Arana, Fr. Ignacio; Gridilla, Fr. Alberto; Irazola, Fr. Francisco; Sala, Fr. Gabriel Franciscan missions, xxxii fig. 21, 16, 87, 161, 183; Apurucayali, 61, 64, 161, 184; Atalaya, 184; Cashiboya, 183; Contamana, xlii fig. 39, 161, 183; Puerto Ocopa, 16, 40, 148–151, 154, 184, 204n31; Requena, 183; San Luis de Shuaro, 58, 68, 83, 85, 161, 211n60; Santa María del Río Blanco, 183; Satipo, 184; Yarinacocha, 167 Freyd, Aleksander, xviii fig. 2, xx fig. 4, 11, 17, 36 fundos (haciendas): xliv fig. 42, 36, 43, 52, 63, 104, 132, 154–155, 160, 163, 168, 181, 193–194, 202n10;

[ 280 ]  Index fundos (haciendas) (continued) Anaquiría, 35, 99; Arica, 160; Atalaya, xxxix fig. 32, 12, 53, 56, 130, 150–151, 154–155, 168–169, 171, 184, 240n132; Betijay, 43; Chicotsa, 27, 29–32, 35, 37–39, 43, 76, 91, 159; Cumaría (Nueva Italia), xxiii fig. 9, 4, 14, 27, 29–30, 32–34, 42, 44, 76, 91, 130, 160, 165, 243n18; Lagarto, 34, 43, 99; La Huaira, 148, 154; La Poza, 43; Maquinaria, 34, 99; Miraflores, 43; Monte Carmelo, 13; Monteverde, 43; Pacaya, 31–32, 35, 99, 203n25; Pucalpa, 26; Puerto Vigo, 43; Puntijau, 12–13, 31, 34, 43; Sampaya, 43; Santaniari, 80, 151–152, 154, 159, 233n3; Santa Zita, 48, 61–62, 64; Sepa, 27, 29–30, 34–35, 91, 130, 149, 154, 168; Tahuanía, 34, 43, 99, 104; Tranquilidad, 43; Unini, 43; Vainilla, 160, 163, 165 funeral practices, 100 Gensollen, Carlos, xl fig. 34, 152 gods, creator/transfomer, xliii fig. 40, 18–19, 47, 87, 110–111, 113, 116– 124, 128–131, 188, 191, 199n25, 208n12, 226n1, 230n62, 240n138; Abireri (Nabireri), 106, 124–125, 225n105, 236n52; Barí, 119, 126; Cheshe Inka, 121; Cori Inka, 119, 121, 126; Goyakalu, 119–122, 226n1; Inka, 119–121, 126, 146, 170, 178, 235n45; Mamantsiki, 123; Manchakori, 18, 105, 124, 225n106; Oshe, 126; Pabá, xxxiv fig. 24, 18–20, 48–49, 65–67, 105–107, 119–120, 123–125, 137–138, 140– 145, 155, 165, 176, 185–186, 199n16, 225n104; Pachakama, 119–121, 229n49; Tasorentsi, 18–20, 65–66, 119–120, 124–125, 190, 208n12, 226n1; Tsla, 119–122, 127–128

Gran Pajonal, xxxi fig. 20, 2, 13–14, 17, 22, 25, 27, 38–39, 41, 44, 49, 53, 59–60, 63–64, 67–68, 70–71, 76–78, 81–82, 85–88, 99, 112, 116, 118, 132, 138, 147, 165–166, 183–184, 189, 199n25, 209n36, 227n12, 234n16, 246n95 Gridilla, Fr. Alberto, 148 habilitación system, 74, 96–97, 194, 202n9; and habilitados, 77, 87, 194, 206n83; and reciprocity, 96–97 Herrera, Capt., xxvii fig. 15, 58, 62 Herrera, Jenaro, 180–181, 249n3 horns (trumpets), 83, 86, human condition, 106, 120, 122, immortality: attaining (achieving, acquiring, regaining), 5, 20, 65, 108, 110–111, 114, 121–122, 124, 126–129, 144, 159, 164, 176, 178, 184, 190; granting, 65, 111, 131, 136, 161; hope for, 4, 188; loss of, 120, 122, 188; maintaining, 125; promises of, 129, 177; quest for, 68, 214n127, 252n39; restoring, xxxvi fig. 28, 122–123 Indians: catechized, 73, 193, 223n58; civilized, 62; highland (Andean), 180, 199n11, 251n35, 232n106, 235n47; and Indian problem, 90, 220n1; tribal, 74, 77, 93, 95–97, 223n58; wild (savage), 15, 38, 180, 194, 198n8 indigenous peoples: Amahuaca, 13, 27, 29–30, 34–37, 43, 75–77, 109, 112; Asheninka, 59–60, 96, 112–114, 124– 125, 195n4, 199n25, 227n12, 228n32, 236n52; Cashibo, 75, 160, 170; Conibo (Shipibo-Conibo), xxii fig. 7, xliii fig. 41, 8, 10, 13, 25–27, 29–30, 33–39, 43, 54, 72, 74–79, 81, 104, 109, 112–113, 115–121, 123–124, 126–131, 133, 143, 146–147, 160, 164–167, 170,

Index  [ 281 ] 179, 184, 193, 202n9, 209n36, 226n1, 229n45, 250n22, 252n42; Matsigenka, 10, 18, 29, 70, 72, 102, 125, 131, 140, 146, 160, 240n138; Mayoruna, 160; Mochobo, 70, 252n42; Nomatsiguenga, 114, 123–125, 131, 195n4, 199n25, 209n36, 228n28, 228n32, 240n138; Yanesha, xxvii fig. 15, xxviii fig. 17, 8, 10, 61–62, 70, 72, 112, 115, 133, 137–141, 173, 177, 189, 208n14, 229n47, 250n22; Yine, xxiii fig. 8, xxxvii–xxxviii figs. 30–31, xli fig. 36, xliv fig. 42, 8–10, 13–14, 17, 25, 27, 29–30, 33, 36–39, 70, 72, 74–78, 84, 102, 109, 112–124, 126– 130, 137–138, 140–141, 143, 146–150, 153–154, 160, 164, 168, 179, 184, 189, 193, 196n10, 199n9, 221n14, 226n1, 229n45, 231n80, 237n64, 241n157, 242n161, 250n22 interethnic: alliances, 27, 34, 37, 61, 108, 123; marriages, 141; openness, 4; relations, 55 Irazola, Fr. Francisco, 51–52, 91 Lehman, Carlos, 80, 159 Lepecki, Mieczys/Law B., xviii fig. 2, xx fig. 4, 1, 2–4. 8–9, 12–22, 24–25, 37, 39, 77–80, 84–87, 123, 138, 144, 147, 150, 153, 155, 182, 198n1, 199n20, 200n37, 206n83 Libertad, steam launch, xxiv fig. 11, 2, 4, 13–14, 27, 29–33, 39, 41–43, 105, 203n25, 204n31–32 life force. See vitality merchants (traders), river, 51, 164–166, 182, 195n8 messianism, 9, 186–188, 190; and messianic discourse, 251n35; and messianic expectations (hopes), 111, 189, 250n26; and messianic identification, 139; and messianic inclinations

(proclivities), 186–187, 189; and messianic leaders, 190; and messianic movements, 187, 189, 191 millennium, 136; and millenarianism, 186, 190; and millenarian message, 140, 174; and millenarian movements, 189, 191 montaña, 1–2, 17, 39, 91, 194, 195n6 moral: conversion (transformation), 4, 55–57, 142, 144, 188; convictions, 56; disposition, 85; hopes, 5; integrity, 169; life (existence), 122, 127; matters, 55, 144; obligations, 142; order, 55; rules, 121; sense, 191; values, 191 Morón de la Fuente, Jaime, 41, 77–78, 80–82, 85–88, 158–159 multilingualism, 70, 113, 117, 129, 184 mythical: birds, xlii fig. 38, 242n161; characters (figures), 185, 250n26; heroes, 139, 229n47; images, 131; times, 121, 230n62; traditions (notions, thought), 23, 127–128 myths, 5, 118–119, 122, 127, 177, 229n47, 232n109, 250n26; and mythification, 36; and mythologies, xxxiii fig. 23, 24, 128, 184, 208n12; and myth tellers, 120, 124, 126–127 oral tradition and time compression (conflation), 54–55, 101, 111 Osborne (Westphal), Barbara, 33, 78, 80, 137, 146, 153, 158, 240n135, 242n162 Parodi, Capt., 62–63, 91 patrones: xxxix fig. 32, xl fig. 34, 9, 13, 193–194, 195n8; abandonment of, 4, 16, 46–47, 49, 62–63, 95–96, 148, 154, 156, 167, 182, 188, 240n138; avoidance of, 160, 165–167; and credit, 93; and debt-peonage, xli fig. 37, 4, 16, 63, 74, 77–78, 80, 82,

[ 282 ]  Index patrones (continued) 95–97, 159; as divine emissaries, 49–50, 63, 103, 138; evil, 155; expulsion of, xxii fig. 6, 2, 14, 25, 40–41, 43, 63, 129, 160, 186; as indigenous leaders, xxxviii fig. 31, 149, 154; killing of, 37, 92; and labor shortage, 33, 73–74, 132; and private militias, 38, 43; and slavery, 24, 29, 40, 51, 53, 55, 57, 74–75, 81, 88, 91, 142, 150–151, 168, 174, 181, 240n132; war against, 39, 60–61, 91, 108, 152–153, 161 peccaries (wild pigs), 101, 103–104–106, 142–143, 155, 182, 188; white-collared, 101, 103–105; white-lipped, 26, 34, 65, 101, 103, 105, 109, 143 Perené Colony, xxvi fig. 13, xxvii fig. 15, xxviii fig. 17, 38, 49, 58, 62, 72–73, 133–134, 137, 141, 161, 164, 167, 173, 175, 208n14, 233n9, 235n42, 237n68 Pérez Noriega, Lucrecia, 80, 141, 158– 159, 243n7 perspectivism, 106, 226n107 Peruvian Mission, 157, 172 Pichis exodus, 174–175, 248n128 --vanguard of: Eduardo Castillo, 174– 176; Anselmo Cruz, 175–176; David Shingari, 173, 175–176; Oseas Tepa, 174; Juan Ucayali, 174, 176 Pichis Trail, xxvi figs. 13–14, xxvii fig. 16, 26, 34, 45, 57–59, 61–65, 67–68, 73, 101, 103–104, 133, 146, 172, 181, 201n1, 201n3, 207n1, 211n60, 214n107, 225n103 pishtacos, 101–103, 108–109 police constables: xli fig. 37, 40, 51, 62, 103–104, 149, 154, 168; Eduardo Arróspide, 155; Samuel F. Figueroa, 16, 149–151, 154, 199n20; Leonidas Ibarra, 151–152; César Lurquín, 41, 53, 59–61, 63; Francisco Rivero de la Guarda, 132

Polish: colony, 12, 33, 198n1; 243n18; expedition, xviii fig. 2, xx fig. 4, 12, 198n1 Polish American Migration Syndicate, xviii fig. 2, 198n1 political economy of life, 98, 101, 222n49 predation: and captor/captive relations, 56; and interspecific relations, 106–107 Pro-Indian Association, 51, 91, 180, 217n43 prophets, 104, 240n138; and prophecies, 123, 131, 155, 157; and prophetic messages, 116, 118, 143; and prophetism, 190 Puente Olavegoya, Agustín de la, 62, 180 religious conversion, 9, 20, 139, 144, 146 rituals, 23, 149, 187; and ritual actions (operations, practices), xliii fig. 40, 6, 67, 100, 103, 105, 127, 144, 169, 177, 187–189, 214; and ritual gatherings, 129, 177 Rivero, Abraham de, xxxix fig. 33, 150, 239n123 rubber: barons, xxx fig. 19, 29, 74, 76, 154, 202n12; boom, xxv fig. 12, 5, 13, 27, 40, 73, 77, 96, 149, 213n92; Castilla, 73–74, 93–94, 193, 216n19; compact, 96–98, 108–109, 191; crisis, 3–4, 93–98, 100, 105, 109; cultivated, 93; economy, 77, 93, 95, 109, 132–133, 181; exports, 73, 93; extractors (caucheros, gatherers), 2–4, 13, 30, 38, 41, 44, 48, 56, 61, 76–77, 81, 90, 92, 94, 175, 202n9, 216n19; Hevea, 73, 93–94, 194, 216n19; merchant houses, 32, 43, 73, 93–94; merchants (traders), 42, 51, 93–94, 195n8; patrones (bosses, entrepreneurs), xxi

Index  [ 283 ] fig. 5, xxiii fig. 8, xxv fig. 12, 13–14, 16, 29, 34–35, 42, 44–45, 47, 61, 63, 73–76, 80, 91–93, 96–97, 109, 130, 149, 161, 181, 195n8, 211n61, 213n92, 221n14; posts (camps, entrepôts, stations), xxiii fig. 9, 9, 27–29, 34–36, 41, 43, 45, 48, 63, 95, 99, 181, 193, 211n61, 213n92; prices, 92–95, 98, 213n92; trade, 76; wild, 93 Sala, Fr. Gabriel, xxxi fig. 20, 49, 70, 82–87, 118, 161, 202n9, 220n94 salvation, 65, 136; and salvationist notions, 24 Sargento Verástegui. See chiefs, Ashaninka Schaeffler, William, xxiv fig. 10, 146, 148, 151–154, 156–159, 172, 203n19, 220n90 Scharff: Carlos (Junior), 154, 221n14; Carlos (Senior), xxx fig. 19, 149 schools and schooling, interest in, 87, 146–149, 153, 155, 160, 168, 188 Sedlmayer, Oscar, 45, 50–53, 57, 63, 103, 209n36 Selva Central, xxv fig. 12, xxvii fig. 15, xxxiii fig. 23, xxxv fig. 26, 2, 3 map 0.1, 4, 8–10, 14 map 1.1, 53, 109, 113, 128, 133, 134 map 7.1, 135, 139, 145, 174, 176, 180–181, 183–184, 186, 188, 195n5, 250n22, 252n42 shamans, 5, 19, 47, 64–67, 104, 106– 107, 129, 131, 138, 143, 174, 184–185, 194, 214n127; and shaman-chiefs, 4, 8–9, 17, 20, 39, 47, 60, 64, 66–67, 69, 98, 105, 211n63; and shamanic knowledge, 60, 66; and shamanic strategies, 98, 103–105; and shamanic transformations, 105, 109, 188; and shamanic warfare, 108; and shamanic weapons, 61; and shaman-priests, 67, 138; and white shamans, xxxiv fig. 25, 138, 144

slavery, indigenous, 4, 15, 32–33, 37, 40, 42, 51, 53, 56–57, 89, 132, 153– 154, 158, 168, 180, 191, 253n52; and Indian slavers, 41, 53, 57, 59–60, 70, 81, 88–89, 150, 168, 181, 188, 206n83, 210n50; and slave raiding, 4, 13, 27, 33, 37–38, 40, 41–42, 51–54, 74–77, 81–82, 88–89, 91, 95, 99, 160, 168, 184, 193, 209n36; and slave trade, xxiv fig. 11, 4, 9, 13, 25, 32–33, 42, 45, 50–51, 53, 55, 60, 88, 99, 159, 209n36; and white-mestizo slavers, xxi fig. 5, xxiv fig. 11, 4, 13, 29, 32–33, 38, 41, 51–54, 56–57, 63, 103, 151, 155, 165 songs, xxxii fig. 21, 112, 116, 189, 252n41; ayahuasca, 65, 129; drinking, 117; love, 117; magical, 117– 118; ownership of, 115; worshipping, xxxii fig. 21, 116–117, 228n37 sorcerers (witches), 100, 102–103, 223n64; child, 174; and sorcerous chants, 117; and sorcery (witchcraft), 138, 140, 178 souls (vitalities), 106, 113, 125, 127; destruction of, 100, 103, 106; detached, 100; and ensoulment, 224n86; and soul flights, 138; theft of, 102, 107 spirit master/owners: Anaconda, 125; Ayahuasca, 145; Kamari, 139; Kiatsi, 107; Mamantsiki, 123; of manioc, 107, 123; of plants, 107 spirits, 65, 67, 102, 106, 120, 125, 129, 138, 153, 188; amatsenka, 18, 20, 48, 138; chaikoni, 121, 126; henokiniri, 125; maninkari, 18, 20, 65; saankarite, 240n138 Stahl, Ferdinand, xix fig. 3, xxxiv–xxxvi figs. 24–27, xxxvii figs. 29–30, xl fig. 34, xli figs. 36–37, 11, 16, 21–22, 80, 87, 132–149, 151–154, 156, 158, 160– 161, 163–164, 167, 169–170, 172– 173, 181, 233n10, 235n42, 236n52

[ 284 ]  Index Sun, son of the (itómi Pabá), 1, 12, 18–22, 24, 49, 66, 87, 139, 144, 177, 185–186, 235n47 tambos, Pichis Trail, xxvi fig. 13, xxvii fig. 16, 58–59, 61, 63, 73, 103–104, 181, 194, 211n60; Aguachini, 63, 211n60; Azupizú, 46, 58, 211n60; Eneñas, 58, 211n60; Kilómetro 71, 211n60; Miritiriani, xxvii fig. 16, 58, 60, 211n60, 211n63; El Porvenir, 58, 211n60; Puchalini, 58, 61, 63, 92, 211n60; Puerto Soto, 211n60; Puerto Yessup, 47, 59, 61, 63, 68, 103–104, 211n60; La Salud, 58, 211n60; San Nicolás, 58, 211n60; Yapaz, 211n60 Tasorentsi (José Carlos Amaringo Chico): as Adventist preacher and people-gatherer, 5, 9, 16, 80, 132, 140–141, 144–147, 158, 162, 164, 171–172, 176–177, 181–182, 185, 188–189; children of, 42, 53, 172, 177, 243n7; death of, 5, 178; as debtpeon, 77–78, 80, 87, 158–159; discourse of, 39, 57, 109–110, 116, 165, 169, 184, 190; dreams of, 5, 9, 40, 42, 56–57, 78, 89, 108, 124, 143, 154, 183; imprisonment (arrest) of, xliv fig. 42, 110, 148, 151, 155, 168–169, 182, 186, 244n40, 246n78; influence of, 9, 84, 86, 172, 178; as inspirer of 1912– 1914 movement, 45, 51–52, 67–69, 71, 79; as leader of multiethnic 1915 uprising, 2, 13, 16, 36, 38–40, 69, 87, 142; name of, 9, 18–19, 66, 78–82, 142, 182, 190, 218n48, 218n66; origins of, 4, 70–71, 196n10; personality of, 17, 84, 158–159; pictures of, xx fig. 4, xxxvi fig. 28, xl fig. 34, 11, 17, 85, 152; as shaman, 4, 8–9, 17, 20, 39, 47, 60–61, 64, 66–67, 69, 98, 144–145, 169, 176–177, 185; and shamanized (indigenized) Adventist

doctrine, xliii fig. 40, 5, 16, 144– 145, 158, 176; as slaver, 4, 9, 25, 42, 53–55, 82, 88–89; song of, xxxii fig. 21, 109, 111–120, 128–130, 131, 188; as son of the Sun, 1, 12, 18–22, 24, 66, 87, 144, 146, 161, 177, 185; theological agenda of, 68, 98, 110–111; as trader, 88, 166; utopian message of, 111, 116, 130, 154–155, 178, 184; wars of, 9, 124, 181–183; wives of, xx fig. 4, 80, 112, 140–141, 151, 158–159, 172, 237n68, 243n7 tasorentsi creator gods, 18–19, 21, 105, 185, 199n25, 208n121, 214n127; emissaries (envoys, heralds, messengers), 20, 42, 47–49, 53, 57, 59, 64, 66, 68, 71, 87, 98, 123, 138–139, 141, 185; good spirits, 18–19, 21, 185, 199n25, 208n12. See also world transformers telegraphs, xxvi fig. 14, xxvii fig. 16, 26, 58, 63, 65, 103, 181, 201n3, 202n10 transformative movements, 133, 191, 233n10 Trigoso, Arístides, 165 Upper Amazon Mission, 21–22, 146– 147, 157, 164, 167, 172 utopian: discourse, 116; expectations (hopes), 40, 186, 190, 192; message, 111, 130, 154, 178; movements, 66, 189; prophecies (promises), 123, 131, 184; response, 89; transformation, 191; uprisings, 2; world, 153 Valle Riestra, Víctor, xxviii fig. 17, 58, 62, 133, 141 Vargas Hernández, Francisco (Pancho), xxiii fig. 8, xxxviii–xxxix figs. 31–33, xliv fig. 42, 13–14, 29–30, 33, 35, 41–44, 132, 148–155, 159, 168, 199n9, 206n83, 233n3, 240n132, 252n41

Index  [ 285 ] vitality (life force), 35, 98–99, 102–103, 106–107, 143, 188; struggle (battle, competition, fight) for, 61, 90, 98, 100–102, 105–110, 154, 222n49 warriors, xxii fig. 6, 9, 27, 30, 35–39, 41, 52, 54, 60, 65, 75, 101–104, 159, 163, 174, 184, 188, 194, 211n63, 221n14, 252n42; and war (warrior) chiefs, 40, 53, 88, 132, 144, 162– 163, 209n36 waters (lake, pool, river, spring) of youth (life), 5, 106, 109, 111, 114– 115, 117–118, 123–128, 130, 136, 155, 188 Westphal, Henry, 33, 78, 137, 146, 158, 163–164 white (-mestizo) people, 193–194, 198n6–7, 199n11; burning of, 47, 52, 68, 90, 98, 100–105, 108–109, 143, 155, 188; demonic nature of, 100– 102, 105–106, 108–109, 188; domination (oppression) by, xxxvi fig. 28, 4, 22, 33, 37, 49, 89, 122, 128, 131,

144, 182, 188, 191; as enemies, xli fig. 36, 101, 105; expulsion of, 13–14, 33, 40–41, 47, 68, 78, 90, 98, 108, 186; extermination of, 26, 34, 40, 92, 96, 105, 108–110, 121, 123, 143– 144, 154, 157; kidnapping of, 34–35, 43, 99–100; killing of, 2, 34, 36, 103, 142–143; mutilation (butchery, dismemberment) of, 92, 101, 104–105; rejection of, 15, 85, 101; war against, 25, 39, 49, 57, 61, 68, 87, 91, 104, 108, 163, 182 world transformers, 2, 5, 9, 18–19, 21, 39, 47, 49–50, 53, 56, 66, 68, 70, 79, 82, 88–89, 110, 119, 123, 131, 134, 139, 144, 157–158, 160, 177–178, 184–186, 188–189; and world transformation, 110, 122–123, 129 world-transforming: discourse, 110, 190; expectations, 66, 111, 129, 153, 176, 186, 189, 250n26; hopes, 121, 135, 191; mythologies, 128; theologies, 190 worshipping houses, 64–66, 188