Asakiyume mita

Holy moly, a person from the Tukano Amazonian people just friended me on Bluesky, and she's learning Tikuna too! I was able to say to her that I thought Tikuna was tagarü mecuraum (a beautiful language). I apologized for my poor orthography (Tikuna is rendered into letters differently in Peru, Colombia, and Brazil, but what I write is not even correct by the Colombian orthography because my teacher is pretty random about spelling). This woman then kindly gave me the correct (for Brazil) orthography, plus a grammar correction: Tága rü nã mecüraū (I left out the ña... not entirely sure what it does/means, but learning is a slow and wondrous thing).

Truly, the internet remains a wondrous place for connecting with people! And now I know the Tukano word for cassava: kií. (Tikuna is a language isolate, so the chances of my Tikuna helping me know Tukano are slight, except for common loan words they both might have from, e.g., Tupi.)

I have other things to post about but I'm going to put the different flavors on different plates (i.e., save it for another post)

UNESCO has conferred the status of intangible cultural heritage on casabe, flatbread made from cassava. It was nominated by several countries of the Caribbean including Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, and Honduras ... but I remember fondly from Leticia, Colombia. (link.... but I just heard the story on NPR, so later this evening you can go there, too.)

The Ticuna word for casabe is dowü.

Here are some photos of my tutor's mom kindly letting me help with making one. You can make it with grated cassava, which is what I do at home, or with cassava starch (tapioca!), which is what my tutor's family does (and I think it's widespread practice).

... The photos are cropped to preserve privacy, but the woman in pink is my tutor's mom. I'm in orange ;-)

First we strained the starch. The tool used for this is called a cernidor in Spanish, cuechinü in Ticuna.



Then we pressed it onto a hot pan (look at the yummy fish in the foreground!)



And here it is, done!

I wrote a microfiction about Icarus the other day:

Sent out to gather feathers for his father's project, Icarus only picked up ones that birds had shed--he never harmed a single bird. And he learned the birds the feathers came from: osprey, gull, raven, jay, starling.

Later, when he flew too close to the sun and the wax melted, when the feathers were coming out one by one, when he was falling, the birds remembered his careful ways and came to rescue him, in flocks and bands and murmurations.

I also tried a pawpaw the other day, following fast on the heels of sovay. It was delicious! It reminded me a little of an Amazonian fruit I had, caímo-the same texture, the same big seeds. But the pawpaw's flavor and scent was all its own. Once upon a time I wanted to grow a pawpaw, but gave up the idea because my yard is small and already has as many trees as I wanted in it. But now I'm rethinking that. I've saved the seeds. The internet tells me they need to chill out in the fridge for 80–120 days, so I have washed them, wrapped them in a wet paper towel, placed them in a plastic baggie, and put them in the fridge. The last time I tried something like this was in 2006, when I tried growing Khazak apples. I ended up with two viable plants that made it past the one-year mark, but then something ate them. Ah, life.

Let's see how I go with pawpaws.

On the first day we spent together, my friend took me down to the edge of Yahuarcaca. That name goes with a group of lakes connected to the Amazon, los lagos Yahuarcaca, but she calls it/them río--Río Yahuarcaca. Like the main river, it inhales and exhales. The waters are at their highest in April or so, and then begin to recede. In June (when I was there this time) they're not at their lowest, but they've receded a good bit. So as you walk beside the water, you're walking in places where you'd be swimming at other times of year. You'd be waaaay under water in April, but in June you're on (more or less) solid ground, breathing air. The same trees that feed the terrestrial creatures drop fruit into the water to feed the water creatures at other times of year. They're watching over and providing for everyone.

"When the forest is flooded, this is a nursery for fish," my friend told me.



Wouldn't you feel safe there? A good place to grow big. It was the fishes' turn to be in this space a few months ago, but at that moment it was our turn. We're sharing the space, just time-slipped. Water creatures were swimming by and over me--time-slipped.

Trees must grow very wise indeed, presiding over two worlds like this. Think of the tales they can tell of all the creatures they watch over.

Genipa americana, known as huito in Spanish, é in Tikuna, is a very wise and generous tree. Francy told me it's a great-great-great grandparent of the Ticuna people.** So when she and her brother took me to meet a huito tree, I felt really lucky to meet it.

Its fruit is edible when ripe, and when unripe, it makes a blue-black protective dye (as described in this entry). In the blink of an eye, my friend's brother was up in the tree. He tossed down a couple of unripe fruits so we could grate them and make some dye back at their house.



**Online I found the story of this written out: Yoi and Ipi, two brothers, came to Earth when it was completely dark: they cut down the giant ceiba that was obscuring the sun, and all manner of plants and animals then were able to flourish. Yoi, the older brother, gave Ipi, the younger brother, the task of growing huito and then grating the fruits. Some of the gratings fell into the water and became fish, which later Yoi caught. The fish he caught became the Tikuna people.

I love hand-clapping games; they're such a wonderful example of truly folk transmission through the generations.

While I was visiting my friends in Leticia, two of the kids were doing one. The rhyme went

Choco, choco
la, la,
choco, choco
te, te,
choco-la
choco-te
chocolate!

You clapped sometimes with the palms of your hands and sometimes with the backs of your hands--it was great!



When I got back to Medellín, at one point Wakanomori and I passed a line of people waiting for pancakes at a pop-up pancake event. In the line was a girl who was teaching this rhyme to her dad.

Do you have any hand-clapping games you remember doing, or seeing others do, when you were younger?

My tutor Francy was out of touch for a while because she and her parents were visiting her husband's family upriver in Peru. She got back yesterday and sent me so many lovely photos and videos, including these. What are the blotches of color in the photo? They look like a weird sun artifact, or something added in in post production, but they're not: they're butterflies, green, yellow, and blue.



Here's a six-second video she took.



Magic.

Apparently I never shared these pictures here! But what better day than Valentine's Day, when people give chocolate to one another.

As you no doubt know, a lot of chocolate is produced using cacao that's obtained and grown in ways that are exploitative and bad for the environment. What I saw, though, was small family production--probably just for local consumption.

Like coffee, cacao *can* be a very beneficial crop to cultivate because it can grow in the shade of larger trees. It can be a forest-preserving crop. (Of course that's not what Big Chocolate encourages.)

Here is a small cacao tree with some cacao pods on it.



If you cut open one of those pods, this is what you see. The milky fruit is **delicious** (and tastes nothing like chocolate. It's full of flavor and reminds me slightly of a mangosteen.) What makes us chocolate are the pips--the beans--in the center of the fruits. Each pod has a bunch of these, as you can tell from how the fruit is packed in there.




Here are pips, drying in the sun. Apparently the recommended process is to ferment the beans and fruit together and then to dry them. So these have probably been fermented. (Obviously if you do that, you don't get to enjoy the fruit!) Some farmers, though, just dry the pips without fermenting them first. According to the article I read, that results in the pips being "overly bitter and astringent." But if you're growing just for your own purposes, you can do as you please. So maybe these pips haven't been fermented.



I had no chocolate when I was there, but my tutor often has chocolate con pan for her breakfast, by which she means hot chocolate: cocoa powder added to boiling water, with then as much milk powder and sugar added as you like. I've tried preparing it that way: it's nice!

It was a peak linguistic delight to listen to a presentation, given in Portuguese by a charismatic Colombian researcher named Mayra Ricardo Zuluaga, on a film she and a Tikuna scholar (meaning, in this case, a scholar who is Tikuna) named Sandra Fernández Sebastián had made about huito (in Tikuna, é), the fruit that's so important in Tikuna culture. It makes a deep, blue-black dye, and painting this on you confers protection and blessings. It's used on babies for this purpose, and in coming-of-age ceremonies and at other important events. (And/but it can be given more casually, too: I got to grate huito, squeeze the pulp, and dye my hands with it.) The film was in Spanish, with some phrases in Tikuna.

huito/é (screenshot from the film)


grated huito/é (my own photo)


I really loved both the film (which you can see here) and Mayra's talk (which you can see here). Mayra describes going to meet Sandra with all the focus of someone educated in the European-heritage way, and Sandra got her to slow. down. The two spent time together, got to know each other, and Mayra got to learn in a different way. "Reading for the Magütá (autonym for Tikuna) doesn't begin with books, it begins with the body," she said, and "a child reads the threads of the forest."

reading the threads of the forest (screenshot from the film)


And Sandra says about maintaining the Magütá/Tikuna language, "If one doesn't talk the language, well, one loses the land,** because our mother tongue is the way we communicate with those spirits who don't speak Spanish."

Sandra harvesting huito/é (screenshot from the film)


I found a PDF made in conjunction with the film which contained contact information, so I sent a thank-you email to the two creators, and Mayra wrote back! And she linked me to more language-learning materials, records from an online class offered a couple of years ago by a French researcher. Who of course conducts the class in French! I had laugh (and thank my lucky stars I learned French in high school). A bouquet of languages to learn another language.

The butterfly is a blue morpho--if it opened up its wings, you would see the brilliant blue. And the pink wall is one wall of the Museo Etnográfico in Leticia. (screenshot from the film)


...In the European-heritage way of learning things. While meanwhile, with my friend and tutor in Leticia, we go slow, and I learn through friendly conversation. We're a continent apart, so we're not walking together, but we ask each other, "What are you doing right now?" "Numa, tacu tai cu u?" (there should be bunches of diacritics on those vowels, but my teacher is pretty haphazard about them, and I'm not sure with my ears about what they represent, so... ) or "What are you cooking?" "Tacu tai cui feim?" And then we answer each other, and we get a big laugh if we're cooking the same thing, which has happened.

**she says "territorio," but she's meaning everything that goes with territory/land: connection, sense of self, tradition, way of living.

I think I maybe shared earlier that the Tikuna see a linking between certain creatures of the land and certain creatures of the water: for example, river dolphins are linked with humans--every time a human dies, a dolphin is born, and every time a dolphin dies, a human is born. Thinking of the world population of humans versus the world population of river dolphins, the connection must be between only limited human populations.... maybe just Tikuna.

And they see a similar connection between manatees and tapirs. The symbol for Fundacíon Natütama, a Tikuna nonprofit, shows this with a manatee-tapir creature.

Another nonprofit active in the Colombian Amazon, Fundacíon Omacha, shared another story about manatees that they say is Tikuna--though when I ran it by my tutor, she'd never heard it, so... not sure. But I like the story, so here it is:

It's said that manatees start out as worms on a particular tree. They wrap themselves in leaves, making nests like the nests of the arrendajo bird (which, may I just say, is káurë in Tikuna, the name of the colonial person in "New Day Dawning"). After three months, the worms have the shape of manatees, but it takes a flash of lightning to cause them to fall from the tree into the water. The story concludes by saying that if you stop seeing those trees on land, you'll stop seeing the manatees in the water.

What happens on land affects what happens in the water, and what happens in the water affects what happens on land. Good to remember.

Here are Fundación Omacha's images for this story (plus the text in Spanish). (Originally posted on Twitter on September 12--link to that post here.)

No doubt you've heard the story of the four children--oldest only 13, youngest only 11 months at the start of the ordeal--who survived in the Amazon rain forest for 40 days after the small plane they were in crashed. The oldest, a girl named Lesly, was able to take care of her younger siblings, including the baby, until rescuers eventually found them.

The children were indigenous, and family members say that they were familiar with the forest, and Lesly had knowledge of which fruits and roots were edible and which were not. And apparently they started out with a supply of cassava flour. Colombian TV had images of a shelter Lesley built for the others to keep the rain off.

When I messaged my guides R & L about the story, they said the kurupira, the spirit of the forest who can either lead people astray or save them, must have been watching over them.

Here is a statue of the kurupira from Reserva Flor de Loto. She's got one foot facing forward and one backward (some representations of her have both feet facing backward), which confuses trackers. She can change her appearance to look like someone you know, but her feet are always the giveaway.



My guides also talked about the rescue dog, Wilson, whose tracks led rescuers to the kids--they talked about him because Wilson vanished. Like a trade: Wilson agreed to stay in the forest, and so the forest released the children.

... which is something that feels more comfortable to think about as a story than in reality. In reality, when a real flesh-and-blood dog is involved, you want him to come back as well. Here's a picture of Wilson that Lesly drew (from the paper El Tiempo)



And here is some art from CNN Español



There was a team of indigenous rescuers with the military rescuers, and when they found the children, they sang a song to welcome them back to the human world. The song was to encourage them to leave behind the heat of the forest and take up the heat of humanity.

Quite a story.