Asakiyume mita

Different palms for different purposes: the caraná palms are for the roofs of the malocas (communal houses). Look how beautiful the weaving is for the roofs:


Photo by Andrés Felipe Velasco, from his page "Tejido Palma de Caraná" on his website Buscando La Raiz

Velasco writes that there are close to 25 types of weaving, representing worms, deer, and crabs, among others.

This 4-minute video shows collecting the leaves of caraná and then weaving them for the roof. So beautiful. The man credited at the 2.06 mark, talking about the figures in the ribs of the roof, is among other things a guide for the Ethnographic Museum in Leticia--we went there; it's a small building but FULL of information.

The weaver is Geiser Peña Ipuchiwa, from Comunidad Bora, at Kilometre 18 in Leticia. (We only found out about this system of identifying where places are located during our visit--by how far along a road or along the river they are.)



And then there's the chambira palm, from which you get the fibers used for making hammocks, bags, fishing lines, and other things like that. When we visited a "tierra de conocimientos" in Puerto Nariño, we made bracelets out of chambira twine--but if/when I go again, I would love to do the background stuff: cutting the palm branches, stripping the leaves, extracting the fibers, and making the twine.

This 7-minute video shows the dying process, as well. The rhizomes that the woman is harvesting from 1.17 is el guisador, Curcuma longa--turmeric! (Not native to the area but well established there.) She also mentions achiote, which makes a red color, el chokanari, Picramnia sellowii, which makes a purple or red color, el buré (Goeppertia loeseneri), which makes a blue-green color, kudi (Fridericia chica), which makes a brown color, and huitillo (Renealmia alpinia), which can make a deep blue or black.





(I've been using the site color.amazonia.com to get the botanical names of these plants--they have a great page showing all the different pigments produced.)

... This post is the result of a long rabbit-hole journey. I was reading more of Aventura en el Amazons, and the family were talking about building a house in the style of a maloca, and they mentioned the different types of tree/plants to be used for the different parts, and when I went to look those up to find out what they were--well, I ended up here.

Some more quotes from Aventura en el Amazonas:

En verano llueve todos los días, en invierno llueve todo el día (In summer it rains every day, in winter it rains all day long)

... Or, why I need to go back at the peak of the rainy season and see if I still love it.

And this, from a section where the parents are talking to the children about the children's names (and also about their own names):

Tu nombre es como una cancíon que no acaba, el aqua limpia que corre desde la montaña sembrando vida (Your name is like a song that never ends, pure water that flows from the mountain, sowing life)

What a lovely thing to say to a kid. That's what they say about the daughter Mayam's name. The son, Nashi, is named after a traveler from Somalia, who ended up loving the mother's people so much that he settled with them and married her grandmother.

Por ello te escogí su nombre, Nashi, para recordar a ese hombre venido de muy lejos (Thus I chose for you his name, Nashi, to remember that man who came from far away)

The father's name, Antonio, seems very ordinary, but the father says:

Me lo escogió mi padre en recuerdo de un escritor francés que era aviador y escribió muchos libros hermosos, llenos de poesía de la vida (My father chose it for me in memory of a French writer who was an aviator and wrote many beautiful books, full of the poetry of life)

And so we know the father was named after Antoine de Saint Exupéry, which I found somehow really touching.