Asakiyume mita

Earlier this week, I not only got to see this remarkable film, I was able to participate in a video-link Q&A with the director, Cero Guerra.



At the start of the film an indigenous man dressed in traditional garb (which is to say, just with necklace, arm bands, and a loin cloth) watches as a canoe approaches. The year is 1909. The canoe holds a desperately ill German ethnographer and is paddled by his indigenous (but more assimilated) assistant. "Go away!" the man on the shore shouts, but the assistant, Manduca, addresses him by name: "Are you Karamakate, the world mover?" Manduca says that no shaman has been able to heal his friend Theodore Koch-Grünberg: they all say that only Karamakate will be able to. "I'm not like you," Karamakate replies. "I don't help whites." But eventually he does agree to help.



In 1940, this same Karamakate, now an old man, is approached by a different Westerner, the botanist Evan Schultes (whom we find out is from Boston--he's a fictionalization of Richard Evans Schultes, who, Wikipedia says, "is considered the father of ethnobotany"). Evan is searching for the rare flower that Karamakate had sought out to heal Theo.



These two timelines and stories ripple in and out of each other like the water of the river.



The harrowing effect of colonialism on indigenous people is the large topic, but the near-at-hand one is the attempts of the main characters to understand one another.

In the Q&A, Guerra said he shot the film in black and white to capture the feeling of the actual Theodore Koch-Grünberg's sketches and photographs and also to escape the easy touristic appeal that comes with color filming. Also, he said, when you're filming in black and white, there's not the same distinction between people and forest--everything shades into each other... which goes with the world view there.

Many languages get spoken in the film, both colonial ones and indigenous ones, and among the indigenous ones spoken was... Tikuna! The character Manduca speaks in Tikuna,** and a couple of times I could understand whole sentences he said (... only a couple of times--but I could also catch the odd word here and there). I was so pleased! And I was mind blown when I was talking about the film with my tutor and she said that the actor is her uncle! He's her mother's brother.

( some quotes from the film )

The movie is available to see for pay through Youtube and Apple, and is free (but with ads) on Tubi. I highly, highly recommend it.

**I've seen him before: he played the shaman in Frontera Verde.

Only these cats are doing kitten things in the heart of the Amazon. The video was sent to me by my friend and tutor--she said I could share it. The Siamese cat is the mother, Mia. The white kitten is her adoptee, named Squiper. The black one is Luna, and the tabby is Anastasia. Apologies for the blurriness; for some reason it got formatted large-style rather than phone-style.

Happy mid-Autumn festival, one day late! Please enjoy this Google doodle that was only shown to people in East Asia. In the United States Google was busy urging us to register to vote.

It was a lovely harvest moon--with a bite taken out of it in these parts, due to a partial lunar eclipse. Like a ghostly version of the moon cakes made in its honor.

Some time ago I learned how to ask questions using "Why" in Tikuna. I gave some sample questions (Why is the cat happy? Why are you tired?) and my tutor went to town, giving me *lots* of why questions. There was a theme...

Why don't you listen?
Why don't you listen to your grandparents when they want to give you advice?
Why don't you pay attention to your parents?
Why did you go without telling me?
Why don't you want to?
Why don't you want to eat?

There were others that didn't fit the theme, but those were so salient! I had a feeling these were things my tutor had heard a lot. If I memorize those, I will know how to nag a teenager in Tikuna ;-)

Recently my college-aged nephew was at my house, helping me smash hickory nuts. We smashed enough to get a cup of nutmeats, and then we made a hickory nut shortbread, yum. I sent a picture of my nephew to my tutor, who remarked that he was cute. I said he was two years younger than she is, just twenty years old. "Veinte añitos!" she said, "Waooo!" --I like that Spanish can do that: turn years (años) into cute little years (añitos). Twenty cute little years. Twenty adorable years. Twenty yearlets.

I spent two days together with my friend and Tikuna tutor this past June. I'm going to post about those days in reverse order.

On the second day, we rented bikes and rode past the airport (the airport in Leticia is adorably small and you can walk from it into town if you want) to the Leticia campus of the National University of Colombia. Wakanomori and I had tried to do that when we were there together two years ago, but the former president of the country had been speaking there and no one was allowed to even bike along the road to campus, let alone visit.

There's a fence around campus, and a gate.

"We can't go in, not without having made an appointment," my friend said. "But we can look at it from out here."

This surprised me, because Wakanomori and I certainly had planned to go on in, and we hadn't seen any indication that we needed to make an appointment ahead of time. But I figured she would know.

"Have you ever been on campus?" I asked.

"Once," she said, "for a school trip. You know, students come from all over Colombia to learn about Amazonas here, to learn about the ecosystem and plants and animals, and to learn about indigenous culture. But people here can hardly ever get accepted."

"That's terrible," I said.

"Yeah."

We admired the grounds through the fence.

A young man was walking by, and seeing us looking, he said, "Do you want to go in? You can, you know."

"Are you sure?" my friend asked.

"Of course--just speak to that man over there."

And the man in question said yes, we could look around campus, walk on the trails, and see the exhibits. "Just don't go into any classes in session," he said.

My assumptions versus my friend's. A brutal reminder of the difference growing up thinking that any and everything is open to you, that you can ask and you'll receive, and growing up thinking that everything is off limits, that nothing (at least in certain spheres) is for you.

But in the end we did get to go in, and it was a delight. There was a display on fishing:

The drawing shows people fishing. In the background is a maloca, a traditional communal house.


How a fishing pole is made


My friend in front of a canoe--the water-ripple-like forms supporting the canoe are actually fish shaped! Water and fish are one.


Then we walked along the trails, and we saw an agouti! (The link below is to a 16-second video that keeps looping, so if you don't spot him right away, you'll have an infinite number of chances, heh.) We saw him trotting through the underbrush, we saw him playing in the water, and one time, after we thought he'd gone away, he crossed the path in front of us!

Agouti!

My friend pointed out his footprints.



It's wonderful to see wildlife so at home on campus. Now if only **people** could be equally at home there.

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.

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.

My Tikuna teacher was explaining to me about the different words for big, and it was so poetic. She said:

There are three words for big:

tauchiii
for slippers and shoes
sandals, bags, caps, and t-shirts

taama
for hugs, kisses, smiles, and greetings, my friend

and tapuneechii

friend, this word is used

for very

big

trees

(my translation of her texts, with minimal liberties taken)

My friend Francy is looking for work, and I am eager to learn Tikuna without taking advantage of her, so I proposed to pay for a month or so of lessons (I don't want to saddle her with a long-term obligation and don't know how long I can afford to do this) as a source of income while she looks.

I should have known from how graciously and easily she taught me words when I was visiting that she'd be an excellent teacher, but I've been truly blown away. She's made me two diagrams of the forest field site where I got to join in the fariña roasting, labeling everything in both Spanish and Tikuna, and she sent me a video where--as the rain beats down on the roof overhead--she goes over how to pronounce each word, slowly and clearly.

Here's a portion of the diagram: you can see the yuca plant with the big tubers, the fariña being sieved through the cernador (in Tikuna, cuechinü), and that figure is me !



I also should have known she'd be an excellent teacher because she's taken one of her nieces in hand, helping her with school work. (This is one of the kids who was so eager to show me her notebooks ^_^)



There are NOT a lot of resources in Tikuna. When I visited the community of Mocagua (a community with three indigenous peoples living together, Tikuna, Cocama, and Yagua), I got to see some textbooks that the kids in the community used, but they were few and consequently very precious: they had been created through the work of a foundation, Codeba, itself the creation of one remarkable Cocama woman, Emperatriz Cahuache. When she passed away, no one kept the foundation going, so there haven't been any more textbooks made.

The books share Tikuna traditions, and also provide general instruction in both Spanish and Tikuna. Here, an explanation of the water cycle:

( The water cycle: explanation in two languages )

I asked if there was a Spanish-Tikuna dictionary, and they showed me a children's picture dictionary. Behold a káurë bird, *just like in my story*. It's so vindicating when research doesn't lie to you.



And some more ^_^



I don't know how for-real for-real I can learn Tikuna. But I am really loving trying. It's a language for speaking about a life so totally different from my own! (And the sounds are more-different from English than the sounds of any other language I've ever learned.)

In the Peace Corps manual for learning Tetun, there's a very good piece of advice: Don't ask people, "How do you say XX in Tetun?" Don't do this, because if you ask like that, they will offer you a word-for-word version of how to say that... even if culturally speaking, such a thing is never said. (A big example relates to condolences: in Tetun you never say "I'm so sorry for your loss"--it sounds as if you're saying you're taking some kind of responsibility for it.) Instead, ask, "In XX situation, what do people usually say?" Then you'll learn something culturally appropriate.

I am thinking that's going to be what I need to ask ALL THE TIME for however we do lessons together.