asakiyume: (shaft of light)
I've started listening to Denis Bertet's 2021 Tikuna classes. OMG great French review because he says everything in French and then translates into Spanish, so if there's something I don't remember, I can catch it the second time around.

First class he shared a video of a man sitting in his house, introducing himself, and asked the students for things they noticed about the language on first hearing (although the class included both people who were familiar with the language and/or culture and absolute beginners), and also things they noticed in the situation.

One of the students mentioned about the microphone that the man is wearing, and Prof. Bertet says that it's a super great microphone, really good for situations like this, because it picks up just the speaker's voice (or mainly just that), whereas there's a lot of ambient noise--hens, dogs, children, birds, rain--which can interfere with hearing.

And I was thinking HOW MUCH I LOVE that about getting WhatsApp messages from my tutor, how it makes me smile, how it makes me feel that much closer. Someone drops a cup in the background and I can hear it bouncing on the floor. Chicks are peeping as they're fed. The rain is coming down. The birds are singing.

It is definitely valuable to be able to hear clearly what someone is saying, and I'm going to learn a lot from these recordings, I can tell already (not to mention other cultural stuff, like that daytime-use hammocks are called--in Spanish--chinchorro... looking online I find that the name comes from a type of hammock made by the Wayuu people), but if I had to choose only one way of learning, I'd choose learning with my tutor in a heartbeat. ... But I don't have to choose. Both are possible! And not just both but many. Multiplicity! So many different ways of doing things. In any given moment, we may have to choose one method or thing or another, but at some other moment we can choose something else. A little of this, a little of that. Or a lot of this for XX years... and then something different.
asakiyume: (shaft of light)
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)
grating huito

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.
asakiyume: (yaksa)
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 !

Yuca, fariña, 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 ^_^)

helping niece


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.

kaure

And some more ^_^

other birds


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.
asakiyume: (feathers on the line)
This is one thing I want to go back to the Amazon for: to join in in this (if there was a community that wouldn't mind that). The screenshots here are taken from a gorgeous 21-minute video made by the Department of Intangible Heritage of Peru's Ministry of Culture (the Tikuna/Ticuna/Magüta people's ancestral lands encompass portions of Peru, Colombia, and Brazil).

Here's a link to that video: Uí, preparación y vigencia de la fariña entre los ticuna

It starts by situating us in relation to the forest, to the trees and plants. An anthropologist says that for the Tikuna, "plants are the beings that possess all knowledge ... they are the most intelligent beings there are." I like it better when people are allowed to speak for themselves, and fortunately that's the case in the rest of the film. But I like this idea, and at least I could feel warmth and respect from this woman toward the Tikuna, and toward their respect for plants.

screenshots of the flooded forest and a solo tree against the clouds )

It starts in a field, digging up the cassava tubers. You can see what the cassava plant looks like on the right, and you can get a sense of how big those tubers are! Coincidentally, in the story by Nando I'm currently (very slowly) translating from Tetun, a husband and wife are digging up a kind of yam, and it's a lot of work, and looking at this video, I can see the how and why of that.



Some peeling happens right out in the field. I took this screenshot because I was admiring the little kid, who, though it's not clear in the picture, is wielding a knife of his own: helping!



And I liked this image of everyone coming back to the community with the tubers they'd dug up because of the boy playing the drum and cradling a tuber like a phone between his shoulder and head.



Half of the peeled cassava is left in water to "ripen," and the other half is immediately grated (and then left to ripen... both portions are going to be mixed together in the end, and it all ends up grated, so I'm not understanding this step, but I'm sure there's a good reason for it).

In the community where this video was made, they have a machine for grating the cassava:





(Some cassava is also pounded. Again, not clear on how this figures in to the process. I thought I was understanding the Spanish fairly well, but I could have missed something.)
strong arms )

The video also shows women making the sieves that will be used to strain the grated cassava, and also making the tipiti, a long, woven tube into which the grated cassava is packed.



Once the cassava's packed, the tipiti is hung from a tree and a heavy stick is inserted at the bottom of the tube. Then someone sits on it, and the tube contracts and the moisture is squeezed out of the mash!



The person speaking says if you don't want to sit on the stick, you can just use one that's very heavy that'll do the squeezing for you.

And beneath the cut you can see the mash coming out of the tipiti and being strained:

three photos )

Next comes toasting it. You start early in the morning and go through into the afternoon, or even, if you want, to the following day:



"If there's no fish, there's fariña. What's important is to never lose the cultivation of cassava because in it is the people's way of life,” says one man.



two photos of fariña in meals )

¡Gracias por acompañarme en esta história de fariña!
asakiyume: (turnip lantern)
I didn't set out to do anything other than catch up with housework today, but then on a morning run I stopped to pick up a walnut fruit, and then that got me thinking about the staining capabilities of walnut, and then that reminded me of the Magüta/Tikuna people, who use the huito fruit (Genipa americana) to dye skin black. For babies there's ceremony where they're washed with its juice for protection. The juice doesn't start out black, but it turns black in the air:

(Screenshots from a lovely 13-minute video from Peru on the ceremony: Buxe Arii Ẽxüῧnechiga – Tinta de Huito Tikuna)

Here, they're washing the baby with the juice. You can see it hasn't yet turned black


And in this screenshot, you can see how dark black it gets


A similar thing happens if you're light-skinned and you stain yourself with walnut juice:

My hand in the morning--you can see the color is kind of yellow-orange


My hand just now, in the night


The huito fruits look kind of like the walnut fruits too, though they're not related:

huito:


black walnut (from Flickr user BlueRidgeKitties):
Black Walnuts in the Husk

... hmmm, maybe they don't look *that* similar.

After the video on the protective ceremony for the baby, there was a video on processing cassava to make the coarse fariña that I brought back, and I watched that one with great joy and happiness and took lots of screenshots. But I'll save those for another day.
asakiyume: (shaft of light)
When we were in Letícia, I bought a bar of soap (and a beautiful green plastic bucket) to wash out socks and underwear and things. The soap was just a bar of Dove soap, but it's not soap I buy at home, so the scent was new to me, and so it became the scent of vacation, a scent of Letícia. We brought it home with us (along with the bucket), and every time I use it, the scent takes me back there.

Now, though, it's mooshed together with some fragments of old soap. Familiar everyday soap fragrance and faraway holiday soap fragrance, mixed together. It feels like the perfect symbol for how all the intense, striking, unique experiences of the trip smoosh together with the rest of my past experiences, and with what I'm thinking and feeling and doing right now.

So for example I brought home roasted, coarsely ground cassava (Manihot esculenta, aka manioc, aka, in Spanish, yuca, sometimes spelled yucca, but not to be confused with this plant, which is not cassava)...

roasted, coarse-ground cassava

because we had had some in a Tikuna/Magüta meal, and it was very tasty...

Tikuna meal

And now I cook it like couscous or with rice and serve it with stir fry or omelets. I haven't found a way to cook it that preserves its crunch and yet doesn't threaten to break our teeth (the meal we were served managed that trick).

(A little extra about the ground, roasted cassava: it's sold in plastic bags thicker than my arm. In this picture you can see piles of the plastic bags stacked on a wooden crate, and you can see raw cassava stacked like kindling by the blue striped bag. There are two sorts of cassava: sweet, which you can just cook and eat, and bitter, which needs lots of processing to get out the cyanide. All cassava has cyanide in it--sorry, I should say "cyanogenic glycosides"--but the sweet cassava has less and it disappears with cooking. The bitter needs more processing, and that's what they grow in the Amazon. You soak it and dry it and roast it and grind it. It can take days. I love that it's grown locally, processed locally, and sold and bought locally--except when someone like me buys a bag and carries it home.)

fruits, vegetables, cassava

(Here's a photo from my guides' website, showing it being roasted.)

I promised [personal profile] wayfaringwordhack some pictures of the giant water lilies. My husband-and-wife guide team told me they are bigger during the rainy season, but they were fine and big! They were originally called Victoria regia but apparently now are called Victoria amazonica:

Victoria amazonica water lily

Unfortunately there's nothing for scale, but this one, from my guides' website, shows their son supported by one (he seems like he's ready to be done with the experience at this point).

ETA: How much weight can a leaf hold? About 30 kg, if it's well distributed! And in comments I thought of other things I wanted to share (read here)
asakiyume: (shaft of light)
A lot of what we saw and learned in the Amazon is taking me a while to digest because it's filtered through Spanish: I scribbled things down that people told me, but now in slow time I have to check what I wrote, find out if I heard things correctly and understood them correctly.

I just discovered a wonderful thing. While we were in Puerto Nariño (the other major town, other than Leticia, in the Colombian Amazon)--a town, incidentally, with a large number of Tikuna (Magüta) residents, including our guide that day, Edgar--we heard some birds singing, birds that Edgar told us were called paucares. "They imitate the sounds of other birds. Like just now, they're imitating oropendola birds." He pointed to long, hanging nests up in a tree. "They make those nests, and when they're finished with them, people like to use them for decorations."

nests of paucar/Cacicus cela

(Pretty terrible photo; I must have been shooting into the sun)

"Because they're such clever imitators, indigenous people used to [or still do--I didn't catch the tense on this] feed their children the brains of the bird, so the children would grow up smart too, like the bird," he said.

I wanted to chase down what bird this is in English/Latin nomenclature, and lo and behold, it is the very bird that I picked for Káurë New Day to be named after in my story "New Day Dawning." I picked the bird because it was pretty and because I could find the Tikuna/Magüta name for it--and it turns out to be a very significant bird!

For example: we also learned that clans among the Tikuna/Magüta are divided among those with feathers and those without (traditionally, if you were in a clan with feathers, you could only marry someone from a clan without, and vice versa--this is not so much the case nowadays). I knew one of the feathered clans was the garza (Spanish word, not Magüta word), or heron, but it turns out paucar is another!

So Káurë New Day's name has all this extra resonance now--and I got to hear some of their namesake birds!

Another paucar story, popular in Peru: a little boy who loves spreading rumors and gossip about people is turned into a chatty bird--the first paucar. As a paucar, he continues spreading stories, but according to this version of the story, "Con el correr de los años, este pajarraco se ha convertido solo en anunciador de buenas noticias, de tal manera que cuando canta, la gente dice que algo bueno va a ocurrir"--over the years he takes to spreading only good news, so that people say that when he sings, something good will happen.

You can listen to another version of the story here (5-minute video in Spanish), and if you jump to 3:59, you can see káurë's familiar and pretty form. In this version too, he switches to spreading good news, so that seems to be the reputation of the bird.

This all makes me very happy!
asakiyume: (shaft of light)
I have a new story out: "New Day Dawning."

A novel cyanobacterium is threatening ocean fish stocks, and Winna and Tomás are at an international conference convened to address the problem. Also at the conference is Káurë New Day, a participant from the Solimões Sodality whose presence warrants an FAQ and causes some strife.

Káurë New Day is named after Cacicus cela, called káurë in the Magüta language, and photographed here by Flickr user Francisco Piedrahita.

Arrendajo Común, Yellow-rumped Cacique (Cacicus cela)

It's a pretty bird!

"Magüta" is an autonym for the people more commonly known to outsiders as the Tikuna or Ticuna. I am very excited to be--God willing--traveling to their ancestral lands in a few weeks, and I've been in contact with a Magüta tour guide who offers walks where you get to learn about plants and things. ... I may have overwhelmed him with a firehose of too much English and enthusiasm, but if I do get to meet up with him, I will be sure to write about it.

Here's that story link again ;-) "New Day Dawning"

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