An encounter with the Shawi people in the peruvian Amazon
My granddad Jorge Rojas Vasquez was born in 1922 in the town of Tarapoto in the Peruvian Amazon. In his early twenties (1940s), while most of the rest of the world was living the horrors of WW2, my granddad decided to leave town and become a montaraz (hunter). He would roam the hilly jungle around remote caseríos (riverside trading posts used by all sort of nomadic passerbys) looking for game to exchange for cooked meals, a bed, ammunition and anything else he pleased. Like a modern backpacker moving between hostels at free-will, he moved between caseríos and repeated the same ritual. The jungle was after all, still a wild bastion of the New World, reminiscent of the American wild west or Patagonia. “When I was a child, the journey to Lima (the capital of Peru, about 500km away as the bird flies) was done on foot and took about a month, weather-permitting”.
The easiest way of moving between caseríos was by river, hitching a ride on any peque-peque (motor-powered canoe) with enough room for a passanger. Once at his destination, he would set off into the jungle at sunrise and be back before dusk, normally carrying the corpse of a large pray on his back.
“I had to find a small quebradita (small valley, ravine or gully) and then follow it into the jungle. This made navigation simple and provided a cleared trail to access the rainforest with little use of a machete. Also, animals would often come down for a drink and so it was rare for me to not find anything. On the rare occasions in which I wouldn’t, I stayed in the monte (forest) waiting for pray through the night”.
On one occasion, possibly while following animal tracks, he got separated from his trail and got lost. Not long after, he encountered two men dressed in loincloths (taparrabos). “We couldn’t verbally speak to each other so we had to communicate in gestures. I aimed my shotgun high into the trees acting out a hunting scene and then pretended to eat the imaginary game. I was scared, all my life I had been told that these were the dangerous infidels. So it came as a surprise when instead of attacking me, they gestured that I follow them. I was lost, so I had very little choice”.
“It was dusk by the time we arrived to their community. To my surprise, I was welcomed and well-fed, which helped ease my fears. We ate meat with no salt, casava and exotic fruits that were unknown to me, even if I was raised in the jungle too. No one said anything explicitly, but I understood that I had to stay there for a while”.
My grandad has not been able to explain to me how they forced him to stay but told me he wanted to leave since he got there. “I wanted to go home to my world. I thought I should better wait and earn their trust before trying anything”.
Despite this, he certainly appreciated some of his time as an abductee. “They did not seem to have a single worry in the world, they just did whatever tasks they had to do without getting disgrunted. Sharing was the norm, and there were clearly very few rules. When the food was ready, everyone who was hungry ate. Also, no one prevented me from intimacy with the local women and viseversa, we all shared”.
They were also immensely practical and resourceful. At night, they would often raid the nearby caseríos and steal whatever tools they could find lying around: shovels, axes and even wire, to bring back to the community and give it some improvised use. They didn’t need guns because they had their own effective weapon in the Pucuna: a wooden blowgun that shoots poisnous darts, allowing them to silently hunt virtually any animal, anything from a deer to a lizard. Prepping the meat was skillfully done in an instant. They cooked it by fire and ate every edible bit, always accompanied with casava, fruit and some exotic roots. “I got used to eating like this to the point I stopped missing salt” (he loves salt). “Day-to-day, they drank a mild Masato, an alcoholic beverage made from fermented casava. For special occasions such as when a child was born, they would ferment it for longer to make a more potent brew and celebrate.”
“They made their ‘taparrabos’ (loincloths) using a the bark from the Ojé tree which they called Yanchama. They cut, dried and grinded the bark to turn it into a fiber. It wasn’t long until I also wore one. At the start I really enjoyed that the women did not wear anything over their breasts, then I got used to it”
As good as it might have seemed, my granddad was still yearning for home and was slowly plotting his escape. First, they got comfortable with him hunting by himself. He gradually prolonged these inefficient hunting trips (he would rarely shoot his gun to save ammunition) and turned them into surveying missions. When he felt they were accostumed enough to his long solo trips, he made a run for it. “I left at sunrise and walked down following the closest quebrada I had surveyed. The stream drained into another stream, and then into another, and into another. It felt like it would never end”.
As he kept descending, he suddenly heard a gunshot. He knew it was another fellow montaraz and so he shouted “OOOH!”. The same sound echoed back “OOOH!”, but this was from another voice. Then they came face-to-face.
“Who are you?”
“I have been lost for about a year- I was living with the ‘infidels’. I’m from Tarapoto”
“…very well. You must be hungry, let me share my food with you.”
My granddad cried when he bit into the salty meat and fried plantains he had not eaten for a year. He looked feral, with his long hair and loincloths. Soonafter, my granddad retired from being a drifter, went back to Tarapoto and became the local barber.
My aunty Ayley told me recently that when she was in her 20s, an indigenous-looking stranger walked into the family house in Tarapoto and asked for Don Jorge Rojas (my granddad)
“Are you Don Jorge Rojas?”
“Yes that’s me, what can I do for you”?
“Hi…well…I am happy to finally meet you. You are my father.”
“…how is that possible?….who’s your mum?”
After the stranger gave him a long explanation, my granddad concluded:
“Yes…that’s possible. So, what can I do for you son?”
“Nothing thanks…I just wanted to meet you. Have a good day”
The stranger left and never came back.
As it turns out, I probably have an entire batallion of cousins scattered around the jungle.
I have corroborated my granddad’s story with family members, a local anthropologist and with information from the peruvian Ministry of Culture. It turns out my granddad spent a year or so of his life living with the Shawi or Chayahuitas, an indigenous community still living in the Bajo Huallaga, probably near the town of Yurimaguas about 100km from Tarapoto.
“I have heard stories like this several times in the communities I work with” said anthropologist Adriana Verán Casanova. “It is possible that during the 1940s, the Shawi still lived in isolation”. Nowadays most of these communities have been asimilated into modern peruvian society.
According to the ministry’s database, historical evidence indicates that the Shawi have been contacted several times prior to my granddad. First it was the Spanish explorer Alonso de Mercadillo and Diego Nuñez in 1538–39 who crossed their territory. A century later, Jesuit missionaries established Shawi missions where many of them died of disease. Finally, during the Amazon Rubber Boom (1879–1912), many were forced or persuaded to relocate and work in the rubber plantations. It comes therefore as a surprise to me that they were so welcoming to my granddad despite the bad rep foreigners must have had given the recent history.
There were probably many more unaccounted foreign ‘visits’ to the Shawi prior to my granddad’s encounter, which suggests to me that they had developed immunity to western diseases and used to foreigners by the time they abducted my granddad.
My mum speculates that perhaps they opportunistically abducted him in order to ‘mix’ the gene pool a bit. With shrinking territory and population, the Shawi could have started to have problems with incestuous relationships. Having a lost mestizo impregnate several tribeswomen was an easy fix to this problem.
Eventhough the Shawi were by no means an uncontacted when they abducted my granddad, they still preserved a lot of their original traditions such as their dress and language. Nowadays, apart from the numerous contacted but isolated communities, there are still an estimated 15 uncontacted tribes in the Peruvian Amazon alone. Even if protected areas and laws have been passed to preserve them, illegal mining, logging, oil exploration and colonisation are threatening their right to be left alone (which a lot of them are quite explcit about).
N.B: Story as narrated by my grandfather in January 2019 at 96 years old, with memory gaps filled-in using my mother’s, uncle’s and auntie’s recollections of the story. The dialogue was translated into Spanish by myself, and sometimes merged to give the article fluency.
