Ignacio Valencia: the last man from a world that no longer exists
In this obituary, antropologist Stephen Hugh-Jones reports his friendship with an important kumu of the Makuna indigenous people, who was the last exponent of his generation
By Stephen Hugh-Jones
Ignacio Valencia, who died on 01/06, was a much respected Makuna elder and one of the most important kumus, the shaman-intellectuals of the Rio Pirá-Paraná region that straddles the equator just inside Colombia’s frontier with Brazil. Ignacio was legendary amongst Pirá people as a man of great knowledge, several wives and many descendants, and last surviving representative of what Pirá-Paraná peoples call masa goro or ‘true people’, a generation that still dressed in the style of their ancestors, hunted with blow-guns and poisoned darts, and lived together in malocas, the imposing painted long-houses that encapsulate their cosmology. He was also a well-known figure in Bogotá and beyond, especially amongst those involved in defending the rights of Colombia’s Amazonian peoples and in helping them to ensure the continued survival of their traditional cultures and forest environment.
Ignacio’s life spanned the period during which the Makuna and neighbouring groups of the isolated Pirá region made the transition from shunning virtually all contact with outsiders to the contemporary situation in which they manage to maintain important elements of their traditional way of life yet combine this with computers and the internet, managing their own affairs through a political organization with offices and legal representative in the departmental capital, running their own education program, and managing their traditional territory as a reservation, looking after the forest and rivers and protecting them from illegal mining and other threats. With his wise ways and gentle sense of humour, his trenchant opinions and diplomatic skills, and his early realisation that the way ahead lay in an alliance with people well-disposed towards indigenous peoples in the world at large, Ignacio played a key role in this successful transition.
Ignacio was born sometime in the 1940’s, a period when the wartime need for rubber brought his people into sporadic contact with Colombian rubber gatherers. My wife Christine and I first met him in 1968 when we arrived unannounced during a festival celebrating an abundance of edible caterpillars. Ignacio was then a young man in his 20s, dressed in feather dance ornaments and already embarking on a career as a shaman and specialist dancer under the guidance of his father Gühe Bükü, ‘Old Tree-Resin’, himself a renowned kumu and ritual expert. We were two callow young anthropologists just beginning a two-year stay to learn the language and gather information for our doctoral theses. Ignacio’s wife had just given birth; he promptly named his new-born son ‘Esteban (Stephen)’ after me, the start of a friendship that was to last throughout our adult lives.
Ten years later we met Ignacio again, this time at a big ritual in our Barasana hosts’ maloca where Ignacio had come to exchange bamboo rhythm tubes for a set of feather crowns. By then, Catholic and Evangelical Protestant missionaries were firmly established in the region and the rubber gatherers had switched to converting the Indians’ coca leaves into cocaine. Whilst recognising the importance the literacy and new knowledge offered by the missionaries, Ignacio was concerned about the threat their version of schooling posed to his people’s own knowledge and way of life. He was even more forthright about outsiders converting sacred coca into cash and about the drug-like effects of the flood of consumer goods the cocaineros brought with them.
The cocaine boom was followed by a gold rush that led to the establishment of an airstrip and town in a sacred site close to Makuna territory. Ignacio condemned the extraction of vital ‘yellow blood’ from the living earth and foresaw what would happen if the Pirá peoples allowed mining within their newly-created resguardo. To administer their resguardo and protect their interests, the different ethnic groups of the Pirá needed to unite together in a single organization and achieve political representation. In alliance with the Fundación Gaia-Amazonas, Ignacio played a leading role in the creation of ACAIPI, the Asociación de Capitanes y Autoridades Tradicionales Indígenas del río Pirá Paraná. His son José-Esteban was later elected as a Deputado to the Vaupés Departmental Assembly and today his nephew Fabio acts as ACAIPI’s legal representative in the Department Capital Mitú.
If the resguardo and ACAIPI gave the people of the Pirá land rights and a relative political autonomy, Colombia’s new 1991 constitution allowed them to substitute mission schools for their own culturally-appropriate education system with Ignacio and other shaman-elders guiding and training younger local literate indigenous teachers to ensure that traditional knowledge was passed down to future generations alongside the new information and skills they will need to defend themselves in the modern world. In 2011, the unique quality of the Pirá peoples’ culture and their success in keeping it alive was given international recognition when the Traditional Knowledge Jaguar Shamans of Yuruparí was added to UNESCO’s Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage.
One of our last meetings with Ignacio was in 2016 when we accompanied Brian Moser on a visit to different Pirá communities to return copies of the four documentary films, thousands of photographs and hours of sound recordings he had made in the area during his film-making career. In Titus-Fossgard Moser’s film Ignacio’s Legacy, a record of his father’s journey and of the Indian’s largely successful efforts to blend the old with the new, a delighted but wistful Ignacio can be seen watching Moser’s earliest 1960 film that portrays the traditional world in which Ignacio grew up. He was the last living representative of that world. The likes of him will never be seen again.
