OP October 26, 2015
Yesterday I learned the oldest member of the Secoya tribe, Matilde Payaguaje, passed away. Her precise age was unknown, but she was believed to have been over one hundred years old. I wonder what life was like one hundred years ago at coordinates 0°58′26″S 75°11′49″W, in the far reaches of the Amazon rainforest.
The dwindling Secoya (or Siekopai) population of approximately 650 live in small multi-family plots of land along Rio Aguarico, in the Sucumbíos region of the Ecuadorian Amazon. The Secoya are classified as members of the Tucanoan ethno-linguistic group, along with the Sinoa, Coreguaje, and Macaguaje of Colombia, and the Maijuna and Tetete of Peru — all tribes who inhabit the area between the Napo and Putumayo Rivers. Like many communities indigenous to this region, demands from the paradigm of Western economic growth for commodities such as rubber, timber, ‘preciosities’ — and most recently palm oil and petroleum — has had woeful effects on nearly every aspect of their livelihood. From blunt force ethnocide and slavery to disease and forced acculturation, a devastating legacy of Occidential presence in the Amazon has effectively destroyed what was once a robust population, culture, and identity, and jungle.
I always thought calendars looked dissonant and displaced, nailed into the wooden planks of the stilted houses, hidden beneath tree canopies whose leaves often outsized the people living beneath them. Calendars, I thought, didn’t belong there. Time was a concept enforced by agenda makers and job takers from Northern lands, where I am from. Time was an imposter. Time seemed a tacky and irrelevant social structure, awkwardly inserted in an environment so dense with life and death.
Some people donned old, broken-faced watches on their wrists - yet I felt other notions of time-keeping prevailed amongst the Secoya. Eventually I learned rather than the linear, 60 minute, 24 hour, 12 month, 365 day to a year calendar, there are three seasons, perceived cyclically, in the traditional Secoya cosmovision. They are called Ometëkawe, Okotekawe, and Kakotekawe. The rest of the timekeeping is simply up to the sun.
+ Ometëkawe can be recognized when turtles bury their eggs in the shores of the rivers. It is also when the Orion’s belt is in the center of the sky or East, which indicates the best conditions to plant paihuea (corn), a’so (yucca), ñajo (tubers), and u’kuisi — a pearly seeded cardamom-like plant.
+ Okotekawe is the season that follows Ometëkawe, characterized by heavy rain. It is monkey hunting season.
+ Kakotekawe is the ‘season of the cicadas,’ which coincides with what we call August, September, and October. The rainfall diminishes, once again the rivers become shallow — yielding favorable conditions for fishing. It is an auspicious time for inter-planetary communion with the celestial spirits, nañe siekopaï, mediated by the ritualized consumption of yagé.
I imagine Matilde also saw time as an anomaly. Her mere presence was a portal into the past — her life, a testimony to the unprecedented speed of global change.
In her one hundred years, Matilde saw the beginning and the end of many things. She saw the construction of asphalt roads swerving through her emerald green jungle like strange dark veins. Upon these roads traveled loud sixteen-wheeled creatures, with big silver barrels carrying black sludge that white cultures run on. Fossil fuels — a technological feat of time travel — digging into the geological archives of planet earth to feed a people with a different appetite for life. And along these roads, pipes carry this sludge, stretching into distant horizons. Electricity, packaged food, motorcycles. Ecuadorian soap operas, chewing gum, key chains (but no doors in the village yet), guns.
And in her hand-woven hammock, when she was young, during interminable yagé nights, she communed the ‘rainbow people,’ only willing themselves visible in deep hypnogogic trances, mediated by the power and grace of yagé — an Amazonian admixture of the highest alchemical mastery.
And a year before the passed away, in that same hammock, she sang to me songs she learned from Evangelical missionaries.
Jesus, chickens, blonde white-skinned bug-bitten New Yorkers like me, the Gregorian calendar, dollar bills. She was a traditional healer turned Evangelist, friend, mother, singer and artist. And amongst these many identities emerged one that, to me, is nothing short of extraordinary. Matilde was a trusted keeper of her people’s stories.
In her youth, Matilde began to draw small, colorful images resembling sigils. In her austerely furnished house, two beaten-up blue suitcases hid beneath her bed. In these suitcases were piles of paper with these drawings — hundreds of drawings. When I would come to her house, she’d carefully unzip the suitcases and with a shaking and crooked finger, deciphering the images one-by-one, explaining stories of her cultural memory. War strategies. Fatalities involving monkeys dropping coconuts on people’s heads. A tender, heavy release of breath and click of the tongue; sometimes she would blink hard and skip to the next. A butterfly. Beneath Matilde’s bed was a treasure chest of Secoya cosmograms.
With the loss of Matilde, the heart of humanity also lost the memories of an extraordinary one hundred years on earth. To the best of my knowledge, someone worked to archive Matilde’s depiction of her world. And yet, my heart grows heavy knowing all that is left of her people’s environmental knowledge, inside jokes, love stories, and deities will be left to sit still and dark, folded and forgotten between the binding of a book.
I do not mourn the Secoya. In the town of San Pablo de Catetsiaya where the Secoya are most densely populated with around 250 inhabitants, there are regular gatherings where elders and youth alike celebrate the changing of the seasons. They dress in bright colors, with their faces painted with red pigment from the pon-sá plant, often with drawings like the ones Matilde has recorded. In schools, children learn their mother tongue Païcoca. Païcoca is a language laden with many vowels — when the Secoya speak quickly amongst each other, sometimes I find they sound like birds.
And yet, every time I had gone to see the Secoya, I noticed the town grew brighter and brighter with electricity provided by petroleum extractors as ‘a gift’ for the village. Teenagers now walk on the forest floor with Nike knockoffs, and drown out the sound of the Amazon with handheld radios. Globalization happened. I wonder how the Secoya’s cultural identity and knowledge will adapt to the pace of this change.
Thanks to Matilde, who helped me learn there are infinite webs of spiritual and cultural memory with which we can weave our perception of life. May we tread lightly on earth, remembering that in the periphery of our global culture live people who, through millennia of living in forests, see with different eyes.