Ana Maria Santi sings of a woman who gets drunk with her friends on chicha. She then tells her husband, "Husband please take care of me, because I'm drunk. Take me to bed wherever you want, but please don't leave me alone in an empty house."(1:01)
Zápara girls of the village of Masáraca sing a children's nonsense song, about an old woman scolding her nephew, telling him that the lizard he just killed looks just like his ugly girlfriend. (0:57)
Zápara women
select palm fronds to weave into baskets. For generations,
the Zápara were virtually invisible to the rest
of the world. Anthropologists concluded that the culture
was extinct.
Bartolo Ushigua, leader of Ecuador's Zápara Indians, was terrified.
Not of New York's massive buildings that towered far beyond the
tallest tree in his native Amazon, not of the oily urban stench
and stupendous traffic, not of the Babel of people constantly snapping
his picture as though he were some exotic zoo mammal. What shook
him so deeply was that for the first time ever, he couldn't dream.
To the Zápara, a dream is a rendezvous with guiding spirits. It
was in a dream that Bartolo's shaman father saw that his people,
down to just a few dozen, weren't supposed to vanish after all,
as prophecy had foretold. It was in dreams that this same father,
now dead, kept returning to instruct Bartolo how to lead. Bartolo
Ushigua was barely twenty when he assumed his indigenous nation's
helm; within three years he had brought the Zápara practically from
extinction to designation by UNESCO as a world cultural treasure.
The path to recognition had been treacherous, filled not just with
old enemies but also new friends whose helpful intentions portended
to be equally deadly, should the Zápara come to depend on them too
much. Mostly, though, the path was strewn with cash—not a lot, but
enough to be tempting and disruptive.
Ana María
Santi, one of four remaining Zápara speakers,
is part of the effort to record and recover the language.
Most Zápara speak Kichwa, the language of the
dominant native group in the area.
After a dreamless week at the UN, one afternoon an exhausted Bartolo
Ushigua napped. Suddenly images formed in his sleeping mind. "In
my dream," he recalled, "there was a man with two faces,
one bloody, one smiling. When the smile showed, people became happy.
When the blood showed, their strength waned. Then the face said
something intriguing: In time, money could gain a soul."
When we met Bartolo, he admitted that he didn't entirely understand
this dream. From our perspective, with the hunter-gatherer Zápara
paradoxically now needing money to defend a way of life in which
money had never been necessary, it was easy to attribute the dream
to wishful thinking.
After all, we were in Ecuador to document a community facing seemingly
impossible odds. The Zápara, once the most numerous people of Ecuador's
Amazon region, had been all but wiped out. Then, in 1998, a 60-year
border war ended, and a few Zápara were discovered living in Peru.
All had lost their language, but one was a shaman. On the Ecuadoran
side, the last shaman had recently died, but a handful of elderly native
speakers remained. Each group had what the other lacked, yet could
so few people possibly resuscitate a culture? Especially with a
new threat hanging over their heads?
A father and child,
faces painted for a minga (village work party),
drink chicha (fresh homemade beer) in the Zápara
village of Masáraca, Pastaza province, Ecuador.
That new threat is oil. The surviving Zápara owe their existence
in no small part to the fact that theirs was, until recently, the
last sector of Ecuador's jungle without an oil concession. Bartolo
and his siblings and cousins, now responsible for their people's
future, told us that they have just a few years to learn to defend
themselves before the road and the drilling rigs arrive.
It seems impossible—until you meet them. We came away from the
Zápara recalling that there's a name for those people
who occasionally confound probability and accomplish the impossible.
Ana Maria Santi 
