Oriente & Amazon Culture & Language

The Oriente’s culture belongs to its indigenous nations, and it is practical knowledge as much as ceremony.

Knowing the forest

A good local guide can name several hundred plants and what each is for — fish poison, roof thatch, blowgun dart curare, contraception, fever, glue, dye, food. This is a working pharmacology and technology developed over millennia, and the demonstration of it on a forest walk is usually the thing visitors remember longest.

Ceramics

Amazonian Kichwa women make mucawa drinking bowls, coiled by hand, burnished with a stone and painted in fine geometric line with natural pigments and a resin glaze. The designs are learned within families and are genuinely distinctive.

Shamanism

Ayahuasca, a brew of a vine and a leaf, is used ceremonially by yachaks for healing and divination. It has become a tourist commodity, with real risks — deaths have occurred under unqualified practitioners — and the traditional practice is not a weekend activity.

Waorani

Hunters with blowguns up to three metres long, contacted only from the 1950s, with an oral culture and a recent history of litigation to defend their territory.

Chambira fibre

Palm fibre is stripped, boiled, dyed with forest plants and rolled on the thigh into cord, then knotted into bags, hammocks and nets. It is the region’s other great craft alongside ceramics, entirely made by hand from a standing palm, and the bags are hard-wearing enough to be used rather than displayed.

Music and dress

Drum and flute traditions, feather crowns and woven fibre, worn for ceremony rather than daily life.

Spanish is the working language throughout and is essential — English is spoken by lodge guides and very little elsewhere.

Kichwa is widely spoken, in an Amazonian variety distinct from the highland one, and is the first language of many communities.

Wao Terero, Shuar Chicham and Achuar Chicham are spoken by their respective nations, and several of the smaller languages here are critically endangered.

Useful Spanish: buenos dias, cuanto cuesta, donde esta, and tengo sed.

Useful Kichwa: alli puncha for good morning, yupaychani for thank you, and imanalla for how are you — all of which are well received.