A living culture,
not a backdrop.

The wail, and the proverb that follows it.

When someone is dying, the family — mostly the women — gather around the person who is isin, sick. At the moment of death the gathered kin begin to wail: a falling scale in a minor key, in falsetto, across about an octave, repeated over and over, the high notes held when the grief is sharpest. Hern describes it as unmistakable, and says it carries a long way, particularly across open water. Everyone within hearing knows what has happened without being told.

Read that beside two other things in the record and they lock together. Roe noted that to be heard at distance across water or forest, Shipibo raise the voice into falsetto — it is the reaching register. And the healer, when he leaves ordinary conversation behind, sings in falsetto too. The same register carries the song, the news of a death, and a call across the river. It is the voice used for what is far away.

Adults are buried in an old canoe, covered over with sawn boards. A child goes into a child’s canoe, or half of an adult one. Everyone takes a turn throwing dirt in as the grave fills. Funerary jars turned up by erosion at settlements older than European contact show that people were once buried in very large pots instead — which is exactly what the archaeologists find, and what the older ethnographies call quënti ani.

When a man dies his house is burned with everything in it; his widow crops her hair and wears black for a year. A woman’s possessions are burned but her house is not. At the end of the year there is a wake, and the mourning is over.

And there is a proverb for carrying it, which Hern recorded in Shipibo: Huinata jahuequi moa shinantima — we no longer think about the things that are so sad they make us cry.

Warren M. Hern, “Shipibo,” Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology, vol. 2, 2004; the falsetto note is Peter G. Roe, The Cosmic Zygote, 1982, p. 71. The proverb is in Hern’s spelling and is one of the things we will ask a teacher to say aloud.

River people. Not jungle people.

Search for Shipibo and you will get canopy — dense green, filtered light, the interior of a forest. It is the wrong picture, and the ethnographic record says so bluntly. Roe’s note from the Ucayali is that the Shipibo avoid the forest and stay close to their river.

The real landscape is water and sky. Settlements on the banks and on cochas, the oxbow lakes left behind when the river changes its mind. Wide exposed beaches in the dry season, on which a crop of black-eyed peas gets planted because the ground is only there for a few months. Canoes. Long sightlines. Fish as the base of the diet, not game — and the year organised around the mijano, the great upstream migration of July and August. Interior groups existed and lived differently, more from the forest and from hunting, but the main body of Shipibo life has always been riverine.

This is not pedantry about photographs. It changes what the culture is about. A people whose protein comes from a river read the water for a living, and their myths are full of what lives in it — the anaconda as mother of all water creatures, the dolphins that are never killed, the seducers who come up out of the lake. The forest in those stories is the dangerous elsewhere. The river is home.

It also explains what is happening to them now, because a people whose life is a river are undone by what is done to the river.

Peter G. Roe, The Cosmic Zygote, Rutgers University Press, 1982, pp. 34–35; Warren M. Hern, Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology, vol. 2, 2004.

What a day of fishing used to bring back.

It is easy to write about a culture as though it sits still. Here is the sentence that stops that, from a doctor who watched the same river for thirty years: a small group of men could once leave the village before dawn and be back by noon with several canoes full of fish — enough to feed a large extended family across several households for days. Now two brothers may fish all day and come home at dusk with a basin of small fish, enough for one family for one day.

What changed is not the Shipibo. Pucallpa held about 3,500 people in 1944, when the road came over the Andes. By 2002 its metropolitan population was past 300,000. Commercial refrigerator ships now work the river with drift nets for 200 kilometres below the town. The mijano — the great upstream migration of the dry months, July and August, when fish were caught in quantity and salted and sun-dried to last for weeks — has crashed.

Deforestation did the rest. Hotter dry seasons, lower rivers, stagnant ponds and gastrointestinal illness in children, dust off the exposed beaches and smoke off the burning. In the wet season nothing holds the rain, so it runs off fast and the floods sit longer and take the crops and the animals with them. Game moves inland. It becomes hard to find firewood, hard to keep clean, and hard to find ground dry enough to bury the dead.

This is the context every word on this site is being recorded in. Not a culture that faded on its own — a river that was fished out from under a people who were living well on it.

Warren M. Hern, “Shipibo,” Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology, vol. 2, 2004. Hern ran a baseline health study at the village of Paococha in 1969 and worked on the Ucayali and the Pisqui for decades after.

Yoashico, the miserable one.

Told by a Shipibo man named Eduardo and written down in the 1970s. It is an origin story for four things at once: fire, cultivated food, the movement of the sun, and why birds are coloured the way they are.

In the old time the sun stood still in the east and did not move. There was no fire. People laid the fish they caught on a leaf and let the standing sun warm it. Only the stingy one, Shäno Inca, had fire — and he had paranta, the plantain, and atsa, the manioc, and he meant to keep all three.

He guarded the manioc the way a man guards something he has no intention of sharing: a viper coiled in the crotch of the plant, another around the stem, wasps in the leaves. When people asked him for manioc he destroyed the growing eyes before handing it over, so nothing they planted would come up. When they asked for plantain shoots he cut the trunk in three pieces and gave them that. They planted it. Nothing grew.

What undid him was a bird and a girl not paying attention. His daughter kept a green parakeet, the vëscón. She was sweeping the plaza around her hut and it got behind her, crying at her — and while she was at a distance it stole a coal out of her fire. She threw her brush at it. It flew off low to the ground and left the coal on the branch of a dead tree at the corner of her father’s garden, and the branch began to burn.

Shäno Inca sent a tempest to put it out. Then every kind of bird came and stood over the fire with their wings spread to shield it from the rain — the vultures, the razor-billed curassow, all of them. Their feathers had been white. The smoke turned them black, and they have been black since. The coal dropped, and the ancestors picked it up and broke it into pieces and shared it out. And the sun began to move.

Then they had fire and still no crops, so they dug a pit for him. The lizard dug the first one and it only came up to his stomach; he climbed out and they could not kill him. So they called the jori bird, which digs deep, chambered nests underground, and asked whether it could do better. It could. They covered the hole with leaves and a skin of earth and invited him out for the arrow match the way they always did — he answered from inside his hut and came jumping, bow ready — and he fell, and they killed him with arrows and dragged him out.

The birds came and bathed in the blood, and that is where they got their colours: the red macaw, the pish-pish. Only the cainqui had gone fishing, and fishing always took him a long time, and by the time he got back the blood had dried. That is why he is a dull orange to this day.

Recorded by Peter G. Roe from Eduardo and published in The Cosmic Zygote, Rutgers University Press, 1982, pp. 68–69, with Roe’s spellings. Retold here in our own words; the version that matters is the one a Shipibo teller gives, and when we have one recorded we will put it here beside this. The same passage preserves an everyday thing worth as much as the myth — how you announce yourself at a house: the visitor calls out, the owner answers welcome, and the visitor answers again.