This is not
a history page.
Almost everything written about the Shipibo online is set in a timeless past — the songs, the designs, the medicine. Here is what is happening to the same communities this year, and who is carrying the cost of it.
The number to sit with.
A 2025 report on Indigenous land defenders in Peru found the Shipibo-Konibo facing more threats than any other Indigenous people in the country — on the Ministry of Culture’s own figures, roughly one in every hundred members of the community at risk of violence.
Not one in a hundred activists. One in a hundred people.
Somebody reading this page has paid to sit in a maloca with a Shipibo healer, and has never once been told that. It is not a detail off to the side of the culture. It is the condition the culture is currently being practised in.
Three hundred people, twenty-five bases, eight million hectares.
In 2023 Shipibo communities formed their own Indigenous guard. More than three hundred community members, organised across around twenty-five bases, patrolling on the order of eight million hectares of the Ucayali against illegal logging, illegal commercial fishing, and coca planting.
They are volunteers from the communities. They are not armed in any way that matches what they are up against. They go out anyway, because the alternative is watching the forest and the river be taken piece by piece while formal complaints move through a system that has already failed for decades.
This is the same river, and often the same families, that the language on this site comes from. A person recording vocabulary for our course may have been out on patrol the week before.
Forty years to get a title to your own land.
One community makes the pattern legible. Santa Clara de Uchunya, on the Ucayali, was granted a title in 1986 — for 218 hectares. Essentially the ground the houses stood on. Everything else they had lived on and from for generations was left untitled, which in Peruvian law means available.
Applications to extend that recognition went in from 1996 onward, year after year. In the meantime oil palm moved in and thousands of hectares of their forest were cleared. Fake land certificates were issued to third parties. Leaders who objected were threatened.
The community took the case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights — in December 2018, and again in October 2020, when the Commission granted precautionary measures to protect threatened leaders. And in the end, decades in, they registered a title extension of roughly 1,544 hectares — the first extension the community had ever obtained.
Set the two numbers beside each other. Forty years of legal work, international litigation, and personal risk, to move from 218 hectares to about 1,760. The forest they lost in the meantime is not coming back, and it ended up in supply chains belonging to companies whose products are on supermarket shelves in every country this site is read in.
She was eighty-one.
On 19 April 2018, in the community of Victoria Gracia in Coronel Portillo, a Shipibo healer and elder named Olivia Arévalo Lomas was shot twice in the chest a few metres from her home. She was eighty-one years old. She was one of the most respected keepers of Shipibo song and medicine alive at the time, and she had spent her later years speaking publicly for her people’s rights to their land.
What followed was ugly and is still argued over. A foreign man who had come to the region seeking to study plant medicine was named as the principal suspect; within hours he was dragged through the streets by a group of local people and beaten to death. No trial ever took place. Nothing about that second death settles anything about the first.
We include her here because her name is largely missing from the enormous body of Western writing about Shipibo healing that she helped make famous. If you have read about icaros, you have read about work she carried. She should be named.
What is being lost is not only forest.
The physician-anthropologist Warren Hern watched the Ucayali for thirty years and recorded the change in a single comparison. A small group of men could once leave a 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. By the time he wrote, two brothers might fish all day and come home at dusk with a basin of small fish, enough for one family for one day.
Pucallpa held about 3,500 people in 1944. By 2002 its metropolitan population was past 300,000. Commercial refrigerator ships now work the river with drift nets for two hundred kilometres below the town. The mijano, the great upstream migration of July and August that used to be caught, salted and dried to last for months, has crashed.
Deforestation did the rest: hotter dry seasons, lower rivers, stagnant water and gastrointestinal illness in children, dust and smoke, faster runoff, longer floods that take the crops and the animals. Game driven inland. Difficulty finding firewood, keeping clean, and finding ground dry enough to bury the dead.
Why this page is on a language site.
Because the two things are the same thing. A language lives in the mouths of people who have somewhere to live and something to eat. Every threat on this page is a threat to the thing we are recording — not metaphorically, not eventually, but directly: the elders who hold the most vocabulary are the ones with the least time, and the communities under the most pressure are the ones where children switch to Spanish fastest.
We are not asking you to do anything about it on this page. We are refusing to sell you a culture while leaving out what is being done to it.
Sources: Mongabay, September 2025, on Peru’s Ministry of Culture figures · Mongabay, May 2023, on the Guardia Indígena · Forest Peoples Programme and the IACHR on Santa Clara de Uchunya · World Justice Project · Amazon Watch and Front Line Defenders on Olivia Arévalo Lomas · Warren M. Hern, Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology, vol. 2, 2004. Figures and cases change; if something here is out of date, write to us and we will correct it.