A people of the Ucayali river,
in the Peruvian Amazon.
If you have arrived knowing nothing, this is the page to read first. Ten minutes, and the rest of the site will make sense.
The short answer
The Shipibo-Konibo are an Indigenous people of the Peruvian Amazon. Somewhere around 35,000 people live in roughly 150 communities, almost all of them along the Ucayali river and its tributaries, in the region of Ucayali in eastern Peru — a long day’s travel from Lima, and a world away from it.
Their language, also called Shipibo-Konibo, belongs to the Panoan family. Between 26,000 and 35,000 people speak it. UNESCO lists it as definitely endangered — not because there are few speakers, but because it is no longer the norm for children to learn it at home.
They are river people rather than forest people: settlements on the banks and on oxbow lakes, fish as the base of the diet, and a year organised around the river rising and falling. They are internationally known for two things — a geometric design tradition called kené, and a healing practice involving the plant preparation most of the world calls ayahuasca. Both are real. Neither is the whole of it, and this site exists partly to say so.
“Shipibo” is not their own word.
Worth knowing before anything else, including the name of this website. The word Shipibo people use for themselves is jonibo — people, in the plural. Everyone else is nawabo: outsiders, strangers, not-people. The pair does the same work most peoples’ names for themselves do.
Shipibo came from neighbouring groups. It is built on shípi, the pygmy marmoset — the smallest primate there is, native to this part of the Amazon and kept as a pet in Shipibo households — plus the plural ending -bo. The marmoset people. A nickname from the neighbours that outlasted every other name.
Konibo is what closely related communities upriver of the town of Pucallpa were called; the language and culture are essentially the same, and the combined form Shipibo-Konibo is now standard. You will also see Xetebo, a third group absorbed into the same population, and the official Peruvian designation is sometimes Shipibo-Konibo-Xetebo. An older spelling, Conibo, appears in books written before the current orthography.
One word to avoid entirely: Chama. Shipibo people consider it a slur, used by the regional mestizo population to treat them as an underclass. It still turns up in old anthropology. It has no place in anything written today.
We keep using Shipibo on this site because it is the word the world searches for and the word Shipibo artists and teachers use when dealing with outsiders. But it is the outside name, and it is worth saying so on the page that introduces them.
The river, not the jungle.
Search for Shipibo and you will be shown dense forest canopy. That is the wrong picture. The ethnographic record is blunt about it: Shipibo people stay close to their river and generally avoid the deep forest.
The landscape is water and sky. Communities sit on the banks of the Ucayali and on cochas — the oxbow lakes left behind when the river shifts course. In the dry season the water drops and wide beaches appear, and people plant crops on ground that will be underwater again in a few months. In July and August the mijano, a great upstream migration of fish, arrives, and historically the whole year was built around it.
The main town of the region is Pucallpa, which was itself a Shipibo settlement in the nineteenth century. It had about 3,500 people in 1944, when a road first reached it over the Andes. Today its metropolitan population is well over 300,000, and a large share of Shipibo people now live in or around it, or in Lima. Shipibo life is not only village life, and has not been for a long time.
About a thousand years, and a very hard century.
Shipibo-Konibo people are thought to have lived in this stretch of the upper Amazon for roughly a thousand years. The evidence is largely ceramic: an archaeological pottery style called Cumancaya is recognisably continuous with Shipibo pottery made today.
What happened after European contact happened here as everywhere: introduced disease, armed conflict, slavery. During the rubber boom Shipibo people were both used against neighbouring peoples and taken as slaves themselves. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries missionaries gathered scattered family households into larger villages, changing the basic unit of the society. Smallpox swept the region in 1964; measles killed children on the Pisqui in the early 1970s; cholera took whole families in 1990–91. Tuberculosis still kills older adults — the people who hold the most language, song and knowledge of the forest.
Two things, and everything else.
Kené (kuh-NUH) is the geometric design tradition — dense, symmetrical, unmistakable — applied to cloth, pottery, paddles, and historically to faces. It is made mostly by women. It is not a decorative style borrowed from somewhere; it is the visual language of the culture, and it is still being made and sold today.
Ayahuasca, called óni in Shipibo, is a preparation of a vine and a leaf used in healing work led by a practitioner called an onanya. Over the last thirty years it has drawn a global retreat industry to the region. That industry is now a significant part of the local economy and a significant pressure on the culture, and much of what is written about Shipibo people in English is really written about that industry.
Beyond those two: a ceramic tradition older than either, a body of oral literature, an extensive knowledge of plants and river ecology, a matrilineal household structure, and forty thousand people living ordinary contemporary lives — fishing, teaching, farming, studying, organising politically, and defending their territory.
Why the language is at risk, specifically.
It is not a small or forgotten language. Tens of thousands of adults speak it fluently, there is a standard orthography, and there are bilingual schools. What is failing is transmission: fewer children are growing up speaking it first, and the pull toward Spanish is strongest exactly where the pressure on communities is greatest.
Two facts sit underneath everything on this site. The elders hold the most vocabulary, the most song, and the most knowledge of the forest — and tuberculosis is a leading cause of death among them. And the communities under the heaviest economic and territorial pressure are the ones where children switch to Spanish fastest. Language loss and land loss are the same process at different speeds.
What this is, and who made it.
ShipiboCulture.org is a public archive of the Shipibo-Konibo language and the knowledge it carries. It is a project of The Community Garden Foundation, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit, run by Dakota Wint and Peter Tran.
We do three things. We record the language with fluent Shipibo speakers, who keep a copy of everything they record and decide separately whether their name and photograph are published. We publish what the written record says, with the source, the date and the fieldwork location visible, so you can weigh it yourself. And we refuse to publish what is not ours to publish — restricted, ceremonial and family-held knowledge stays out, and we say when we are leaving something out.
We are outsiders. The people described on this site are not the people writing it, and that gap is the main thing we are trying to close by recording living speakers. Where a Shipibo teacher contradicts a source on this site, the teacher is right and the page changes.
About the foundation → · The sources we use → · Corrections →
Three ways in.
Sources for this page: Warren M. Hern, “Shipibo,” Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology, vol. 2, 2004 — population, settlements, the name, the epidemics, Pucallpa. Peter G. Roe, The Cosmic Zygote, Rutgers University Press, 1982 — the river, the Cumancaya continuity. UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger and Ethnologue for the endangerment status and speaker range. Figures from 2004 should be treated as a floor, not a current count. If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it.
Shipibo and regional words on this page — and every other — are defined in one place. The glossary →