Überlebenskampf der Amazonas- Sprache
AMADEO GARCÍA GARCÍA rushed upriver in his canoe, slipping into the hidden, booby-trapped camp where his brother Juan lay dying.
Juan writhed in pain and shook uncontrollably as his fever rose, battling malaria. As Amadeo consoled him, the sick man muttered back in words that no one else on Earth still understood.
Je’intavea’, he said that sweltering day in 1999. I am so ill.
The words were Taushiro. A mystery to linguists and anthropologists alike, the language was spoken by a tribe that vanished into the jungles of the Amazon basin in Peru generations ago, hoping to
save itself from the invaders whose weapons and diseases had brought it to the brink of extinction.
A bend on the “wild river,” as they called it, sheltered the two brothers and the other 15 remaining members of their tribe. The clan protected its tiny settlement with a ring of deep pits, expertly hidden by a thin cover of leaves and sticks. They kept packs of attack dogs to stop outsiders from coming near. Even by the end of the 20th century, few outsiders had ever seen the Taushiro or heard their language beyond the occasional hunter, a few Christian missionaries and the armed rubber tappers who came at least twice to enslave the small tribe.
But in the end it was no use. Without rifles or medicine, they were dying off.
A jaguar killed one of the children as he slept. Two more siblings, bitten by snakes, perished without antivenom. One child drowned in a stream. A young man bled to death while hunting in the forest.
Then came the diseases. First measles, which took Juan and Amadeo’s mother. Finally, a fatal form of malaria killed their father, the patriarch of the tribe. His body was buried in the floor of his home before the structure was torched to the ground, following Taushiro tradition.
So by the time Amadeo wrestled his dying brother into the canoe that day, they were the only ones who re-
mained, the last of a culture that once numbered in the thousands. Amadeo sped to a distant town, Intuto, that was home to a clinic. A crowd gathered on the small river dock to see who the dying stranger was, dressed only in a loincloth made of palm leaves.
Juan’s shaking soon gave way to stiffness. He drifted in and out of consciousness, finally looking up at Amadeo. he said at last.
The church bell rang that afternoon, letting villagers know that the unusual visitor had died.
“The strange thing was how quiet Amadeo was,” said Tomás Villalobos, a Christian missionary who was with him when Juan died. “I asked him, ‘How do you feel?’ And he said to me: ‘It’s over now for us.’ ”
Amadeo said it in broken Spanish, the only way he would be able to communicate with the world from that moment on. No one else spoke his language anymore. The survival of his culture had suddenly come down to a sole, complicated man.
An Unexpected Burden
“That’s Amadeo there: Almost no one understands him when he’s speaking his language,” said William Manihuari, watching Amadeo fish alone from a canoe on a recent day.
“And when he dies, no one is left,” added José Sandi, a 12-year- old boy.
The waters of the Peruvian Amazon were once a vast linguistic repository, a place where every turn of the river could yield another dialect, often completely unintelligible to people living just a few kilometers away.
But in the last century, at least 37 languages have disappeared in Peru. Forty-seven languages remain in Peru, scholars estimate, and nearly half are at risk of disappearing.
“At any moment I might disappear, my life will end, we don’t know how soon,” said Amadeo, who is around 70. “The Taushiro don’t think about death. We just move on.”
The Taushiro were among the world’s last hunter-gathers, living as refugees in their own country, wandering the swamps of the Amazon basin with blow guns called pucuna and fishing from small boats called tenete. To count in their language, they had words only for the numbers one, two, three and many. And by the time Amadeo was born, their population had shrunk so drastically that they had no names: Amadeo’s father was simply iya, or father, his mother iño, or mother, his sister and brother ukuka and ukuñuka.
Amadeo has five children, dotted across the Americas. But after his wife left him in the 1980s, he put them into an orphanage when they were still young, thinking it was safer than a life in which children were abducted by traffickers or lost to war. None of them lived with him after that. They never learned his language.
“For those languages that are in this critical situation, many times it seems their fate is already sealed — that’s to say, it’s hard to ever recover a language at this stage,” said Agustín Panizo, a linguist. “Amadeo García, he wants Taushiro to come back. He wants it, he dreams of it, he longs for it, and he suffers to know that he’s the last speaker.”
Now Amadeo lives alone in a clapboard house behind the town’s water tower, spending many of his final days drinking. Desperate to speak and hear whatever Taushiro he can, he sits alone on his porch in the morning, reciting the only literature ever written in the language — verses of the Bible translated into Taushiro by missionaries who sought to convert the tribe years ago.
Amadeo lives alongside the people of Intuto, but not with them, often passing them in a quiet stupor. Mario Tapuy, 74, who met Amadeo as a child when he lived in the forest, said he had tried many times to draw Amadeo out of the bar to teach others the language.
Mr. Tapuy, who speaks his own indigenous language, Kichwa, said he had realized years ago that the future of Taushiro would come to down to Amadeo.
“I told him many times,” Mr. Tapuy said. “He listens, but it doesn’t record in his brain.”
A linguist, Juanita Pérez Ríos, has known Amadeo for years. When Amadeo wanted to speak to his son Daniel, who lives in Lima, the capital, Ms. Pérez lent him her phone.
“I fell on my knees in the jungle,” said Amadeo. “I’m limping a little.”
“You need to be careful,” said Daniel. The two spoke in Spanish. “My brothers told me you’ve been getting a little drunk,” Daniel chided him. “You need to stop that now.” Then a pause. “I love you a lot, understand?” said Daniel. The phone clicked.
Amadeo sat in his home for a few minutes, looking into the night as the sounds of the forest grew louder. Families could be heard in the distance, cooking dinner.
“They say they love me, but they never come,” he said.
Rubber and Slavery
The problems began with the rubber boom of the 19th century, when European and American companies descended into the jungles, forcing indigenous populations into slavery.
In many areas, as much as 90 percent of the indigenous population died from disease and forced labor, researchers say. Thousands moved into newly settled cities. But the Taushiro, along with many other tribes, took another route: They decided to disappear.
Amadeo’s early memories from the hidden Taushiro settlement of Aucayacu remain in the haze of a place where writing was unknown and no records were kept, not even of his birth, which he thinks was sometime in the 1940s. His first memory was walking naked through the forest in a storm, the rain trickling down his body.
Contact with the outside world was rare, and often violent.
First came a rubber tapper in search of slaves. Wielding machetes and rifles, he found Aucayacu with four of his men and ordered the tribe to work. The tapper forced Amadeo’s married sister into a sexual relationship, then nearly beat her to death with a piece of wood. Her husband threw a spear through the tapper, who was never seen there again.
Before long, another rubber tapper came in his place. Perhaps learning from the fate of his predecessor, the new tapper decided to give his rifle in exchange for work, rather than turn it against the Taushiro.
He also gave them something else. Unable to distinguish among his workers, he lined them up and gave them Spanish names: Margarita, Andrés, Magdalena, César, Antonio. The youngest boy was called Amadeo. With no surnames, the Taushiro were each given two: García García.
Taking On Christianity
One day the ground began to tremble and the world took another step toward Amadeo.
It wasn’t an earthquake, but the seismic testing equipment of the Occidental Petroleum Corporation, an American company that had come to Peru. Rubber had long declined in the Amazon. Now the foreigners were after oil.
Word spread among the drillers that an indigenous group was hiding on one of the tributaries of the Tigre River. Occidental soon sent a plane and a lookout with binoculars to lo- cate the tribe.
It was the first time Amadeo had seen anyone fly. It was 1971.
“They were so close to the ground you could see their faces looking at us,” Amadeo said.
With the coordinates of the Taushiro in hand, contact was inevitable. But rather than sending one of its own, the oil company turned to the Summer Institute of Linguistics, which had been founded by an evangelical minister who wanted to translate the Bible into every language still spoken.
In 1971, Daniel Velie approached the edges of the Taushiro settlement, making his way past the booby traps and barking dogs. When he arrived, seven Taushiro were near death. He pulled out a first- aid kit and gave them penicillin, the first antibiotics the Taushiro had taken. When they recovered, he took down the first 200 words of a Taushiro glossary.
Using hand gestures, the group conveyed their appreciation to the missionary. But Mr. Velie wanted something in return. He eventually asked for Amadeo, who was thought to be in his 20s at the time, to return with him and start teaching the language to others.
“They said yes, Amadeo could go; they were so thankful to have been saved,” said Nectali Alicea, the linguist put in charge of the Taushiro project by the language institute. “It was medicine that was the key.”
Ms. Alicea was a young Puerto Rican social sciences graduate. One of her pictures from 1972 shows Amadeo stepping aboard a plane for the first time, en route to the institute’s compound outside the Peruvian city of Pucallpa. A new world of firsts was opening up: of roads and sidewalks, of chicken, which he had never eaten before. He slept on the floor, unaccustomed to a bed. For days on end, Ms. Alicea took dictations of his language to prepare to meet the Taushiro in the forest.
She arrived at their secret camp that June with a missionary doctor, his wife and their son for a two-week visit. The Taushiro clan welcomed the strangers and the recording technology they brought, along with medicine, machetes and food.
She began to follow some of their conversations, learning enough Taushiro to ask one man in the clan why he never swam. Despite living off the river, the Taushiro avoided even wading in it, washing themselves from the safety of a canoe. The man explained that under the water lurked a horde of boa constrictors, waiting to strike.
Ms. Alicea and the missionaries with her stripped down to their underwear and jumped into the river, laughing and splashing. “When they saw us in the water, something changed,” Ms. Alicea said, adding that the event had caused the Taushiro to question their long- held beliefs. “They asked us how we did it. And we said: ‘Because we have a Spirit that is stronger than the boa.’ ”
Ms. Alicea produced a Bible.
A Life of Isolation
When Amadeo, the youngest of the Taushiro, arrived with a girl named Margarita Machoa, declaring that she would be his wife, there was a sigh of relief in Aucayacu. The Taushiro line was continuing.
Amadeo was a grown man. Margarita was 12 years old. So Amadeo wound up in jail, at the request of the girl’s father. It was Ms. Alicea who brokered Amadeo’s release, arguing that Peruvian law allowed indigenous men to marry according to their customs.
Within months, Margarita was pregnant with Amadeo’s first child, a girl they named Margarita. The baby was the first of five.
Margarita, who came from a different tribe, was unable to communicate with anyone in Taushiro. In 1984, Amadeo took the family to a village where he worked construction. Neighbors said the couple argued frequently and Amadeo beat her.
Margarita, her daughter said, got into a relationship with a man her own age. When Amadeo learned of it, he attacked her again. “She left that night and said nothing,” the daughter said.
Leaving the Forest
Without Margarita, Amadeo became the sole caretaker of five children.
“I knew nothing about how to care for them,” Amadeo said.
Amadeo decided to leave the camp for the missionary compound near Pucallpa, several hundred kilometers away, and put the children into an orphanage. In 1990, Ms. Alicea adopted them and took them to Puerto Rico.
“I love the language,” Ms. Alicea said. “But I love the people more than the language. With the blessing of God, those children had a future.”
But three of them, David, Jonathan and Daniel, chose to to return to Peru as teenagers.
Amadeo had settled in Intuto and lived as a recluse, heading into the forest most days in search of game to sell. He took the boys to what remained of the Taushiro settlement in Aucayacu, where only his father and a few relatives still survived.
Jonathan found he was unable to communicate. “My grandfather could only say my name,” he recalled. “I had gotten used to Puerto Rico. Now I felt more from there. I cried all night.”
And Amadeo’s drinking continued. One day, José Álvarez, a missionary, went to visit Amadeo. In Spanish, Amadeo told him he was sick, but after a moment Mr. Álvarez said he realized Amadeo was trying to say he was depressed.
“He spoke in tears of his children, that they didn’t want to come see him, that they didn’t want to know hardly anything of him, or their Taushiro origins, not the language, not the culture,” Mr. Álvarez wrote in a letter from that time.
Mr. Álvarez added: “I felt in these moments the deep pain that probably that man felt, the last Taushiro, that the saga of his people would definitively end with him.”
The Taushiro language had been reduced to its last five speakers: Amadeo, and four family members in Aucayacu. All four have since died, the last being his brother Juan.
A Race Against Time
Nearly 20 years later, Amadeo walked through an overgrown cemetery, the place he had buried his brother. The wooden cross had fallen over.
“When I’m gone, I’ll be here as well,” Amadeo said.
Yet a few hold out hope that some part of the Taushiro language will persist after him. Last year, working with Amadeo, government linguists created a database of 1,500 Taushiro words, 27 stories and three songs.
Last February, the government flew Amadeo to Lima to give him a medal for his contribution to Peruvian culture. He beamed as a crowd gathered for the ceremony. One of his children, Daniel, was in the audience. After the ceremony, the two men embraced, and Daniel introduced Amadeo to his 6-year- old daughter.
“I just want to be proud of my father, of the tribe that we were, that I was born into, that we lived,” said Daniel, who is a construction worker in Lima.
One evening last summer, Amadeo sat alone in Intuto and began to speak his language, saying one sentence in Taushiro, then translating it into Spanish, before repeating the process.
“I am Taushiro,” he said. “I have something that no one else in the world has. One day when I am gone from the world, I hope the world remembers.”