Indigenous languages dying out in the Amazon
Fate of Taushiro people lies with its last speaker, who never expected such a burden and has spent much of his life overwhelmed by it
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 remained, 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. Ta va’a ui, he said at last. “I am dying.”
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 haltingly, 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. Human history can be traced through the spread of languages. The Phoenicians spanned the ancient Mediterranean trade routes, bringing the alphabet to the Greeks and literacy to Europeans. English, once a small language spoken in southern Britain, is now the mother tongue of hundreds of millions across the world. The Chinese dialects are more than a billion strong.
But the entire fate of the Taushiro people now lies with its last speaker, a person who never expected such a burden and has spent much of his life overwhelmed by it.
Nearly 20 years later, Amadeo walked through an overgrown cemetery, the place he had buried his brother. The wooden cross had fallen over. Juan García’s name was barely visible where it had been etched onto one of the beams.
“When I’m gone, I’ll be here as well,” Amadeo said later that day. “I am old and will disappear at any time.”
Yet even in the twilight of Amadeo’s life, a few hold out hope that some part of the Taushiro language will persist after him.
This year, Peru’s Ministry of Culture decided to take up the work of preserving the Taushiro language. Working with Amadeo, government linguists have created a database of 1,500 Taushiro words, 27 stories and three songs, with plans to make recordings of Amadeo available to academics and others interested in the language.
Last February, the government flew Amadeo to Lima to give him a medal for his contribution to Peruvian culture. The sudden attention was a shock to Amadeo, along with the packed streets of Lima and the interviews with the local news media.
Still, he beamed as a crowd gathered for a ceremony that honored several other indigenous activists who spoke their languages. Government officials gave impassioned speeches on the importance of preserving the 47 indigenous languages that remain in the country. Amadeo spoke words in Taushiro.
While Amadeo knew that he had not passed his language to his five children, he took comfort in the fact that they were safe. They had not suffered the fate of their relatives, who had all perished in the forest. One of them, Daniel, was even in the audience that day to see him.