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Ethnohistory 61:3 (Summer 2014)"DOI 10.1215/00141801-2681786 Copyright 2014 by American Society for Ethnohistory

Surviving the Rubber Boom: Cofán and Siona Society in the Colombia- Ecuador Borderlands (1875–1955)

Robert Wasserstrom, Terra Group

Abstract. In the 1960s and 1970s, anthropologists began modern ethnographic research in lowland Ecuador and Colombia. At the time, Cofán and Siona people there lived in apparently remote forests with a diverse subsistence economy based on hunting, fishing, and gardening. It was difficult to imagine that traditional indige-nous territories often coincided with old rubber outposts, derelict haciendas, mis-sionary stations, and abandoned oil camps. Nor did researchers envision the mael-strom that had taken place fifty years earlier, when native families were forced to collect rubber throughout the western Amazon. It seemed more reasonable to think that they had somehow avoided the cataclysmic impacts of rubber extraction that led to enslavement and ethnocide along the lower Putumayo River. But the story turns out to be much more complicated, as new historical research shows. Since 1930, the resurgence of Cofán and Siona communities presents a compelling story of survival and reconstruction, not isolation. It bears directly on current discussions of ethnicity, citizenship, and indigenous rights in contemporary Amazonian society.

A Case of Mistaken Identity?

I was born in Teteyé [Colombia]. My parents were from Ocano. After the measles epidemic they went to live with white people at the mouth of the San Miguel. We collected rubber for Mario Magno, an Ecua-dorian who sold our debts to Arsenio Figueroa, who took us upriver to find rubber around Sencella. We collected rubber with another 50 Indians: Cofanes, Inganos, Sionas and others. Figueroa paid for the rubber with cloth and he hired overseers. He kept the accounts and he cheated you if you didn’t watch him carefully.

526 Robert Wasserstrom

This account of debt peonage in the Amazonian rainforest was recorded around 1945 by the Colombian historian Juan Friede (1952: 206). It was given by an unnamed Cofán man who collected rubber along the San Miguel River in northeastern Ecuador and the Upper Putumayo River in Colombia following a particularly virulent measles outbreak in 1923. Like similar accounts from the far northwestern foothills of Amazonia (known as the montaña or piedemonte), it was largely disregarded by subsequent researchers because it showed up in the wrong place, almost a thousand kilometers away from Julio Arana’s notorious slave camps farther down the Putumayo River (see fig. 1).1 Indigenous groups that escaped outright enslavement, they reasoned, had been spared the worst impacts of rubber or perhaps any impact at all. Friede himself contributed to this misconcep-tion. “It may be assumed,” he wrote, “that the arrival of rubber tappers, and before them quinine hunters, did not subject the Kofán to the disas-trous consequences that were suffered by indigenous people who experi-enced rubber collection elsewhere in the Amazon” (ibid.: 205). Following his lead, modern researchers have often suggested that Cofán, Siona, and

Figure 1. The Western Amazon. Author created

Surviving the Rubber Boom 527

other small ethnic groups survived the extractive economy because they remained marginal to it (Robinson 1979, 1996; Yumbo 1995; Moya 2000; Little 2001: 49; Yashar 2005: 111).

More than twenty years ago, Blanca Muratorio (1991: 107) explained why this view is incorrect. By the nineteenth century, she argued, axes, machetes, shotguns, and textiles had become “culturally essential” for native people in the eastern forests. “Unlike the situation in the [lower] Putumayo examined by Taussig for the Huitotos, these Ecuadorian indige-nous groups understood and were accustomed to debt- peonage. Systematic use of terror was not needed to induce them to work, but in no way were they free from abuses or from the generalized anarchic violence that pre-vailed during this period.” Indeed, indigenous people in the borderlands between Colombia and Ecuador may not have regarded such arrangements as an unusual loss of their own freedom. Since at least the mid- nineteenth century, they had depended on Jesuit missionaries and quinine traders for tools and other goods and often paid with their labor (Tamariz and Wasser-strom 2013; Bustamante and Wasserstrom 2013).

Like native peoples across the Amazon Basin, Cofán, Siona, and neigh-boring groups were drawn into a broad variety of labor arrangements dur-ing the rubber boom (roughly 1885–1930). Such arrangements represented a continuum of coercion and debt generally known as aviamiento or habili-tación. They ranged from armed violence in the Lower Putumayo, Madre de Dios (Peru), and parts of Bolivia to highly unequal or semivoluntary trade relations elsewhere.2 Two main elements shaped the kinds of labor systems that emerged in each region: the ecology of rubber production and the avail-ability of native workers (Taylor 1994: 42). Slavery of the kind uncovered by Walter E. Hardenburg and Roger Casement occurred almost exclusively in the Amazon lowlands and floodplains, where a rubber variety called jebe or shiringa predominated. Jebe was harvested from Hevea brasiliensis and its immediate relatives, which grew close together and could be tapped repeat-edly for years. Even within Hevea regions, outright violence and slavery were mostly limited to a twenty- thousand- square- kilometer territory where 13,600 Huitoto and other “uncivilized” Indians tapped rubber for the Casa Arana (Domínguez and Gómez 1990: 202–26; Stanfield 1998: 105; San-tos Granero and Barclay 1999: 32). Elsewhere, however, jebe was collected by an assortment of Brazilian caboclos (mixed- race workers), dispossessed Peruvian and Bolivian peasants, impoverished Europeans, and even occa-sional Americans—all of whom remained at least partly free (Woodroffe 1914; Jungjohann 1989).

Different varieties of rubber—generally known as caucho and balata—were found in the Andean foothills, where widely scattered, solitary Casti-

528 Robert Wasserstrom

lloa, Sapium, Manilkara, and additional species were cut down and drained into pits.3 Here, latex was harvested by native labor gangs of twenty to a hundred people who moved through the forest like locusts, frequently accompanied by their patrones, or overseers (Rice 1903). In Colombia and Ecuador, their population was thinly scattered. According to one Jesuit missionary, only 9,545 people (about 1,900 families) occupied twenty thou-sand square kilometers on the Upper Napo—a small fraction of the number who worked for Arana within a similar area (Cáceres 1892). Among rubber gatherers in the foothills (including Friede’s informant), a range of patron- client relationships prevailed, although the outcome was usually the same. “In exchange for a few glass beads, a shirt, an ax or a machete,” another priest reported, “they must pay an arroba of rubber [25 pounds; 11.5 kg] or an ounce of gold, so that in their whole lives they will never erase what they owe” (Calamocha 2002: 168). And always, their debts might be sold to other caucheros as far away as Iquitos and the Marañon River in Peru, where conditions were frequently worse (Muratorio 1991: 110–11).

Few researchers today would argue that indigenous groups like the Cofán and Siona remained outside time while the rest of Amazonian his-tory unfolded around them. Among anthropologists and historians, such views, once nearly ubiquitous, have become untenable (Balée 1998; Ruben-stein 2007). Even so, they have often misunderstood the so- called Colom-bian rubber boom for three reasons. Because caucho and balata brought a lower price than jebe, they reasoned that rubber tappers largely ignored the borderlands between Ecuador and Colombia. They also assumed that rubber collection there collapsed after 1914, when Amazonian jebe lost its place in international markets. Unlike jebe, however, caucho and balata had few competitors and were aggressively harvested until 1930. And finally, most records from that period are located in Colombia, not Ecua-dor, even though the laborers were overwhelmingly Ecuadorians. Recent archival discoveries in both countries now permit us to analyze how native Cofán, Siona, and Quichua (Runa) people survived the maelstrom of rub-ber extraction. Their resurgence since 1930 presents a compelling story of cultural survival and persistence.

Caucho in the Borderlands

My parents were from Concepción, on the Upper Napo; here on the San Miguel River everyone’s family came from towns in the Napo foothills . . . A white man from Quito, Daniel Peñafiel, got permis-sion from the government to take us downriver and collect rubber . . . we spent ten years near Rocafuerte [a major Ecuadorian port on the

Surviving the Rubber Boom 529

Napo]. After Peñafiel died, we were taken over by another white man, Barregas, who made us pan for gold in the Upper Aguarico and San Miguel Rivers. We did this for four years. . . . On the Aguarico, there was another patrón, a Colombian named Londoño . . . and he bought our debts from Barregas so we went to work for him. (Foletti Casteg-naro 1985: 167–68)

This narrative was recorded in the late 1980s along the San Miguel River, today’s international boundary between Ecuador and Colombia. It chron-icles the odyssey of Quichua- speaking workers as their debts were bought and sold among patrones who eventually sent them to collect rubber in the borderlands. Until 1916, Colombia exercised sovereignty over an area that extended as far south as the Aguarico River—roughly fifty kilometers inside today’s border. Indigenous laborers worked virgin rubber forests on the San Miguel and Aguarico Rivers, and often carried their product sev-eral days across trails that ran overland to the Napo (see fig. 2). There it was loaded onto canoes or river launches and transported to Iquitos for sale. By the early 1900s, at least 1,000 Quichua men had been taken from their vil-

Figure 2. The Colombia- Ecuador Borderlands. Author created

530 Robert Wasserstrom

lages along the upper Napo around Tena and Archidona and sent to work elsewhere; according to Oberem (1971: 97–98), only 40 ever returned (see also Hudelson 1981: 207–216). When labor supplies ran short, caucheros looked even farther afield. According to the French geographer Henri Bar-ral (1978: 16), for example, Londoño (whose first name remains unknown) brought Runa to the borderlands from as far away as the Bobonaza River, 200 kilometers away.

Large- scale extractive activity in Ecuador’s eastern rainforests had begun much earlier, around 1870, with the international trade in quinine (Esvertit 2008: 120–23). Presaging the rubber boom ten years later, Colom-bian and Ecuadorian fortune seekers filtered onto the Putumayo, Aguarico and Napo Rivers and settled among the area’s indigenous people. After 1885, when caucho replaced quinine as the area’s most valuable commodity, itinerant trading posts gave way to more permanent estates, called fundos, where hundreds of indebted peones tended cattle, cotton, sugarcane and other cash crops in addition to collecting rubber (Rice 1903: 406; Reeve 1988: 22–24; Dall’Alba 1992; Cabodevilla 1994, 1996; Gianotti 1997: 35–53). By 1925, according to María del Pilar Gamarra (1996: 47), more than one hundred fundos operated in the southern reaches of Oriente Prov-ince. In Ecuador, large landowners became known as the señores ribereños (masters of the river banks).

From 1885 to about 1930, rubber was usually sold in Iquitos or to agents of commercial houses there (aviadores) who supplied the trade goods with which Indians were paid. The most infamous aviador was Julio César Arana’s Peruvian Amazon Company (PAC), known as the Casa Arana. Indeed, it was the British Parliament’s investigation of PAC (registered as an English company) that eventually exposed “the crimes of the Putu-mayo.”4 But Arana also knew his limits. Even with aggressive support from the Peruvian army and navy, he seldom tried to exert direct control over rubber production beyond the Middle Putumayo, more or less at the eco-logical limit of Hevea growth.

Farther upstream, he followed a different business model, one more closely based on traditional debt relations. As the twentieth century began, he wove together a network of semi- independent collectors and minor avia-dores along the upper Putumayo and Napo Rivers (among other places) who sent their caucho to his agents in Cuembí, Güepí, or Rocafuerte. Arana was not the only aviador operating in the area: according to Emilio Gia-notti (1997: 53), the Casa Israel maintained a well- stocked warehouse in Rocafuerte; other merchants—including Casa Marius and Levy, Kahn and Israel, Morey and Co.—also worked the region (Santos Granero and Bar-clay 1999: 46–89). And in the lower Napo, Curaray, and Pastaza regions,

Surviving the Rubber Boom 531

señores ribereños were visited by smaller river launches that retrieved their harvests (Gamarra 1996: 63; Gianotti 1997: 52; Segal 1999: 25–27).

Indians, Missionaries, Rubber Collectors

In the Colombia- Ecuador borderlands, Indian- white relations never involved the overt violence and slavery that occurred farther south in the Hevea zone. Even fundos were unknown there. Indigenous people remained few in num-ber and were widely scattered among various river basins. As the rubber boom began, for example, Cofán people, who lived close to the Andean foothills along the Upper San Miguel and Aguarico Rivers, probably num-bered no more than four to five hundred. Their Siona neighbors, who occu-pied adjacent (and overlapping) territory along the Upper Putumayo, Agua-rico, and Cuyabeno Rivers, included about three hundred people. Under these circumstances, the possibilities of organizing intensive, Arana- style enterprises were nonexistent.

In 1896, Capuchin missionaries, expelled from Ecuador by Liberal President Eloy Alfaro, set up shop in Colombia. Backed by a Conservative government in Bogotá, they enjoyed almost unlimited authority over native people in a vast territory known as Caquetá y Putumayo. For the next two decades, they labored single- mindedly to build a road between Mocoa and Puerto Asís and then to bring in white settlers.5 They also extended their authority over isolated Indian communities stretching down into present- day Ecuador: their records provide a detailed picture of native settlement there. In 1898, for example, Fr. Antonio de Calamocha, traveling over old quinine trails, undertook an excursión apostólica throughout Cofán terri-tory. A decade earlier, in 1888, the Cofán had lived in two main clusters, one located on the Upper San Miguel and another on the Upper Aguarico. A smaller group had settled at San Rafael de la Coca, along a tributary of the Napo. When Calamocha visited, however, they were still recovering from epidemics that had passed through in 1895 and 1896. The San Miguel group had splintered into four dispersed communities “where some of them were collecting rubber for white men and the rest were panning for gold” (Calamocha 2002: 167). In addition, two or three families resided along the Guamués River, forty kilometers north of the San Miguel, at “the rubber station of D. Leónidas Ramírez” (147).6

During his visit, Calamocha counted 178 Cofán along the San Miguel and Guamués and another 78 in various settlements on the Aguarico, “although only nine men were present when I visited, because the rest were collecting rubber” (154). San Rafael had disappeared completely: in 1896, it was burned by Ecuadorians who carried off its inhabitants to an unknown

532 Robert Wasserstrom

fate. The entire Cofán population—15,000 people when the Jesuits counted them in 1611—stood at about 300 souls (perhaps sixty nuclear families).7 And he added another detail: as he was leaving San José del Aguarico, the Indians played a farewell tune on their drum and flute, “sadder than the one they play when they travel to the Marañon” (157).8 As for the Siona, he reported that many of them worked for Elías Andrade, a powerful cauchero living where the Aguarico joined the Napo; others served an unnamed white family located farther up the Aguarico near its confluence with the Eno (159).9

As native population declined, white caucheros tightened their hold over the Indians who remained. In 1908, Fr. Ildefonso de Tulcán retraced Calamocha’s earlier route among the Cofán and located only two brothers and their families on the Guamués “who were often in contact with white rubber collectors” (Tulcán 2002: 113). Reaching the San Miguel, he found that its inhabitants had dispersed upriver in flight from epidemics that had taken a heavy toll there. A day’s trip upriver took Tulcán and his party to Santa Rosa, where ten years earlier Calamocha had counted forty Cofán. Only a few families remained, now joined by Juan Paz, a Colombian rubber tapper and his family. “He was so cunning about the Indians,” wrote Tul-cán, “that when they moved from one place to another, he and his family moved with them” (116). At every major trailhead and river crossing, he found other caucheros: Cornelio Terán Puyana, Pedro Urbano, and Froilán Barrera and his brother Teófilo.

Around 1912, the missionaries extended an older trail from Puerto Asís to the Aguarico, where it continued to the Napo.10 But they soon real-ized that the proposed boundary with Ecuador would exclude most Cofán and Siona people from their jurisdiction (Vilanova 1947b: 29).11 In 1914, they decided to move the Indians from Ecuador to Colombia. Within two years, they organized a new Cofán mission on the Colombian side of the San Miguel River, which they called San Miguel Teteyé.12 Local caucheros, deprived of their workers, protested violently. “The Indians are indispens-able in the places where they already live,” wrote the deputy provincial com-missioner, Juan Paz (the rubber man who controlled Ecuadorian Cofán in Santa Rosa), “because commerce depends on them; they provide for every-one who passes through this territory. If they are taken away, the region will be abandoned.”13 But the missionaries remained unyielding. Over the years, they had prepared Basilio Aguinda, a Spanish- speaking elder from the Aguarico, as their proconsul. Now they brought him to Puerto Asís and had him elected gobernador of the Cofán, with the task of bringing other groups on the Aguarico and San Miguel “voluntarily” (by bribing them with trade goods) to the mission (Vilanova 1947b: 25; Friede 1952: 207).

Surviving the Rubber Boom 533

According to the Capuchin historian Fr. Pacífico de Vilanova (1947b: 24), their plan worked: 72 men—all but three—arrived with their families.14 A satellite post was created for the five or six families living on the Guamués; all in all, the total Cofán population in 1918 was estimated at 367 people.

Farther down the Putumayo, missionaries and caucheros were locked in a similar struggle for control of Siona communities. In 1898, Calamocha counted 428 Siona, but their numbers steadily decreased: in 1905, Fr. Jacinto de Quito found only 250 living in four main villages (Calamocha 2002: 172; Quito 1908: 12). Faced with a labor shortage, provincial authorities decided in 1913 to increase the native head tax, forcing Indians to work for caucheros and undermining their relationship with the priests.15 Fr. Fidel de Montclar, the Capuchin superior, protested that this policy would only cause more Indians to abandon their communities and disappear.16 Not-withstanding his protest, the tax was implemented.

Native communities faced other pressures. In 1914, one important rub-ber collector and local politician, Arsenio Muñoz, agreed to sell Siona and Huitoto families from Güepí to a Peruvian named Manuel Jesus Hidalgo. When a gunboat from the Casa Arana showed up to collect them, the mis-sionaries called for government intervention.17 Colombian officials quickly shifted the blame from Muñoz to the perfidious Peruvians.18 Six weeks later, the province’s commissioner bragged that he had “won a round against Peru” by convincing Siona people to return.19 No one knows how many others were taken downriver to Peru and never returned. Ultimately, though, the missionaries got their way: a Siona elder, Casimiro Castillo, was ordered to bring the main body of Siona to San José, a new mission on the Putumayo. By 1918, the friars had organized a boarding school for Siona and Cofán children at Puerto Asís. The next generation would be civilizados.

But things did not work out that way. In 1923, a virulent measles epi-demic—the one mentioned by Friede’s informant—broke out in Puerto Asís. Cofán and Siona people abandoned their missions and fled down the Putumayo. Fearing they would cross into Ecuador, the missionaries at first persuaded Colombian authorities to remove Cofán families in San Miguel away from the border to the satellite mission at Guamués.20 That plan col-lapsed after the provincial commissioner backed out: powerful caucheros were happy for Indians to live in Ecuador, free from missionary control.

Three years later, Fr. Bartolomé de Igualada went looking for them. Most of the Siona had settled in Güepí on the Colombian side, where together with Napo Runa and Huitoto they collected balata for local rubber men (quoted in Pinell 1928: 33–43). The Cofán had split into three groups, most likely reflecting earlier family divisions: a few households went north

534 Robert Wasserstrom

to San Antonio de Guamués, while a second contingent of thirty- six people settled temporarily along the northern (Colombian) bank of the San Miguel, opposite a smaller river known as the Sansahuari (45, 62). This spot marked the beginning of an important trail that led to the Cuyabeno River: a Colom-bian cauchero named Pedro Palomares had built his rubber post there and gave them work (Vilanova 1947a: 54). They soon moved on: in 1927, the American geologist Joseph Sinclair (1929: 212) encountered a handful of Cofán living far to the west along the Coca River, near the settlement that had been burned in 1896 by Ecuadorian raiders. No one else reoccupied it (Ferndon 1950: 4). The name “Sansahuari,” used to designate the Cofán who lived there temporarily, disappears from historical records.21

The third group—several extended families clustered around a so- called gobernador—eluded Igualada’s search altogether. Instead, they were found in 1924 by a Josephine missionary, Fr. Emilio Gianotti (1997: 65; Cabodevilla 2011), who had been sent to reconnoiter Ecuadorian ter-ritories now reassigned to his order. Gianotti encountered this group at a place called Tibifindié on the Aguarico, near the Eno. Apparently, they worked for a Colombian named Froilán, who lived at Benaqué. How long they remained there is unclear: when Gianotti passed nearby again four years later, he found nobody at all but came across recently abandoned Cofán camps suggesting that they still used the area for fishing and hunting (Gianotti 1997: 156–57). In any case, by 1944, the Ecuadorian Cofán seem to have reoccupied most of their pre- 1918 territory along the San Miguel and Aguarico headwaters. In 1947, when American Protestant missionaries took a census, they listed 517 Cofán in both countries; about 300 of them lived in Ecuador (Robinson 1979: 34). According to Friede, whose visit took place in 1945, three other groups—237 individuals (forty- one fami-lies)—remained in Colombia (Friede 1952: 210).

The Siona also reoccupied their former lands. As fears of the 1923 epidemic subsided, many Siona people moved away from the isolated and disease- ridden mission at San José and settled closer to Puerto Asís. Others followed Cofán families up the San Miguel and Aguarico Rivers, and eventually moved into the Upper Cuyabeno as well. Throughout the Aguarico Basin, Siona settlements were reestablished, although they felt the continued depredations of rubber collectors. In 1941, they were joined by another closely related group from Peru, the Secoya, who settled at San Pablo Kantesiya on the Aguarico; a second contingent arrived in 1973, when their combined numbers reached 374 (Vickers 1981). Across the Colombian border, 287 Siona resided in four small hamlets near the modern town of Santa Elena. And sixteen families intermarried with linguistically related Macaguajes who lived “dispersed among the white population along the

Surviving the Rubber Boom 535

rest of the Putumayo as far down as Puerto Leguizamo” (Langdon 1974: 43–44).

As the price of balata rose after 1920, rubber merchants shifted their operations farther down the Aguarico and San Miguel. Most balata was found along the lower Aguarico and Güeppí Rivers extending eastward into Colombia as far as the Caquetá. Between 1919 and 1924, however, the Colombian government prohibited all forms of rubber collection that involved cutting down trees. As a result, Colombian tappers moved across the San Miguel into Ecuador, where local officials readily accepted bribes and taxes.

The most infamous example involved Juan Paz, the former Colombian official who earlier collected caucho with Cofán laborers along the Upper Aguarico. In 1919, Paz was killed near Lake Cuyabeno as he tried to help Fr. Justo de San Martivell reach the region’s last infieles (heathens), the Tetete (San Martivell 1926; Cabodevilla 1997; Wasserstrom, Reider, and Lara 2011). No doubt Paz, who traded on both sides of the border, was eager to get his hands on the last virgin rubber stands in Ecuador before other col-lectors arrived. Until then, Tetete groups had avoided harming white men, which would have brought savage reprisals. But in attacking Paz (and his partner, Toribio Hernández), they declared war.22 Paz’s death set off a fire-storm of retribution by Colombian and Ecuadorian collectors that peaked around 1923. Much reduced in numbers, the Tetete retreated deeper into the swamps near Lake Cuyabeno, their former lands now occupied by rub-ber tappers. The last three survivors died around 1972.

Where Paz and Hernández failed, another Colombian, Cornelio Terán Puyana, enjoyed greater success. According to Ecuadorian officials, Terán (whose first rubber post on the Aguarico was visited in 1908 by Fr. Tul-cán) had established himself as “the main Colombian authority in terri-tory that is clearly ours” and claimed jurisdiction over the entire Agua-rico River down to Rocafuerte.23 In 1907 or 1908, he led an armed attack against Modesto Valdez, one of his rivals on the Cuyabeno. A year later, Terán was shot somewhere along the Upper Aguarico “on orders from Sr. Aquilino Ortega, who claims to be the Colombian official in charge there.” Wounded, he dragged himself into a canoe and floated toward Iquitos, ten days away, “which he apparently did not reach alive,” as one Ecuador-ian official gleefully informed his superiors.24 But schadenfreude was pre-mature. Terán soon returned and shifted his activities to the Güeppí River in Ecuador and then across the Putumayo into Colombia. By 1923, he domi-nated balata collection on both sides of the border around Güepí (spelled differently from the river), which had become a major regional entrepôt. Between 1923 and 1926, he made repeated (and unsuccessful) attempts to

536 Robert Wasserstrom

circumvent the Casa Arana and set up his own trading network.25 In 1930, when the Liberal Party took over Colombia’s government, he unsuccess-fully nominated himself to become provincial commissioner in the Putu-mayo. After that, he faded from view.

The Extractive Economy Recedes

By 1930, the Great Depression had finally disrupted international rubber markets, including Amazonian caucho and balata. Its effects were immedi-ately felt along the Upper Putumayo. In a report to his superiors, the civil commissioner in Mocoa complained that Peruvian launches no longer trav-eled to Colombian ports because nobody there produced anything worth taking back to Iquitos.26 Over the next thirty- five years, no major extrac-tive activity emerged to replace rubber. A few landowners and merchants traded shotguns, machetes, fishhooks, and cloth with native people for gold dust (Holloway 1932: 411). Otherwise, according to Shell Oil geolo-gist Karl T. Goldschmid (2005: 174), who surveyed the region around 1940, “The Natives generally show little interest in making money. They prefer to be left in peace.”

Without question, relations between Indians and whites in the region had shifted. Along the Napo and Curaray, many of the fundos collapsed; the rubber collectors were gone. By 1934, the area lay virtually deserted (Loch 1938: 96; Samaniego and Toro 1939). In 1941, when the US Rubber Development Corporation surveyed Amazonia for potential wartime sup-plies, its maps showed no caucho at all in the Colombia- Ecuador border-lands (Higbee 1951: 404–5). Citing Cofán oral tradition, Randall Borman (1996: 187) has described these years as “a time of increasing isolation for the surviving members of the culture. . . . The Cofans dedicated themselves to hunting, fishing, subsistence agriculture, artisan work, shamanism, and an occasional gold- panning expedition.”27

When Scott S. Robinson and William T. Vickers arrived to conduct ethnographic fieldwork among the Cofán (1968) and Siona- Secoya (1973), respectively, they found small but resilient societies that had regenerated during the two previous generations (Vickers 1976; Robinson 1979). Both groups lived in dispersed extended households that sometimes grew as large as twenty families. They maintained a diverse subsistence economy based on hunting, fishing, and gardening. Each settlement was headed by an elder who often served as shaman and political leader.

Subsequent inquiry focused not so much on how the Cofán and Siona recovered from fifty years of debt servitude but rather on how they had managed to escape its impact. And of course, later researchers faced a

Surviving the Rubber Boom 537

major sampling bias: they simply ignored the unknown number of Cofán and Siona who were taken downriver into la vorágine (the vortex) and never heard from again. Jean Langdon (1974: 37–40) cites the example of one cauchero “who took some sixty adults of the Oyo tribe [close relatives of Siona] to Peru because of the debts they owed them . . . and with their forced departure, the Oyo tribe became nearly extinct.” How might such events—including the disappearance of entire lineages, extended families, and categories of potential marriage partners—have changed our view of supposedly isolated tribal societies tucked away in remote upriver basins?

Without new evidence, it is impossible to trace the recovery process with certainty. Yet tantalizing hints can be found in missionary reports and other documents. In 1908, for example, Fr. Tulcán (2002: 117–18) wrote about his visit to Cofán people at Santa Rosa on the Upper San Miguel. There he met a young man named Luis, who had come from the Guamués to look for a wife. Luis had already found the woman he wanted to marry, but she and her family refused him, so he continued upriver to La Ber-meja. Here he was also rejected. Tulcán then advised him to consult with two local elders, who would find him an appropriate partner. In the same passage, Tulcán also described how he agreed to transport a second young Cofán man from the Aguarico to the San Miguel for marriage to a Santa Rosa woman. Already, it seems, modern Cofán marriage practices—with few rules other than the need to “marry individuals from far away” (Cepek, pers. comm., 2012)—were taking shape. Throughout these years, mis-sionaries also recognized differences of dialect, “temperament,” and cus-toms between Aguarico and San Miguel Indians, and they mentioned more shadowy groups along the Middle Aguarico and Cuyabeno with whom these Indians intermarried and traded. Beyond such friendly villages, Cofán and Siona men raided infieles whom they called Tetetes, carrying off their women and children. At one Cofán village, Tulcán gave last rights to an old man who was known as a “fierce Tetete killer”; at another, he tried to bap-tize a captive Tetete boy, but nobody would agree to serve as his godfather (Tulcán 2002: 121).

Most probably, each of the Cofán settlements visited by Tulcán—one on the Guamués, four along the Upper San Miguel, one at La Bermeja, and two on the Aguarico—represented the focal point of extended fami-lies that splintered or consolidated according to marriage alliances, con-flict over sorcery, and other issues. After the Teteyé mission collapsed in 1923, Cofán families evidently continued to split and create new settle-ments, although overall population (about three hundred people) remained unchanged. Between 1937 and 1944, Shell geologists exploring the Ecua-dorian rivers found seven small Cofán communities living along the Upper

538 Robert Wasserstrom

San Miguel and Aguarico Rivers and downstream as far as the Eno and Coca (Ferndon 1950: 4). According to Goldschmid (2005: 184), the Coca group also moved seasonally to hunt or fish along the Aguarico. Mean-while, in Colombia, Cofán people in Guamués had spread from their origi-nal village in San Antonio and by 1945 occupied three settlements, where they intermarried with Siona, Igano, and Macaguaje families (Chávez 1945: 578; Friede 1952: 210; Langdon 1985: 144). Beginning in the 1930s, these villages were increasingly surrounded by mestizo colonists who took their land to raise cattle, sugarcane and other crops. By contrast, their relatives in Ecuador lived in increasing isolation, reinforced by the early failure of oil exploration there. No further colonization or oil activity took place in the Ecuadorian Oriente until 1964.

In an ironic twist, missionaries were often forced to tread lightly on the issue that was most important to them: religion. From the beginning, they were well aware of Cofán and Siona shamanism, yet here they found themselves in a bind. Since 1773, most Indians in the borderlands had spent long periods on Catholic missions or under their control. They were Christians, not infieles, and it would be politically awkward to admit that the mission system had failed. So the Capuchins came up with a different narrative: Cofán and Siona people were not yet fully civilized, but neither were they salvajes (savages). Under the circumstances, overt repression of native beliefs was out of the question. Instead, indigenous curing and other practices, including yajé vision quests, were relegated to the less threaten-ing category of superstition.28 Tulcán and his colleagues understood very well the non- Christian leanings of shamanism. But as long as native curers respected the friars’ authority, accepted the sacraments, and celebrated major fiestas, they were safe.

In Ecuador, where Josephine priests replaced Capuchins in 1922, the newcomers apparently adopted a similar laissez- faire approach. When Fr. Gianotti made his first acquaintance with Cofán people on the Aguarico in 1924, he was greeted unselfconsciously by a village elder in the full sha-manic regalia of

red tunic, crown of parrot feathers of a thousand colors, necklace of jaguar teeth, strings of pearls around his neck, feathers in his nose, wearing a cape of fragrant leaves and palm fiber on his shoulders, his face well- painted with red ochre, surrounded by four robust sons simi-larly decorated. They all spoke good Spanish, slowly and purposefully. They are vigorous, but unaccustomed to work except as rowers and hunters. They are less docile and servile than other Indians, they are the masters in their own house. (Gianotti 1997: 65–66)

Surviving the Rubber Boom 539

For the next thirty years, Cofán and Siona social institutions effectively recovered. As Vickers describes it, they exercised agency in their own self- defense (pers. comm., 2012). In particular, recovery was facilitated by the compactness of their organization (family settlements revolving around a powerful healer) and the flexibility of social boundaries (easy intermarriage with other groups).

Conclusion: Native Identity Reconstituted

In 1955, American Protestant missionaries from the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL)/Wycliffe Bible Translators initiated the penultimate chap-ter in Cofán and Siona transformation (Robinson 1981; Vickers 1981; Stoll 1982; Goffin 1994). In Ecuador, SIL operated under contract to the national government, providing bilingual education, health care, and other services to remote native communities. It built airstrips in distant villages and a base camp at Limoncocha. By 1965, Cofán families had abandoned much of the territory reoccupied after 1923 and clustered around a SIL mission at Dureno (Fugler and Swenson 1971). According to Borman (1996:191–92), when the local headman there, Guillermo Quenamá, died in 1966, SIL missionaries (Borman’s parents) reluctantly assumed a leadership role that would otherwise fall to traditional elders. With slight variation, similar events took place among neighboring Siona- Secoya and Huaorani. A care-ful analysis of their impact on indigenous society has only just begun (e.g., Cepek 2012).

For the previous seventy- five years, however, Cofán and Siona his-tory comes more sharply into focus. Both groups survived a half- century of semivoluntary or forced labor because they lived in caucho forests, where mobile labor gangs were needed.29 Competition between caucheros and missionaries also may have kept them alive: from 1896 onward, mission-aries intervened to limit, if not completely prevent, rubber tappers from removing native people to Peru. Indigenous groups often shifted from mis-sions to rubber camps and back again, depending on the relative harshness of conditions in the missions and the trade goods available to them.

At the same time, native people experienced a constant redefinition of social, cultural, and linguistic space, as Cofán, Siona, Ingano, Macaguaje, and Huitoto households were absorbed into each other’s families. When Oyo and other Western Tucanoan lineages disappeared, for example, the survivors often became Siona or even Cofán. By contrast, along the Napo River and its tributaries, where missionary influence was limited, señores ribereños depopulated entire Quichua, Záparo, and other regions (Hudel-son 1981; Muratorio 1991; Cabodevilla 1996; Barclay 1998; Trujillo 2001).

540 Robert Wasserstrom

In such areas, a different form of cultural reconstruction occurred: ethno-genesis, the amalgamation of formerly distinct ethnic groups into small, dispersed, mostly Quichua- speaking communities (Whitten 1976; Reeve 1998: 75–77; Hill 1999: 750–53; Taylor 1999; Whitten 2011). Only the Huaorani successfully fought off intruders (Rival 2002).

Why has this compelling story been overlooked for so long? Perhaps one reason lies in a misunderstanding of extractive economies themselves. Modern writers (e.g., Yashar 2005) have often emphasized the limits of state influence in areas like the Amazon as evidence that indigenous people must have lived beyond the “margins of empire.” Yet such views seem to be at least partly anachronistic. As Esvertit (2008: 122) has pointed out, the Ecuadorian state, at least in its nineteenth- century robber- baron form, was seldom absent from the Oriente. Across the border in Colombia, Capu-chin missionaries exercised both civil and ecclesiastical authority: for three decades, they were the state. In both countries, the intensity of pressure on indigenous people was primarily determined by international markets for quinine, rubber, and gold, exported via Iquitos—not by the administrative fiat of authorities in Quito or Bogotá. If the Great Depression had not inter-vened, it is likely that Cofán and Siona groups would have followed their Tetete, Ono, Correguaje, and Macaguaje neighbors into historical memory.

Historical inquiry reminds us that the survival and regeneration of native society must be explained, not assumed. “Had it not been for the rapid decline of rubber gathering in lowland South America,” Jonathan Hill (1999: 753) has written, “it is doubtful that any indigenous peoples . . . would have survived into the twentieth century. The survivors of the Rub-ber Boom faced problems of constructing viable cultural identities in the aftermath of demographic collapse.” Yet the challenge of understanding this process frequently remains unmet. In the 1960s and 1970s, when anthro-pologists began modern ethnographic research in lowland Ecuador, they found a half- dozen native groups living in relatively remote places. For many researchers, it was difficult to imagine that traditional indigenous ter-ritories often coincided with old rubber outposts, derelict fundos, former missionary stations, and abandoned oil camps. Nor did they envision the maelstrom that had taken place fifty years earlier; it was easier to think that people who appeared isolated in modern times had somehow escaped with their cultural inheritance intact. But the real story turns out to be far more complicated and far more illuminating. Closer analysis of the rubber period and its aftermath, the impact of SIL and, later, of oil development, will shed new light on the critical evolution of ethnic identity that still takes place today.

Surviving the Rubber Boom 541

Notes

This article could not have been written without research assistance from María Eugenia Tamariz and Camilo Mongua. It is part of a larger investigation of recent history in Ecuador’s northern Amazon region co- directed with Teodoro Busta-mante at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO). I have also received invaluable comments from Frederica Barlay, Teodoro Bustamante, Marc Becker, Michael Cepek, Mary- Elizabeth Reeve, David Stoll, William Vickers, and Norman Whitten Jr. 1 Key sources about the Casa Arana and rubber slavery in the Lower Putumayo

include W. E. Hardenburg (1921); Roger Casement (1913); Charles Eberhardt (1913); John Collier (1968); Michael Taussig (1984, 1991); Camilo Domínguez and Augusto Gómez (1990); Michael Edward Stanfield (1998); Roberto Pineda Camacho (2000); Jordan Goodman (2009); Alberto Chirif and Manuel Cor-nejo Chaparro (2010).

2 For Bolivia, see J. Valorie Fifer (1970) and María del Pilar Gamarra (2007); for Brazil, see Barbara Weinstein (1983) and Bradford L. Barnham and Oliver T. Coomes (1996); for Peru, see Fernando Santos Granero and Frederica Barclay (1999), Guido Pennano (1988), and Pilar García Jordán (2001).

3 Jebe was high- quality rubber used primarily for tires. After 1914, it was pro-duced almost exclusively on plantations in Southeast Asia. Caucho and balata were lower- quality resins used in machine parts (valves, hoses) and cable insulation.

4 Santos Granero and Barclay (1999: 48–50) provide a persuasive analysis of the shift from debt peonage to violence as Arana intensified rubber production after 1902.

5 Anonymous [Fidel de Montclar] (1911); “Prospecto para la colonización del Putumayo,” Archivo Capuchino de Bogotá (hereafter ACB), 20 de abril de 1914; Gaspar de Monconill (1932); Pupiales (1934).

6 Most likely, Ramírez had moved there to take advantage of Cofán labor: a map from 1889 shows the “Sucumbíos tribe” extending northward to this point (Codazzi, Paz, and Pérez 1889).

7 As Randall Borman (2009: 226–27) has written, “By the early twentieth cen-tury, there were probably fewer than 400 Cofan surviving in the entire his-torical Cofan territory. One family group, numbering perhaps 25 people, lived along the upper reaches of the Aguarico and occasionally wandered into the Rio Cofanes region. . . . This family group enters modern history as the Umenda clan.” According to Cofán oral tradition, he continues, they worked as “guides for increasing numbers of mestizo explorers seeking rubber and gold in the Rio Cofanes region.”

8 Citing oral accounts from the 1980s, Lucy Ruíz Mantilla (1992: 78) wrote that one group of Cofán managed to return from the Marañon only after six years. Michael Cepek (2012) reports that the Cofán term for non- Indians is cocama, an indigenous group in Peru.

9 Fritz Up de Graf (1923) also provides a description of Andrade’s operation and locates it on his “Sketch Map of the Hinterlands of Iquitos,” at the end of his book (after p. 337).

10 Archivo General de la Nación, Bogotá (hereafter AGN- B), Ministerio de Gober-nación, tomo 693–94: 34.

542 Robert Wasserstrom

11 The border was established in July 1916. 12 Vilanova (1947b: 24); “Carta al Comisario Especial del Putumayo del RP Fr.

Estanislao de las Corts, 9 de junio de 1914,” Archivo de la Prefectura Apostólica de Sibundoy, Sibundoy, Colombia (hereafter APAS [currently the Archivo de la Diócesis de Mocoa- Sibundoy]).

13 “Carta del corregidor al comisario especial,” 1914, quoted in Friede (1952: 208). 14 According to Cepek (pers. comm., 2012), a Cofán leader named Santos Que-

namá and his two sons, Guillermo and Gregorio, refused to join the missions and remained on the Aguarico. Guillermo subsequently founded Dureno settle-ment and Gregorio created Duvuno settlement.

15 “Carta del Alcalde Municipal de Mocoa al Inspector de Policía del Alto Putu-mayo, 14 de septiembre de 1913,” APAS. In general, Colombian officials in the Putumayo district were also caucheros or their representatives. They faced the difficult political task of defending their country’s borders against Peru while also maintaining open commercial channels to Iquitos. Meanwhile, through the 1920s, Arana and his friends in the Peruvian army pushed relentlessly into Colombian (and Ecuadorian) territory.

16 “Carta del Fray Fidel de Montclar al Sr. Gral. Don Joaquín Escandón, Comi-sario Especial del Putumayo, Sibundoy, 23 de octubre de 1913,” R20, AGN-B.

17 “Telegrama al Comisario Especial del Prefecto Apostólico, 10 de mayo de 1914,” APAS; “Telegrama del Comisario Especial del Putumayo [Guillermo González] al Ministro de Relaciones Exteriores, 7 de junio de 1914,” R3, 178, AGN-B.

18 “Carta del R. P. Estanislao de las Corts al Comisario Especial, 28 de abril de 1914,” APAS.

19 “Telegrama del Comisario Especial del Putumayo [Guillermo González] a los Ministros de Gobierno y Relaciones Exteriores, 23 de julio de 1914,” R3, 183, AGN-B.

20 “Carta del Fr. Fidel de Montclar al Fr. Narciso de Batet, 24 de enero de 1924,” APAS.

21 Recently, it has been suggested that “the Sansahuari” were a distinct ethnic group that was extinguished by oil activity in the 1960s and 1970s. No evidence has been found to support this claim.

22 Ministerio de Gobierno, Sección Primera, tomo 842: 7, AGN-B. 23 “Carta del Jefe Político al Señor Gobernador de Oriente, 12 de noviembre de

1909,” Archivo de la Gobernación de Napo, Tena, Ecuador (hereafter AGN- T). 24 Ibid. 25 Terán’s preferred partner was Israel y Cia. In 1926, Fr. Gaspar de Pinell attempted

a similar project, but the Peruvian Navy blocked Colombian shipping and ended his venture.

26 “Informe que el Comisario Especial del Putumayo rinde al Ministro de Gobierno, 1930,” Ministerio de Gobierno, tomo 1043, leg. 106, AGN- B.

27 Scott S. Robinson (1979: 33) adds that one family of former caucheros “returned to the upper Aguarico to homestead in 1932, coming down the old trail from highland Carchi province in the Ecuadorian side. . . . This family established a profitable, alluvial gold- washing operation, at first using Kofan forced labor, but later importing Quijos Quechua from the Napo region in the south.”

28 Yajé is a preparation of the Banisteriopsis vine drunk by many Amazonian shamans to induce visions (Schultes and Raffauf 1990, 2004).

29 Vickers has suggested that the rubber boom did not fall “equally as harshly on

Surviving the Rubber Boom 543

each and every indigenous settlement and extended family within the Aguarico region”; less impacted groups provided repositories of native tradition derived from “the far larger Western Tucanoan population that was first encountered by Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (pers. comm., 2012).

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