Ethno-ethnohistory of the processes of territorial occupation and affirmation of the Western Tucanoans of the Putumayo River: Siona narratives and historical documents from the extractivist period 1860-1930

Abstract

The article explores the historical consciousness of the processes of territorial occupation and affirmation in the borderlands between Ecuador and Colombia, a region occupied traditionally by Western Tucanoan groups. Based on historical and anthropological investigations, we examine and correlate written documents with the ethno-ethnohistory of the Siona indigenous people of the period of quinine and rubber extraction. The written documents reveal the Colombian government’s concern for establishing presence, defense and state control of its territory. Siona oral narratives are about occupation of their ancestral lands as a place of belonging and of relations of exchange and conflict between the indigenous settlements. Rather than recounting the conflicts with the territorial invaders, Siona narratives of this period recall the epidemics and other misfortunes that afflicted their settlements along the Putumayo River, and inscribe in the geography the memories of critical events evoking relations between humans and non-humans in which shamans are main protagonists.

Keywords:
territoriality; Putumayo River; ethnohistory; narrative