Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Amuesha Map

AMUESHA MAP -- TRANSCRIPT
Jon Miller

BRITNEY SPEARS SONG: You drive me crazy, crazy baby!

If you're looking for a place to pick up a Britney Spears tape, you might try Oxapampa, a tropical hill town on the western fringe of the Peruvian Amazon. With a little bargaining you can get one from this street vendor for about a dollar and a quarter. Or if you prefer, you can buy the Police, Nirvana, Kenny G or the Doors.

MOTOR-TAXI

With its motorcycle taxis and wide dirt streets, Oxapampa FEELS like a frontier outpost. But in fact it's well connected to the outside world. Every day a bus makes the 10 hour trip over the Andes from Lima. Last year an Internet place opened over a grocery store on the main square.

ELECTRIC GUITAR

Even the PEOPLE who live in Oxapampa tend to be from other places. In fact there's been so much immigration in recent years that the people who USED to live here have nearly all been forced to flee.

BIRDS, BUGS...

SMITH: This is the corridor that was the original Amuesha territory....

Richard Chase Smith sits on his porch on the outskirts of Oxapampa, a topographic map spread out before him on a wooden table. Tall and thin, with large hands, short white hair and blue eyes, Smith is an anthropologist who's been working on and off with the Amuesha people since the mid 1960s. The Amuesha -- they call themselves the Yanisha -- number about 6,000. Smith shows me how waves of settlers have pushed them farther and farther into the Amazon jungle.

SMITH: There's isolated families living in this part. In this corridor -- there's isolated families here, and there's probably isolated families down in here. We're trying to find them.

Visiting with Smith this morning is a wiry, hook-nosed, black-haired Amuesha man named Espiritu Bautista.

BAUTISTA (briefly in Spanish)

Smith and Bautista first met in the 1970s, when they talked about putting a book together on Amuesha geography. But the project never went forward and the two men fell out of touch. They met up again by chance in 1999. In the meantime, Smith had become something of an expert in Geographic Information Systems, or GIS, which combines satellite-aided mapping with computer database technology.

SMITH: Because I was now working with GIS, and we were doing a lot of mapping of indigenous communities in the Amazon, I suggested to him, why not use the new computer technology to combine a very precise base map with all the Amuesha names for places, rivers, mountains, waterfalls, streams, river crossings, house sites, and so forth and so on. And add in the song that the mountain sings. Or the bit of oral tradition that's associated with the waterfall. And add in maybe video clips of these places.

A first draft of that map is almost finished -- but a few key pieces are missing.

DOOR CLOSES, CAR STARTS...

Along with Bautista's 8 year-old son Elmo and a local friend of Smith's, we pile into into my old Land Cruiser and rattle out of town. We're headed to a place called Huancabamba, about an hour and a half away. A couple of years ago Smith found an Amuesha sacred site in a cow pasture there. Bautista, who's been going from village to village collecting information for the mapping project, has never seen it.

HONK HONK!

Not far from Oxapampa we pass a farmer's field with a ring of waist-high rectangular stones standing in the center.

SMITH: That's one of the sacred sites. That was the brother of the sun god who was changed -- turned to stone.

Smith says all the features of the landscape here have cosmological significance, dating back to when the sun god traveled through, battling ogres and monsters and wild animals, making the country safe for the Amuesha people.

SMITH: The sacred site we just passed used to be the center for enormous pilgrimages. People would come from all over the territory to do rituals at that site. They no longer come. During the times when they were doing pilgrimages, the oral tradition associated with many of these cliffs and so on would be repeated to those making the pilgrimage on foot. But because people aren't walking anymore, that oral tradition is not being passed on. So like Espiritu may have heard the stories, but has no idea where these places are.

FEET CRUNCHING IN BRUSH, men talking...

We arrive at last at the cow pasture in Huancabamb. Big squared-off stones lie on their sides, hidden by the high grass. Smith says the Amuesha consider the stones to be gods. A local rancher, a German immigrant, knocked them over looking for gold.

BAUTISTA SPEAKS in Amuesha...

After a few minutes Bautista takes out a little Walkman-style tape recorder and, in Amuesha, records his impressions. Although he's never been here, he recognizes the place from the songs and stories he learned as a child.

SMITH: He's almost positive this is the lost site of one of the brothers of the sun. That, you know, we've been hearing about through oral tradition for a long time, but they lost track of where the site was.

BAUTISTA SINGS

As part of his report, Bautista sings some verses from songs he's known since he was a boy. For the Amuesha, all the important places have songs. The songs aren't composed, but revealed by the spirits through the wind or the thunder or the murmur of a stream. The songs contain most of the group's history and myth.

SMITH: Finding this site, and sort of reincorporating it into the cosmography of the Amuesha, is extremely important. I mean, he'll go back now and tell everyone he's seen that he's been here, and that this site exists, and here it is.

CRICKETS, LAUGHTER

That night, with a light rain falling on the tin roof, I sit on the porch of Richard Smith's cabin and talk with him and Espiritu Bautista about their efforts to keep Amuesha culture from dying. The map is only a part of it, Bautista says -- he also wants to build a cultural center and a library, and to shore up a system of bilingual schools.

BAUTISTA: No podemos frenarlo, no podemos poner muro...

We can't stop the influences from coming in, he says. We can't build a wall. It's GOOD to know new things, it's good to live with other cultures. But we have to live with them in a healthy way, not forgetting who we are. We can be doctors, engineers, or millionaires -- but we are also Yanisha.

CRICKETS

Talking to Bautista, it's not hard for me to see how he and his people stand to lose something if they trade in their beliefs and songs and local knowledge for some generic imported modern market culture. But, I ask Smith, what about the rest of us? What do WE lose if the Amuesha vanish from the face of the earth?

SMITH: We lose diversity in the human experience. And I think that's extremely valuable.

MILLER: Valuable to all of us, or valuable to...

SMITH: I think valuable to humankind. You know, we are discovering how important biodiversity is, and that monocropping has brought the disappearance of innumberable species and varieties of cultivars, you know the same process is going on socially.

WOMAN'S VOICE, BAUTISTA SINGS

The next day I follow Bautista and Smith to the house of Teresa Ballesteros, a toothless, wrinkled, bright-eyed old woman who lives in a tiny Amuesha enclave just a few minutes from Oxapampa. Bautista sings for her, then plays the antara, a five-tone pan-pipe made from a jungle plant called carizo.

ANTARA MUSIC

Ballesteros is so pleased by the visit that she goes into her bedroom and comes back wearing a kushma, a traditional Amuesha robe, adorned with shells and seeds and the dried-out heads and bodies of parrots.

CONVERSATION

Today's visit isn't just a social call. Bautista has a list of questions about place names, and sacred sites, and the songs and myths and legends associated with them. He records her as she sings a song about the planet Venus.

OLD WOMAN SINGING

Watching all this is Ballesteros' 49-year-old son Pablo, and a couple of his teenage children. They look like they don't know quite what to make of it.

PABLO: El yanisha entiendo bien, pero hablar me hace un poco dificil...

I can understand Yanisha pretty well, he says, but speaking it is tough. The trouble is, we live too close to civilization. The children neither speak nor understand.

ACT 20: TERESA: Nosotros les ensenado Castellano no mas pues...

We only taught them Spanish, the old woman says. They used to tell us that we shouldn't teach our own language because they'd never learn Spanish. It pains me, because I can't talk much with them. I don't speak Spanish well at all.

ANTARA MUSIC

Breathing life into an ailing culture is a complicated business -- especially when so few of its members occupy the ancestral territory, and so few of the young can even understand the old. Clearly it takes more than recordings, databases and maps. But as Richard Smith and Espiritu Bautista agree, getting things down on tape and disks and paper is a big first step. It will be up to the children and grandchildren to decide what to do with the data.

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