Читать книгу The Andes of Southern Peru - Isaiah Bowman - Страница 15

Nature as well as man works against the scattered tribes of Machigangas and their forest kinsmen. Their country is exceedingly broken by ramifying mountain spurs and valleys overhung with cliffs or bordered by bold, wet, fern-clad slopes. It is useless to try to cut your way by a direct route from one point to another. The country is mantled with heavy forest. You must follow the valleys, the ancient trails of the people. The larger valleys offer smooth sand-bars along the border of which canoes may be towed upstream, and there are little cultivated places for camps. But only a few of the tribes live along them, for they are also more accessible to the rubbermen. The smaller valleys, difficult of access, are more secure and there the tribal remnants live today. While the broken country thus offers a refuge to fugitive bands it is the broken country and its forest cover that combine to break up the population into small groups and keep them in an isolated and quarrelsome state. Chronic quarreling is not only the product of mere lack of contact. It is due to many causes, among which is a union of the habit of migration and divergent tribal speech. Every tribe has its own peculiar words in addition to those common to the group of tribes to which it belongs. Moreover each group of a tribe has its distinctive words. I have seen and used carefully prepared vocabularies—no two of which are alike throughout. They serve for communication with only a limited number of families. These peculiarities increase as experiences vary and new situations call for additions to or changes in their vocabularies, and when migrating tribes meet their speech may be so unlike as to make communication difficult. Thus arise suspicion, misunderstanding, plunder, and chronic war. Had they been a united people their defense of their rough country might have been successful. The tribes have been divided and now and again, to get firearms and ammunition with which to raid a neighbor, a tribe has joined its fortunes to those of vagrant rubber pickers only to find in time that its women were debased, its members decimated by strange and deadly diseases, and its old morality undermined by an insatiable desire for strong drink.[5] The Indian loses whether with the white or against him.

The forest Indian is held by his environment no less strongly than the plateau Indian. We hear much about the restriction of the plateau dweller to the cool zone in which the llama may live. As a matter of fact he lives far below the cool zone, where he no longer depends upon the llama but rather upon the mule for transport. The limits of his range correspond to the limits of the grasslands in the dry valley pockets already described (p. 42), or on the drier mountain slopes below the zone of heaviest rainfall (Fig. 54). It is this distribution that brought him into such intimate contact with the forest Indian. The old and dilapidated coca terraces of the Quechuas above the Yanatili almost overlook the forest patches where the Machigangas for centuries built their rude huts. A good deal has been written about the attempts of the Incas to extend their rule into this forest zone and about the failure of these attempts on account of the tropical climate. But the forest Indian was held by bonds equally secure. The cold climate of the plateau repelled him as it does today. His haunts are the hot valleys where he need wear only a wild-cotton shirt or where he may go naked altogether. That he raided the lands of the plateau Indian is certain, but he could never displace him. Only along the common borders of their domains, where the climates of two zones merged into each other, could the forest Indian and the plateau Indian seriously dispute each other’s claims to the land. Here was endless conflict but only feeble trade and only the most minute exchanges of cultural elements.

Even had they been as brothers they would have had little incentive to borrow cultural elements from each other. The forest dweller requires bow and arrow; the plateau dweller requires a hoe. There are fish in the warm river shallows of the forested zone; llamas, vicuña, vizcachas, etc., are a partial source of food supply on the plateau. Coca and potatoes are the chief products of the grassy mountain slopes; yuca, corn, bananas, are the chief vegetable foods grown on the tiny cultivated patches in the forest. The plateau dweller builds a thick-walled hut; the valley dweller a cane shack. So unlike are the two environments that it would be strange if there had been a mixture of racial types and cultures. The slight exchanges that were made seem little more than accidental. Even today the Machigangas who live on the highest slopes own a few pigs obtained from Quechuas, but they never eat their flesh; they keep them for pets merely. I saw not a single woolen article among the Indians along the Urubamba whereas Quechuas with woolen clothing were going back and forth regularly. Their baubles were of foreign make; likewise their few hoes, likewise their guns.

They clear the forest about a mid-cotton tree and spin and weave the cotton fiber into sacks, cords for climbing trees when they wish to chase a monkey, ropes for hauling their canoes, shirts for the married men and women, colored head-bands, and fish nets. The slender strong bamboo is gathered for arrows. The chunta palm, like bone for hardness, supplies them with bows and arrow heads. The brilliant red and yellow feathers of forest birds, also monkey bones and teeth, are their natural ornaments. Their life is absolutely distinct from that of their Quechua neighbors. Little wonder that for centuries forest and plateau Indians have been enemies and that their cultures are so distinct, for their environment everywhere calls for unlike modes of existence and distinct cultural development.