Tukano medicine

In the northwest Amazon, along the Vaupés, the Apaporis, the Pirá Paraná and their tributaries, on the border of Colombia and Brazil, live the Tukano peoples. They speak related languages of the Tukanoan family: the Tukano themselves, who call themselves ye'pâ-masa, and the Desana, Barasana, Makuna, Wanano, Kubeo and others. A man marries a woman from a group with another language. As a result children grow up with their father's language, their mother's and often more, and several languages are heard in a single maloca, the great communal house.

According to their stories the first people came from the Milky Way in a canoe drawn by an anaconda: a man and a woman with three plants, manioc, coca and yajé. On their way upstream they founded the places of the peoples. At the mouth of the Pirá Paraná in the Apaporis, close to the equator, a large rock engraving marks the place where they arrived.

From the nineteenth century traders, missionaries and above all rubber seekers came into the region. The German ethnologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg, who lived there from 1903 to 1905, found abandoned villages on his return and wrote about murder and abuse by the rubber barons. Yet much of the Vaupés stayed inhabited by the peoples themselves, protected by waterfalls and rapids.

The Sun Father created the world, the plants and the animals. He gave beings the task of guarding creation and fertility, but also created evil, to punish people when they do not follow the customs. Forests, rivers, waterfalls and mountains are inhabited by spirits. The Master of Animals, Vai-mahsé, lives in the rocky hills and appears as a small red hunter; the Master of Fish lives in the waterfalls.

Whoever hunts or fishes without the healer having asked permission brings illness, snakes or storms upon himself. Broken food rules, envy and sorcery also make people ill. A common illness is susto, fright: fear of supernatural punishment, which makes a person tired and stop eating.

The world is one great body. Rivers are anacondas, whose rapids are their scales. The maloca is the universe: the roof is the sky, the posts are the mountains, the men's door lies in the east where the sun rises and the women's door in the west. Yajé is an umbilical cord that links people to the time of origins, and the red berries of kana are 'hearts on a string', the generations that follow one another. Red, the colour of blood, stands for life and strength. That is why the healer colours his hands red with the sap of a Philodendron before he examines a patient, and a mother paints red dots of achiote on her baby.

In Spanish the healer is called payé. The Barasana distinguish the kumu, who chants and blesses, and the yai, the jaguar shaman, who in trance is said to be able to turn into a jaguar. The office is not hereditary. A boy with a good memory, a good voice and an interest in the myths and the animals becomes an apprentice. He fasts, lives without sex, eats only manioc and water for months, often takes yajé and tobacco, and learns endless chants about the history of his people and the spirits he must speak with. After one or two years a dance follows at which the teacher gives his students feathers, beads and a rattle.

During a treatment the healer chants, shakes his rattle, blows tobacco smoke and blesses water, food or plants with his breath. Only then, or if that does not help, does he give plants. Ordinary people, and especially women, also know many remedies themselves. For lung complaints people drink a decoction of Justicia pectoralis, for inflamed eyes they drop a tea of Cayaponia, a bleeding wound gets the powder of cojamba, and for sleeplessness and susto the healer gives Souroubea.

Women work the manioc fields; the healers call them 'food mothers'. The men plant coca, tobacco, yajé and the fish poisons in a separate field, and pick coca every day. While the coca leaves are pounded in the evening, the healer tells the stories of origin. With Virola snuff he speaks with the spirits.

The knowledge is oral. It lives in the chants, in the stories that belong to every waterfall and rapid, and in the rock engravings along the rivers, which according to the peoples were made by the first beings. According to the Tukano, the images on the walls of the houses are what one sees when drinking yajé.

Theodor Koch-Grünberg described the peoples in Zwei Jahre unter den Indianern (1909–1910). Later came, among others, Irving Goldman on the Kubeo (1963), Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff on the Desana and Tukano cosmology (1968, 1971 and 1975) and Stephen Hugh-Jones on the Barasana (1979). Schultes worked there in the 1940s and 1950s and described the plants with the healers, among other works in The Healing Forest (1990) and Vine of the Soul (1992).

In 2011 UNESCO inscribed the traditional knowledge of the jaguar shamans of Yuruparí on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. That knowledge belongs to the peoples along the Pirá Paraná.

The Tukano peoples live in large Indigenous reserves in the Vaupés and neighbouring Brazil. According to UNESCO the jaguar shamans of Yuruparí keep a calendar of rituals, with chants and dances meant to keep people and land healthy. Boys learn the rules for health and the care of the land at their initiation, and women pass on their knowledge of caring for children and pregnant women and of preparing food.

Their life is under pressure from gold mining, armed groups, the drug trade and young people moving to the city. The communities along the Pirá Paraná are working with the Colombian government on a plan to protect their knowledge and their sacred places.

The peoples live among rainforest, black-water rivers and open sand savannas with table mountains. Peach palms stand close to the malocas, and dozens of kinds of manioc grow in the fields, which the women recognise by colour and origin.

The men grow coca, tobacco and yajé, and mix the coca powder with the ash of the leaves of the guarumo tree. From the forest they take the bark of Virola for snuff, and Justicia and Cayaponia grow near the houses. Souroubea grows on the savannas, and the red parasite cojamba on the damp forest floor. Many plants on the table mountains grow nowhere else; according to the peoples, the Masters of Animals live there.

The Yuruparí rites, with the sacred trumpets, belong to the men of these peoples and are secret; women may not see them. We therefore do not describe them. We also leave out the initiation rites and the healers' chants.

We leave out curare, the fish poisons and the aroids that women use as contraceptives, because they are poisonous or because it is the women's own knowledge.

Coca leaf and DMT, the active substance of Virola snuff, are on List I of the Dutch Opium Act. Yajé belongs to the peoples' own ceremonies.