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

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 indigenous territories often coincided with old rubber outposts, derelict haciendas, missionary stations, and abandoned oil camps. Nor did researchers envision the maelstrom 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.

In the Spirit of Oil: Unintended Flows and Leaky Lives in Northeastern Ecuador

“…I was interested in understanding how these experiences, and other past encounters with powerful 'others,' were brought to bear on their ongoing talks with Occidental Petroleum Company, a US-based oil company, which at the time held the rights to exploit resources below Secoya territory (Krøijer 2003(Krøijer , 2017. Over the next many years, I worked with the Secoya indigenous organisations in Peru and Ecuador on a binational land rights claim which would enable them to (re)establish a continuous binational territory in a border area historically torn by war, colonisation, and the effects of the rubber boom in the Upper Amazon (Casement 1913;Hardenburg 1913;Taussig 1987;Vickers 1989a;Santos-Granero and Barclay 2002;Wasserstrom 2014). When I returned again for long-term fieldwork in 2014-15, the Secoya were in talks with a Chinese-owned company, Andes Petrol Ecuador Ltd, which was bent on drilling two exploratory wells in the immediate vicinity of San Pablo Katëtsiaya.…”

Dialogicalidad, conflicto y memoria en etnohistoria siona1

“…La resistencia y la enfermedad, junto a los problemas de aislamiento y falta de comunicación con la zona andina (donde residía la administración colonial), contribuyeron a la interrupción de la actividad misionera hacia 1800. Cien años más tarde, los sacerdotes capuchinos volvieron a tomar el control del área como respuesta a la invasión de los patrones peruanos del caucho en las regiones de los cursos bajos del Caquetá y el Putumayo, y relocalizaron varias comunidades siona (Wasserstrom, 2014).…”

“…Los indígenas lo ahogaron después de unos veinte años (Pérez, 1862: 296;Markham, 1859;Kohn, 2002 La escena 4 es la más larga y consiste en un largo diálogo que repite los conflictos, pero está situado en el siglo xx, con la llegada de los capuchinos y su establecimiento del internado en Puerto Asís. Hablan de las relaciones laborales con los blancos (Wasserstrom, 2014) y el tiempo histórico es indexado por la referencia a la recolección de caucho (línea 33). En esta escena, son los capuchinos quienes acusan a los siona de ser perezosos por no obedecer sus órdenes de trabajo.…”

La colonia interna vigente: transformación del territorio humano en la región amazónica del Ecuador

“…A diferencia de los peruanos, quienes aprovechaban la navegabilidad de los ríos, los ecuatorianos debían atravesar las escarpadas montañas y profundas gargantas que forman las estribaciones orientales de los Andes ecuatorianos (Rudel, 1993). La presencia de la población colona de Costa y Sierra en la Amazonía permanecía limitada por la ausencia de carreteras (Bromley, 1981;Barclay, 1998;Wasserstrom, 2014).…”