Total population | |
---|---|
Approx. 2,000 (various post-2001 est.) | |
Regions with significant populations | |
Peru Colombia Brazil | |
Languages | |
Bora, Spanish | |
Religion | |
Christian, Animist | |
Related ethnic groups | |
Witoto, Ocaina |
The Bora are an Indigenous tribe of the Peruvian, Colombian, and Brazilian Amazon, located between the Putumayo and Napo rivers.[ citation needed ]
The Bora speak a Witotan language and comprise approximately 2,000 people.[ citation needed ]
In the last forty years,[ clarification needed ] the Bora have become a largely settled people living mostly in permanent forest settlements.[ citation needed ]
The animist Bora worldview makes no distinction between the physical and spiritual worlds, and spirits are considered to be present throughout the world.[ citation needed ]
Bora families practice exogamy.[ clarification needed ][ citation needed ]
The Bora have an elaborate knowledge of the plant life of the surrounding rainforest. Like other indigenous peoples of the Peruvian Amazon, such as the Urarina, [1] plants, especially trees, hold a complex and important interest for the Bora.[ citation needed ]
Bows and arrows are the main weapons of the Bora culture used in person to person conflict.[ citation needed ]
The Bora have guarded their lands from both indigenous foes and outsider colonials. Around the time of the 20th century, the rubber boom had a devastating impact on the Boras, who suffered mistreatment during that time period. [2]
The Bora tribe's ancestral lands are currently threatened by illegal logging practices. The Bora have no indigenous reserves.[ citation needed ]
Uncontacted peoples are groups of indigenous peoples living without sustained contact with neighbouring communities and the world community. Groups who decide to remain uncontacted are referred to as indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation. Legal protections make estimating the total number of uncontacted peoples challenging, but estimates from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in the UN and the non-profit group Survival International point to between 100 and 200 uncontacted peoples numbering up to 10,000 individuals total. A majority of uncontacted peoples live in South America, particularly northern Brazil, where the Brazilian government and National Geographic estimate between 77 and 84 tribes reside.
The Putumayo River or Içá River is one of the tributaries of the Amazon River, southwest of and parallel to the Japurá River.
Bora is an indigenous language of South America spoken in the western region of Amazon rainforest. Bora is a tonal language which, other than the Ticuna language, is a unique trait in the region.
El Encanto is a town and municipality in the Amazonas Department, Colombia. It is located in the mouth of the Caraparaná River, tributary of the Putumayo River (Içá). El Encanto can be reached by air or river. The local navy base has a runway available only to military and official planes, these were established during the Colombia-Peru War. By river the closest towns with airport access are Puerto Arturo, Peru from downstream, and Puerto Leguízamo upstream.
The Urarina are an indigenous people of the Peruvian Amazon Basin (Loreto) who inhabit the valleys of the Chambira, Urituyacu, and Corrientes Rivers. According to both archaeological and historical sources, they have resided in the Chambira Basin of contemporary northeastern Peru for centuries. The Urarina refer to themselves as Kachá, while ethnologists know them by the ethnonym Urarina.
The Chambira River is a major tributary of the Marañón River, and has been the traditional territory of the Urarina peoples for at least the past 350 years, if not longer. Located in the Amazon jungle of Peru, otherwise known as the Selva, the Chambira is a tropical waterway with many purposes. There is a huge diversity of plants and animals in this region, which creates a unique ecosystem around the river. Made up of "palm-swamps", the region takes its name from the Chambira palm.
The Matsés or Mayoruna are an indigenous people of the Peruvian and Brazilian Amazon. Their traditional homelands are located between the Javari and Galvez rivers. The Matsés have long guarded their lands from other indigenous tribes and struggle with encroachment from illegal logging practices and poaching.
The Indigenous peoples of Peru, or Native Peruvians, comprise a large number of ethnic groups who inhabit territory in present-day Peru. Indigenous cultures developed here for thousands of years before the arrival of the Spanish in 1532.
La Chorrera is a town and municipality in the southern Colombian Department of Amazonas. The population is largely engaged in agricultural production, hunting, fishing, and banana and cassava growing. The municipality was once a notable site for rubber production: exploited by the Peruvian Julio César Arana, who owned the Peruvian Amazon Company at the turn of the 20th century, north of the Putumayo River. The territory has an area of 12670 km².
The Amazon rubber cycle or boom was an important part of the economic and social history of Brazil and Amazonian regions of neighboring countries, being related to the extraction and commercialization of rubber. Centered in the Amazon Basin, the boom resulted in a large expansion of colonization in the area, attracting immigrant workers, generating wealth, causing cultural and social transformations, and disrupting local indigenous societies.
Indigenous people under the nation-state have experienced exclusion and dispossession. With the rise in globalization, material advantages for indigenous populations have diminished. At times, national governments have negotiated natural resources without taking into account whether or not these resources exist on indigenous lands. In this sense for many indigenous populations, the effects of globalization mirror the effects of the conquest in the mid 16th century.
Urarina is an isolated language spoken in Peru, specifically in the Loreto Region of Northwest Peru, by the Urarina people. There are around 3,000 speakers in Urarinas District. It uses a Latin script. It is also known as Itucali, Simacu or Shimacu.
The Jivaroan peoples are the indigenous peoples in the headwaters of the Marañon River and its tributaries, in northern Peru and eastern Ecuador. The tribes speak the Chicham languages.
Julio César Arana del Águila, (1864–1952) was a Peruvian entrepreneur and politician. A major figure in the rubber industry in the upper Amazon basin, he is probably best known in the English-speaking world through Walt Hardenburg's 1909 articles in the British magazine Truth, accusing him of practices that amounted to a terroristic reign of slavery over the natives of the region. A company of which he was the general manager, the Peruvian Amazon Company, was investigated by a commission in 1910 on which Roger Casement served. He was appointed its liquidator in September 1911. He later blamed the downfall of the company on the British directors for neglecting to manage the Peruvian staff, of whom he was chief. Arana was the main perpetrator of the Putumayo genocide: where his company exploited and exhausted Indigenous populations to death, in exchange for rubber.
The Peruvian Amazon Company, also called the Anglo-Peruvian Amazon Rubber Co, was a rubber boom company that operated in Peru in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Based in Iquitos, it became notorious for the ill treatment of its Indigenous workers in the Amazon Basin, whom its field forces treated as slaves. The company's practices were exposed in 1912 by the investigative report of British consul-general Roger Casement and an article and book by journalist W. E. Hardenburg.
The Putumayo genocide is the term which is used in reference to the enslavement, massacres and ethnocide of the Indigenous population of the Amazon at the hands of the Peruvian Amazon Company, specifically in the area between the Putumayo River and the Caquetá River during the Amazon rubber boom period from 1879 to 1912.
Armando Normand (1880–?) was a plantation manager of Peruvian and Bolivian descent who had a central role in the Peruvian Amazon Company’s perpetration of the Putumayo genocide.
Miguel S. Loayza (c.1870-1960s) was a manager of the Peruvian Amazon Company at its El Encanto headquarters. Benjamin Saldaña Rocca included Loayza in his original criminal petition against eighteen members of the company for atrocious crimes. The criminal petition indicted Loayza and the others with fraud, robbery, rape and aggravated murder. Judge Carlos A. Válcarcel and Walter Ernest Hardenburg implicated Loayza with an incident in 1907 that result in the massacre of multiple Colombians. Ultimately, Miguel was never prosecuted for his role in the incident, or any involvement with the Putumayo genocide.
Benjamin Saldaña Rocca (1865–1912) was a distinguished Peruvian soldier and later journalist, mostly known for his role in exposing the Putumayo genocide which was perpetrated by Julio César Arana and the Peruvian Amazon Company. Saldaña established the newspapers La Sancion and La Felpa, which made revelations about crimes occurring in the Putumayo under Arana's Company, and publicly campaigned for justice to be served in the region.
Andrés O'Donnell (1886–?) was an agent of the Peruvian Amazon Company of Irish–Peruvian descent, employed in the Putumayo River basin between 1903 and 1910. He managed the Entre Rios station for the Company, which collected rubber from locally enslaved indigenous populations. In 1910 Roger Casement described his plantation as "merely a center of terrorization – that is all." O'Donnell is included in three different testimonial correspondences collected in Walter Ernest Hardenburg's 'The Putumayo: The Devil's Paradise,' and at least five testimonies collected by Roger Casement in 1910. Casement's report as well as Hardenburg's book were published in 1912, and helped to expose atrocities that occurred during the Putumayo genocide. An investigation carried out by judge Carlos A. Valcárcel later managed to collect at least twenty three depositions that incriminated O'Donnell in the Putumayo genocide. O'Donnell separated from the Company in 1910, and later disappeared without a trace in the United States around New York.