Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
same. They yelled at us, “We are here and we are good inside!” They yelled loudly.
We yelled back, “don't be afraid of us, we are good inside! here we are and we
want to share turtles with you!” The others answered, “We have palm hearts and
we want to share them with you.” We shared with each other. no one could be
angry; they were all happy.
Author: That is good.
Jnupi: That is what we did. We gave each other things at echoi. We played games. The
young women played with the young men. We were strong. It was very good there
in that place, before the war. It was our trunk.
Author: did the people do the ceremony for Asojná, the nighthawk, at echoi?
Jnupi: Yes, they did that thing there, off to one side of Big salt. A place of sandy soil
and a spring. northeast. They said, “here we eat the world and the world eats us.”
They called it our bridge. That is what they said. Our bridge. sometimes we did it
together with people from other groups. There are many stories about that. The
people liked it at echoi because they would give each other things. They talked a
lot but more than that they would sing. All night long they sang.
This brief exchange not only seemed to confirm my desires, it exceeded
them. I became ever more convinced that Echoi was the key to rewriting
the past, present, and futures of Ayoreo-speaking peoples. Heartened by
this apparent confirmation, I began to collect stories about Echoi when-
ever I could over the following months and years. These were usually not
formal interviews but casual snippets of conversation written down after
the fact and only later systematized. What was most striking about these
fragments gathered across Bolivia and Paraguay was their consistency.
Those Ayoreo elders who had made a journey to this place shared a re-
markably similar set of impressions about the past significance of Echoi.
A Ñamocodegosi man from the community of Tunucujnai in Paraguay
remembered that the road to Echoi was clearly marked:
There were five different roads that our grandfathers traveled to arrive at echoi. The
roads were big and clear. They were the branches to our trunk. The Guidaigosode had
one, the direquednejnaigosode had one. The Totobiegosode and the Garaigosode
shared the same road to arrive there. We shared the road because echoi and its roads
had no owner. Anyone can travel the road to echoi.
I was told that these well-trodden footpaths led from the farthest
lands of Ayoreo-speaking groups to Echoi. According to my teachers,
people from all the various Ayoreo subgroups gathered there once a
year, between July and September, to collect salt and socialize. The an-
nual gatherings at Echoi could include hundreds of people from bands
