Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
idea evoked the sense, common at the time, that the unique climate and
ecological diversity of the Americas exerted a positive effect on its Euro-
pean inhabitants, in order to justify colonial domination by naturalizing
the social distance between Euro-American colonizers and Indigenous
peoples. The fact that savages now occupied the former location of the
Garden of Eden was thought to reflect the degraded nature of their hu-
manity. God's Grace was found in the bounty of American nature, and
criollos
became its only legitimate cultivators. Accordingly,
criollo
and
nationalist scholars continued to argue that the New World was the site
of the lost Paradise for the next two hundred years.
11
At the same time, practical efforts to colonize and thus restore di-
vine order to this region directly affected the everyday lives of Ayoreo-
speaking peoples. I pursued Echoi across archives in the United States,
Argentina, and Bolivia. And I found that Ayoreo groups and the Salinas
were inseparably linked in outsiders' imaginations of them. The Jesuit
priest Juan Bautista de Zea provided the first description of Ayoreo-
speaking groups in 1711. According to de Zea, they were “people of large
stature and good strength.” He took special note of the respect they paid
to their wives:
They honor their women with the title of Ladies, and truthfully they are so, because
they command their husbands, and it is due to their whims that they move from one
place to another; they never put a hand to domestic chores, rather, they are served
by their husbands, for even the most humble tasks. Although they have chiefs and
captains, this does not mean they have either government or religion, and they only
have some reverence for the devil's company. . . . To drink they have some jungles of
palm trees, from whose trunks they extract the thick and spongy heart, which when
squeezed alleviates the lack of water. In the winter it is very cold there and also freezes,
which does not bother the natives, although they go about naked, because their skin
is covered with callouses two fingers thick, and because of this they are robust, strong
and of great endurance, there are men and women that exceed 100 years of age and
die with no other ailment than old age.
12
Word lists compiled by early eighteenth-century Jesuits (and a linguist
named Ignace Chomé, in particular) prove that the language spoken by
these people is nearly identical to that of contemporary Ayoreo.
13
More-
over, the Jesuits noted that these Indians shared the same language with
several other groups—Curacates, Cucutades, Ugaroños, Sapios, Zamucos,
Careras, Zatienos, and Ibirayas. All of these groups, the priests noted, live
together “near some Salinas.”
14
That is, archival sources not only dem-
onstrate that these Zamuco groups were the ancestors of contemporary
