Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
digging sticks of hard
palo santo
wood, the “very curious” rectangular
sandals, and their formidable war clubs.
25
Cardus reports that these people organized expeditions to steal metal,
and he was struck by how they cut up a single knife to make several wood-
hafted tools. Like D'Orbigny, Cardus linked Zamuco groups with the area
of Echoi and their defense of it to violence against them:
The Zamuco before were somewhat gentle, or at least one could talk to them, and
they came out to converse with the Chiquitanos and whites that went to mine salt,
and they knew how to ask for some tools or food. The Christians, however, were the
first to commit outrages [
tropelias
] against them, even killing some of them: and since
that time [1845] . . . they have declared themselves to be enemies of the whites and
Christians, taking revenge whenever they can. Because of this, to mine salt at the
salinas of san Jose and santiago, it is necessary to go in a group of many people, and
always with great care.
26
Archival sources, then, reveal how changing visions of this area and its
value were reflected in changing perceptions of Ayoreo humanity. For
outsiders, the place known as Echoi was alternately a zone of diabolical
savagery, a possible location of the Garden of Eden, a key geopolitical out-
post, a site for economic production and resource extraction, and finally,
an untouched wilderness. Likewise, representations of Ayoreo-speaking
people mirrored these shifts. Images of their humanity flashed quickly
from savages to converts and back again, before, in the early twentieth
century, they were perceived as “uncontacted” and thus in need, once
again, of contact and conversion. Each shift required a new version of
history to legitimize and sustain its meaningful projects.
Place Making
One alternate way to apprehend Echoi was as a manifestation of the
complex ways that Ayoreo-speaking people organized social space.
Ayoreo people used the word
uniri
to refer to the areas belonging to a
certain band or people, and it was often translated by them as
territo-
rio
. When I asked Totobiegosode men to draw maps of the
uniri
their
people ancestrally controlled and that they themselves occupied before
contact, they invariably depicted their land as comprised of distinct
and separated sequences of circles in a wider empty space. The circles
represented large named and fixed regions called
pamite dateode
. People
said these regions—which they drew like disconnected beads—were the
