Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
peaceful contacts with Guidaigosode since around the 1930s, nearly all
living Totobiegosode can count someone who originated in a Guidai-
gosode subgroup as a direct ancestor within the last three generations.
27
The
uage
group, in other words, was not historically conceived only as a
function of its individual members, nor did group identity or territorial
range define the limits of the individual or the family. Echoi was perhaps
the most elaborate expression of a general socio-spatial system, in which
group affiliations were counterbalanced by wider bonds of shared belong-
ing. These bonds were emphasized in face-to-face encounters between
groups that were as mutually suspicious as they were deeply related.
Colonial Coordinates
Echoi also played a central role in colonial cosmologies of space and
value. My explorations in the archive revealed that the association of
Ayoreo-speaking people and the area of Echoi organized a variety of co-
lonial projects. The success of early missionary efforts to collect Ayoreo
souls depended on the historical link between Ayoreo and Echoi. Like
the Jesuits and Padre Cardus before them, twentieth-century evangelical
missionaries learned of Echoi's significance from Ayoreo slaves. Armed
with this strategic information, missionaries soon began to concentrate
their “first contact” efforts on the vicinity of the salt lakes.
These contacts were the final stage in a much longer process of dispos-
sessing Ayoreo-speaking people of land and life. In the 1870s, the Para-
guayan government sold off large portions of the territories of southern
and eastern Ayoreo-speaking groups on international markets to pay for
the disastrous War of the Triple Alliance, which killed nearly 75 percent
of Paraguay's total population.
28
Much of this land was bought by tan-
nin companies seeking the red axe-breaking wood of
quebracho colorado
trees used to tan the hides of feral Argentine cattle for later shipment to
Europe. For instance, land occupied by Totobiegosode and Garaigosode
was included in the holdings of the quebracho baron Carlos Casado, who
at one point owned more than eleven million acres of land through
which his own private railroad extended 145 kilometers inland from the
Rio Paraguay. To replace the extreme war casualties, Paraguay also en-
couraged European immigration, particularly from Germany.
29
Tensions between Bolivia and Paraguay over control of the northern
Chaco were already simmering by 1900. As part of Paraguay's claim to
the area, the government brokered a deal with Casado in which part
of his Chaco holdings were granted to a group of Canadian Mennonite
