Katukina Rapé

The people outsiders call “Katukina” call themselves the Noke Koî — “the true people.” They are a Pano-speaking people of the western Brazilian Amazon, organised into clans named for the beings of the forest and sky: the people of the Sun (Varinawa), the Jaguar (Kamanawa), the Otter (Satanawa), the Pupunha palm (Waninawa), the Sky (Nainawa) and the Juriti dove (Numanawa).

On demarcated Indigenous land in the state of Acre, in Brazil’s far west — most in the Terra Indígena Campinas/Katukina, with a smaller community in the Terra Indígena Rio Gregório. Their villages — Campinas, Varinawa, Samaúma, Masheya and Bananeira — sit along the BR-364, the lone highway between Rio Branco and Cruzeiro do Sul, which runs straight through their territory.

A language of the Pano family, still spoken every day within the community — children grow up in it, and Portuguese is used mainly with outsiders. Far from being lost, it is now being written down for the first time, in a Noke Koî dictionary built to carry it to the next generation.

Around 585 at the last published census, and steadily growing — a remarkable recovery for a people who numbered fewer than 200 in the 1970s, after the rubber era nearly destroyed them.

From the 1880s the rush for rubber brought waves of invasion and violent correrias that scattered and decimated them; survivors were dispersed across the rubber estates as tappers. They slowly regathered through the mid-20th century and won legal title to their land in the 1980s. The asphalting of the BR-364 around 2000 brought new pressure — thinning the game, opening the forest to traffic — part of why fair, direct trade in their medicines matters to them today.

Deeply. They are among the peoples most closely associated with kambô, the secretion of the giant waxy tree frog (Phyllomedusa bicolor), traditionally worked with to clear panema — heaviness and misfortune — and to bring strength for the hunt. It was from near the Katukina that kambô first spread into the wider world, and their knowledge of it later sat at the heart of international disputes over who owns traditional medicine. Their frog medicine is in our Katukina Kambô collection.

By hand, and by a rule they state plainly: they burn only wood that has already fallen. “The original peoples never cut a living tree — it causes an imbalance,” our maker in Acre explains. Ash from fallen trees is pounded in a wooden pilão with tobacco and the plant of each blend, then finely sieved. The one exception she volunteers is sananga, which they do cut — “because it does not fall, and it does not die.”