Yawanawá Rapé

The Yawanawá are a Pano-speaking people of the western Brazilian Amazon. Their name joins yawa — the white-lipped peccary, the wild pig that moves through the forest in great tight-knit herds — with nawa, “people.” They explain it themselves: “Nós somos como queixadas: todos juntos” — “we are like the peccaries: all together.” Togetherness is the idea the whole nation is named for.

On the Terra Indígena Rio Gregório, in the municipality of Tarauacá, in the state of Acre — the first Indigenous territory ever demarcated in Acre. Their villages sit along the winding Gregório River, centred on Nova Esperança (“New Hope,” founded 1992) with sister villages including Mutum and Sete Estrelas. It is deep forest: days by boat from the nearest town.

A language of the Pano family, closely related to those of their neighbours (Shaninawa, Yaminawá, Shawãdawa) and still spoken in the villages. Most Yawanawá are bilingual, with the elders holding the language most fully and Portuguese more common among the young — so the community runs its own schools and an active revitalisation effort to carry the language forward.

Around 850 in Brazil at the last health-service count (Siasi/Sesai, 2020), with smaller related communities across the borders in Peru and Bolivia. It is a story of recovery: a community census in the late 1990s counted only about 450, after the rubber era and the diseases that came with it had nearly undone them.

First contact, a little over a century ago, was violent — Peruvian rubber cutters (caucheiros), then Brazilian rubber bosses (seringalistas), on whose estates the Yawanawá ended up labouring for generations. Later, missionaries of the New Tribes Mission settled in the village and pressed them to abandon ayahuasca, their songs and their dances — until the Yawanawá expelled the mission in the early 1980s. A new generation of young leaders then won demarcation of the land (with FUNAI and the Comissão Pró-Índio do Acre), drove out the logging-and-cattle company that had moved in, and in 1993 struck a fair-trade partnership supplying urucum (annatto) to a cosmetics company — income that funded a deliberate revival of the culture that had so nearly been lost.

Revived in 2000 to bring the old culture back to life, it has grown into the tribe’s great annual gathering — several days at the full moon of song, dance, forest games, body-painting in urucum and jenipapo, and the sharing of sacred medicines. Once an act of cultural rescue, it now draws visitors from around the world to the Rio Gregório.

Their central medicine is uni (also nixi pae) — ayahuasca — worked with by the pajés for healing, vision and song. Alongside it they hold rume, their word for rapé (hapé), and sananga eye-drops, and — like several peoples of Acre — they also work with kambô, the secretion of the giant waxy tree frog. These medicines are not recreational; they belong to ceremony, discipline and the guidance of experienced practitioners.