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Caught two worlds i.c.u.1/4/2024 ![]() “How can you buy or sell the sky? The land? The idea is strange to us. During treaty negotiations in 1852, a native American named Chief Seattle said the tribe’s ancestral lands didn’t have a price. Indigenous people have been through this before throughout the Americas. “Things have changed so fast,” said Cahuilla, 38. Alcohol comes and men start hitting their wives.” But when the roads come, they destroy us, everything. “We don’t kill the animals,” said Alicia Cahuilla, a leader of the Waorani Nationality of Ecuador. ![]() Once the old Huaorani die off, “everything is going to be lost,” said Mipo, who said she did not know her age, but looked to be in her late 50s or early 60s.Īsked what life was like before oil workers and colonists arrived, Mipo said, “There was none of this. ![]() Others are trying to preserve their traditions. Some have adopted Western ways and work for oil companies. The Huaorani, also spelled Waorani, are deeply divided. The plight of the Huaorani offers a glimpse into the what may lie ahead for the Tagaeri and Taromenane, two Huaorani clans that have resisted contact with outsiders. Most Huaorani are “living in the mestizo world,” he said. They no longer want to speak their language and so they forget their language and they start to speak Spanish.” “I think that once they enter the Western world, I don’t know, something happens to their personality. “Now the Wao people are in pieces,” Nihua said. Since then, many of them have struggled to survive and adapt. Missionaries made the first peaceful contact with the Huaorani in 1958. Many have killed – or been killed – trying to prevent outsiders from taking or invading their land. The Huaorani, also called Waorani or Wao, have lived in the eastern jungles of Ecuador for centuries. “They are forgetting their identity, their culture.” “Many of the young people are changing a lot,” said Moipa Nihua, a Huaorani leader in a settlement called Yawepare. Nowadays, pierced ear lobes and other Huaorani traditions are disappearing. There was “a new stick every day,” said Mipo, who told her story while riding in a canoe along the Shushufindi River in eastern Ecuador. The elders returned the next day to make the holes bigger. Then several women grabbed Mipo and jammed a sharp wooden spine into one ear lobe, then the other. “You’ll remember this when I die,” the Huaorani elder told her. SHUSHUFINDI RIVER, Ecuador – When Nemonte Mipo was 12 or 13 years old, a village elder told her it was time to pierce her ears.
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