Introduction
The establishment of the Shuar Federation, the first ‘ethnic federation’ in the Ecuadorean Amazon,Footnote 1 in 1964 in the province of Morona Santiago took place in a wider context of transformation. In that year the ruling military junta implemented the first agrarian reform and colonisation law. At the same time, one of the main actors in the internal colonisation of the Amazonian lowlands, the Catholic Church, formulated, through the Second Vatican Council (1962–5), a social justice agenda which inspired liberation theology propositions. One of the Catholic orders, the Salesian, that was most clearly influenced by this new orientation was charged by the Ecuadorean state with the mission to ‘civilise’ the Shuar people inhabiting the province of Morona Santiago. During this and the following decades the Salesian mission performed the ambiguous role of advancing settler colonisation and agrarian expansion and, at the same time, facilitating Shuar ethnic organisation, territorial politics and cultural revitalisation: the ethnic mobilisation of the Shuar, which led to the founding of the Shuar Federation in 1964, was enmeshed in the Salesians’ colonising efforts.
The ambiguities of the Salesians’ position arose from the combination of religious conversion and a set of subsidiary activities: linguistic studies and the establishment of a regional bilingual education system, recording of Shuar mythology and ethnographic studies of religious practice, writing of Shuar history and support for ethnic organisation building. This academic and religious work contributed to the Salesians’ disentangling the Shuar from their ‘savageness’ and was accompanied by increased questioning on the part of the Salesians of the primacy of their own knowledge. Through their activities the missionaries brought a new kind of sensitivity into the ‘civilising’ governance project in the late 1950s and in the following decades. Without abandoning the colonising project of conversion and ‘civilisation’, the Salesian missionaries started to view the Shuar as people with different social and cultural traits. In this period the Salesians increasingly acknowledged that interaction with the Shuar required another kind of cultural recognition.Footnote 2
A similar reorientation cannot be observed in the neighbouring province, Zamora Chinchipe. The Franciscan mission operating in this area retained a vision of the Amazonian lowlands as an immense, desolate and virgin territory, the dominion of ‘savages’ and the ‘primitive’.Footnote 3 The Franciscan authorities continued in the 1960s–80s to portray the Shuar as the original owners of the forest, and viewed them at the same time as beings in the process of incorporation into ‘civilisation’, as malleable subjects, ‘docile and willing to receive civic and Christian instruction’,Footnote 4 ‘marginal elements’ in the process of maturation.Footnote 5 Their relevance as beings was tied to their becoming subjects comparable to (yet distinct from) Christian, peasant colonos.Footnote 6
My main objective in this article is to explain and contextualise the difference in these two Catholic missions’ approaches to the Shuar at a crucial moment of change, by exploring their roles in two delegated governance projects.Footnote 7 More specifically, I examine whether and how cultural translation (the recognition of Shuar otherness) formed part of the missions’ institutional practices. From 1889, when the Ecuadorean state divided the Ecuadorean Amazon into four Catholic vicariates, the Catholic missions played central roles in state-supported efforts to colonise the Amazon region and to unite it politically and economically with the rest of the nation. The missions formed part of delegated governance projects in coordination with other actors, and in particular with the military and state institutions for economic development and colonisation of the Amazonian lowlands – from 1964, the Instituto Ecuatoriano de Reforma Agraria y Colonización (Ecuadorean Institute of Agrarian Reform and Colonisation, IERAC). The specific functions of the missionaries were to implement plans for and manage the concentration of indigenous populations in Indian reserves, and later in inhabited centres,Footnote 8 in combination with the conversion of the so-called ‘savages’ to the Christian faith. Both functions implied an incorporation of the indigenous other through modes of dispossession and elimination. The rationale was twofold – to make space available for the expansion of colono livestock agriculture, and to expand the influence of the ‘civilised’ world into areas of increasing national concern.
These functions were generally shared by all religious missions involved in the colonisation of the Ecuadorean Amazon in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, yet their practices differed and changed over time. In this study I focus on the Salesian and Franciscans missions’ divergent individual and institutional practices, and their particular historical trajectories in the southernmost Amazonian provinces of the country, also referred to as the south-east. I explore differences in the ways the Salesians and the Franciscans practised the concentration and conversion of the Shuar people, by paying special attention to how sensitive they were to the cultural distinctiveness of the colonised Shuar subject. Crucial to this discussion is how cultural translation (see the following section) formed part of the missions’ institutional practices of incorporating the Shuar into the Christian and ‘civilised’ world. These issues can give us insight into the governance sensitivity of projects that formed part of the same colonial process, but which at the same time produced significantly different effects. In this paper I seek to understand how these diverging governance sensitivities influenced territorial politics, and I argue that while the Salesians’ recognition of Shuar otherness informed their undertakings to protect Shuar territories, the Franciscans’ emphasis on a peasant work ethic as a basic component of conversion seriously weakened protection of Shuar lands.
Additionally, I hope in this paper to contribute to the debate about a relatively less well known part of the colonisation history of one of ‘the most well-studied indigenous groups of lowland South America’.Footnote 9 By reference to published accounts and analyses, alongside recent empirical research at the archive of the Franciscan mission in the city of Zamora, I aim at adding to the literature on historical Shuar–Apachi relationships.Footnote 10 I thereby highlight distinctions that are relatively poorly understood in the existing literature regarding missionary projects and dynamics with different ramifications for territorial and indigenous politics.
The archival material considered comprises a series of correspondence books containing letters, reports, notes, announcements, speeches and some press releases sent and received by the Bishops who served at the Franciscan Vicariate in Zamora in the period 1950–89. The correspondence includes that written by both ecclesiastical and secular authorities and contains some communications with the colono population. In October 2017, I carried out a systematic review of this archival material, producing digital photographic files of a total of 626 documents. I make use of an approach from the historical and archival turn in social research,Footnote 11 which analyses colonisation from the perspectives of the governing authorities, and views archives as sites for the inscription of authoritative knowledge about governance.Footnote 12 The use of the archive serves here as a vantage point from which to revisit historical missionary accounts and ethnographic and historiographical studies with a specific emphasis on the history of the Franciscan mission in Zamora.
Following this introduction, the article is divided into four sections followed by a conclusion. In the first section, I outline the conceptual framework that informs my analysis. The ambition of the second section is to locate the Catholic missions’ work of conversion within a regional historical–ethnographic context. This account is followed by sections where I discuss in greater detail two aspects of colonisation in the 1940s–80s: linguistic and cultural translation, and land acquisition and territorial politics.
Governance Sensitivities – Some Conceptual Considerations
In this discussion of sensitivities in the two Catholic missions’ governance projects I draw on propositions which analyse the state through its many and varied institutional practices, constituted on the basis of ‘multiple and conflicting claims to the right of rule, within government institutions, beyond them, and between what is generally considered to be inside and outside of the state’.Footnote 13 More specifically this study considers the Ecuadorean state's delegation of authority in order to administer and rule over inhabitants and habitats in so-called remote areasFootnote 14 – the Amazonian south-east which, in the historical period I consider, was in the process of becoming a governed national space. Governance of this space was, according to Cecilia Ortiz Batallas, characterised not by state absence, but by its delegation to other actors such as the Catholic missionaries and the military.Footnote 15 Projects of ‘civilisation’ through Christian evangelisation, colonisation through agricultural expansion and national securitisation through the defence of territorial sovereignty and national borders were intertwined by this kind of governance. Intersecting with but far from being ‘bound to [the] authorizing agendas’ of ‘official institutions of government’,Footnote 16 the Salesian and Franciscan missions were proactive agents which defined and enacted the transformation of the lifeworld of the ‘savages’. Despite their commonalities, I argue that the specific colonial projects the missions took part in led to different kinds of political subjection and to the shaping of different colonial subjects.
My main contention is that the coercive processes resulting from these colonial projects were characterised by different governance sensitivities. To clarify the meaning of this concept I will make a short detour via several interlinked analytical concepts – elimination, incorporation, recognition and translation. This detour will be guided by the revisiting of two theoretical discussions in combination, namely reflections on the ‘logic of elimination’ inspired by Patrick Wolfe's work on settler colonialism,Footnote 17 and anthropological perspectives on cultural translation.Footnote 18 Without intending to argue that the colonisation of the Shuar is a version of settler colonialism as such, a significant resemblance between the strategies of colonisation in the Ecuadorean south-east and the mechanisms of elimination described in Wolfe's research is worth noting. Moreover, a recent interest in exploring settler colonial perspectives in the study of colonisation and the ‘coloniality of power’ in Latin AmericaFootnote 19 suggests in more general terms the relevance of drawing on Wolfe's insights in order to understand the colonisation history of the Shuar.
In his extensive work on settler colonialism, Wolfe seeks to identify a set of key features that in one way or another imply elimination – spanning a spectrum of strategies from genocide to conversion and assimilation. No genocide took place in the colonisation of the Shuar, but other eliminatory mechanisms were definitely at work: abduction – the separation of Shuar children from their families and living spaces and their placing in boarding schools; concentration – the massing together of indigenous people in centres tied to colonising authorities and institutions (mission, military, school); conversion – the religious instruction of the Shuar and the remoulding of ‘savage’ minds based on the Christian faith and an ideal of a peasant work ethic. Underlying these mechanisms of elimination was the quest for land, i.e. the freeing up of land for the new colono population, and the organisation and control of populations in an area marked by a continuing national border conflict with Peru.
Mechanisms and strategies of elimination constitute the logic behind the incorporation of the Shuar into colonial structures of power and perception. The construction of colonial subjects in this context presupposes the disintegration of indigenous society – the restructuring of living spaces, the remoulding of minds and the dismantling of lifeworlds. Incorporation of the indigenous other takes place through mechanisms that exclude dimensions deemed by the colonisers to be unacceptable, incommensurable and inconceivable.Footnote 20 Moreover, the elimination of the indigenous paradoxically presupposes the existence of an authentic other. Wolfe uses the concept ‘repressive authenticity’ to describe the process by which the erasure of what the indigenous were is replaced by an authenticity that the colonisers ascribe to them.Footnote 21 As Glen Coulthard points out, colonial incorporation implies a form of ‘unequal exchange of institutionalized and interpersonal patterns of recognition between the colonial society and the Indigenous population’: the terms and values by which the indigenous peoples are recognised tend to ‘remain in the possession of those in power to bestow on their “inferiors” in ways that they deem appropriate’.Footnote 22
In this analysis of governance sensitivities, a general analytical framework regarding colonial incorporation by elimination will be refracted through a perspective on cultural translation. Cultural translation – as Talal Asad and others argue – refers to an extended understanding of translation beyond the transference of meaning between languages.Footnote 23 It includes the difficult task of making meaning, established through a specific set of practices within a specific form of life, comprehensible and coherent within another knowledge practice. This task of translation has been described as a betrayal in the sense that the intention of the original meaning caught in one web of significance is altered by its integration into another.Footnote 24 Transference of meaning from a source to a destination language and context implies in this view a displacement. Reconstructing meaning involves the reformulation of assumptions about knowing and being, assumptions which, in the case of the Shuar, are culturally distant from those of the colonisers, as the ethnographic literature indicates.Footnote 25 In his discussion, Asad also emphasises the asymmetrical dimension in the transference of meaning from a native source to an academic destination. Asymmetry here is not only a product of academia's major capacity to make cultural meaning circulate widely but, more importantly, a result of academics’ conception of their own knowledge production as having universal explanatory capacity. This understanding resonates with those of the colonisers of Ecuador's Amazonian south-east, who saw their own knowledge as based in universal ideals of ‘civilisation’ and modernity.
In their attempts to subvert the asymmetry of translation, some scholars argue that good translation implies betraying the destination language, not the source language. Building on Walter Benjamin, Asad writes that ‘The language of a translation can – in fact must – let itself go, so that it gives voice to the intentio of the original.’Footnote 26 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro elaborates on this idea: ‘A good translation is one that allows the alien concepts to deform and subvert the translator's conceptual toolbox so that the intentio of the original language can be expressed within the new one.’Footnote 27 The limitations and possibilities of cultural translation indicated here relate to what I conceptualise as the governance sensitivity of the Catholic missions’ colonial practices. The Salesians’ and Franciscans’ efforts to colonise and ‘civilise’ the Shuar implied, as already argued, incorporation based on mechanisms of elimination and asymmetrical recognition. The construction of the Shuar other formed part of this work, and the central question discussed in this article is whether this also implied some kind of cultural translation.
The missionaries’ construction of the indigenous other in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was informed both by the Catholic orders’ and the criollo elites’ perceptions and imaginaries of the ‘savage’ and the ‘Jíbaro’ as an antithesis to Western civilisation, and by a European understanding informed by the visions of and obsessive interest in ‘Jíbaro’ head-shrinking practice. In the early twentieth century, a series of ethnological studies added to this imagery without notably ‘dispelling the fantasies’ construed about the Shuar.Footnote 28 Ortiz Batallas argues that around the time of the Franciscans’ and the Salesians’ early missionary attempts in the late nineteenth century, the imagery of the ‘Jíbaro’ formed part of the political construct of the ‘Oriente’, which viewed the eastern tropical lowlands as a space ‘inhabited by “barbarian” people, nevertheless owners of wealth located in a savage geography distant from civilisation’.Footnote 29
Considering this colonial imagery, I ask how the missions’ construction of the Shuar other during the twentieth century, and especially during a period of political and intellectual change in the 1960s–80s, also involved cultural translation. Can we – in the Catholic missions’ capacity and willingness to learn from Shuar knowledge practices and social worlds – discern a move towards a greater governance sensitivity, a move towards ‘good translation’? My aim here is to understand how degrees and qualities of approximations to the Shuar influenced Franciscan and Salesian missionary practices differently. The relevance of this question also relates to the effects of these practices. Accounting for effects is of course a major task which goes far beyond what I try to do in this article. Hence, I will restrict my focus to the question of land and territorial politics – central issues in the Shuar ethnopolitical mobilisation and organisation in the 1960s–80s. In the following section I situate my study of the mission–Shuar relationship within a wider regional and historical context.
Constituting the ‘Savage’ Other – the Early Work of Conversion
Far from being the untouched and pristine tropical landscape of colonial imagery, the Upper Amazonia region (the high-altitude rainforest areas adjacent to the Colombian, Ecuadorean and Peruvian highlands) was the realm of traders, settlers, missionaries and the military, whose interventions contributed to its continuous transformation. Indigenous groups were, however, differently affected by these transformations. Except for an early intrusion of Hispanic colonisers involved in gold extraction in the period 1540–1620, the Shuar populated during most of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries a ‘fringe zone’, on the margins of missionary and resource extractive endeavours. The late sixteenth-century gold rush resulted in the establishment of several towns in the Upano and Zamora valleys, and the influx of a considerable mobile population searching for extraction sites and indigenous slave labour. The best-known (but not the only) Shuar response to this new presence was a series of uprisings that towards the end of the 1500s and the beginning of the 1600s resulted in the disintegration of the gold economy and the abandonment of colono settlements. The fate of the Corregidor (royal representative) of the town of Logroño, who was captured, tortured and executed in 1599, is a prominent symbol of the uprisings. Whilst pouring molten gold down his throat, his capturers asked him if he had finally satisfied his desire for the precious metal.Footnote 30
After the gold rush and until the eve of the nineteenth century, the Shuar lived relatively distant from the centres of natural resource extraction and missionary activity. Withdrawing from, negotiating with and resisting external actors, the Shuar mediated contact by maintaining relative independence.Footnote 31 From the 1850s onwards Peruvian expansion, which was closely related to the Amazonian rubber economy,Footnote 32 affected an area that had historically been under the authority of the colonial administration of Quito and, after independence, of the Ecuadorean republic. This included the Aénts Chicham-speaking areaFootnote 33 inhabited by the Shuar people. Towards the end of the century the Ecuadorean government appointed the Catholic missions as ‘the “only resource” to keep decisive control over these populations and territories’.Footnote 34 In 1889, Pope Leo XIII approved a petition from Ecuador's Liberal government to divide the whole of the Ecuadorean Amazon into four Catholic vicariates. From a government perspective interest in the Catholic missions was related to national defence concerns. The vicariates formed part of a strategy to curb Peruvian ‘military, administrative and political implantation’ in the foothills of Ecuadorean Amazonia.Footnote 35
In agreement with the political project of both Conservative and Liberal governments to integrate the Amazonian south-east, the Catholic missions adhered to the current of thought referred to in the academic literature as ‘Orientalista’. Building on notions of patriotism and the need to ‘Ecuadoreanise’ the tropical lowlands, the trope of the ‘Oriente’ originated, according to Ortiz Batallas, in nineteenth-century political discourse.Footnote 36 Orientalista imagery of the other is evident in a series of characteristics attributed by the missionaries to the Shuar identified by Anne Christine Taylor in a review of historical religious, secular and scientific texts from Latin America and Europe. Negative connotations predominated, such as ‘insolent anarchy’, ‘permanent state of war/chronic warmongering’, ‘disturbing misanthropy’, ‘anti- and non-religiousness’, ‘radical materialism’, ‘cold incredulousness’ and ‘sexual promiscuity’. These characteristics combined with more ambiguous associations, such as ‘warring ardour’, ‘fierce adherence to liberty’, ‘active opposition to hierarchy’, ‘untamed naturalness’ and ‘perverted intelligence’.Footnote 37
The violent practices of intra-tribal revenge raids and inter-tribal warfare were central elements in this imagery of the ‘savage other’.Footnote 38 The Orientalista notion of the ferocity of the Shuar was strongly associated with the practice of shrinking the heads of captured enemies.Footnote 39 Curiously, the heads, tsantsas, became a valued and desired international trade object during the Upper Amazonian rubber boom. Taylor writes that the first tsantsas appeared in Europe in the 1860s,Footnote 40 and according to Daniel Steel ‘the trade in shrunken heads was already well established between local Shuar and colonists when Franciscan missionaries arrived in Zamora in 1892’.Footnote 41 The leader of the first Franciscan expedition and mission to Zamora in 1892, Fray José Vidal, recounts first-hand experience with French traders trying to strike deals with the Shuar in the exchange of tsantsas.Footnote 42 There is no indication, however, that the Franciscans’ knowledge about head-shrinking was based on direct observations of the practice.Footnote 43
Vidal's report provides rich accounts of the ambivalent first encounters the Franciscans had with the Shuar of Zamora. He expresses the tension between what appears to have been peaceful and collaborative approaches on the part of the missionaries towards the ‘naturally clear-minded … Jíbaro’,Footnote 44 on the one hand, and the missionaries’ struggle to establish hierarchy and foment acceptance of their project, on the other. Despite these equivocal experiences the Franciscans adhered to negative Orientalista conceptions of the Shuar at certain decisive moments. The mission in Zamora was abandoned in 1897, owing in large part to these negative conceptions.Footnote 45
In the report commenting on the series of incidents that led up to the abandonment, Fray Luis Torra, the Superior of the mission in Zamora, evoked the image of ‘Jíbaro’ revenge.Footnote 46 Torra's account revolves around an exchange with members of a Shuar settlement from Quimi, a tributary of the Yacuambi river. The situation that occurred, and which the Franciscans interpreted as threatening, regarded their failure to cure two severely ill elderly Shuar, brought to Zamora by relatives in hope of receiving help from the missionaries. Since both died shortly after, the Franciscans expected that their failure to cure them would be interpreted by the Shuar as murder, which would have to be avenged. There is no indication in Torra's account of any violent reaction on the part of the Shuar to the death of the two elderly tribe members. Nevertheless, the missionaries perceived themselves to be in danger. With government failures to fulfil promises of support, they lacked personnel, weapons and ammunition with which to defend themselves. Consequently, they resorted to preventive action, described by Taylor as ‘reactions of aggressive panic’. They chased the five sons of the deceased Shuar and other ‘jíbaros’ who were supposed to be hatching a plot to kill the Christians in revenge for the deaths of the two elderly tribe members, caught three of them, brought them to the mission centre and forced them to whip each other. This type of response to a perceived threat was, according to Taylor, a common practice in colono communities that saw themselves vulnerable vis-à-vis the indigenous population, and was ‘almost always the product of a misunderstanding’.Footnote 47 The Franciscans’ prediction of and violent reaction to an imagined Shuar attack created an unsustainable situation of risk. In 1897 they decided to abandon the mission centre.
The process leading up to the abandonment indicates how an Orientalista vision of Shuar nature prevented the missionaries from following different paths of understanding the people they struggled to convert. In the next section I take a closer look at similar limitations in the Catholic missions’ understanding of Shuar ways of being and knowing, viewed against an increasing sensitivity emerging through work with the Shuar language (in the case of the Salesians).
A Path towards Cultural Translation
In the following I discuss how the Salesian and Franciscan missions related differently to the Shuar language. I argue that the writing and use of catechisms, dictionaries and grammars in the Shuar language, which from the outset had a functional aim in the work of conversion, laid the basis for a later cultural recognition of the Shuar by the Salesians, which did not take place in the case of the Franciscans. To contextualise this discussion, I outline some conditioning features I suggest contribute to explain why the two missions diverged in their approaches. The time period considered is the early twentieth century, up to the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s and during the bilingual educational initiatives of the late 1960s and early 70s.
When the Franciscan mission returned to Zamora in 1921, the Salesian mission had already had a long experience working with the Shuar. The Salesians established their first permanent mission in Gualaquiza in 1894 in the southernmost part of the vicariate and expanded during the first decades of the twentieth century to Indanza and Méndez, further north along the western banks of the Zamora and Upano rivers. In 1924, Macas was incorporated into the vicariate, and in the early 1930s the Salesian mission established the first mission station, Don Bosco de Sevilla, on the east side of the Upano river, beyond what at that time constituted an ‘ethnic frontier’.Footnote 48 Apart from in Macas, with its non-indigenous population history dating back to the sixteenth century, the Salesians interacted directly with the Shuar population in the early decades. Those working in Gualaquiza, and especially the ‘itinerant missionaries’, needed communicative tools to establish a ‘provisional “bridge” to Spanish’.Footnote 49 Juan Bottasso, Salesian and one of the main contributors to the academic study of Shuar–missionary relations,Footnote 50 notes interest in and also early work with the Shuar language among some Salesian missionaries.Footnote 51 Although motivated by the desire to evangelise, this work spurred over time a fascination with the language as an ‘admirable construction of forms, contents and modes of thinking’.Footnote 52
Bottasso points to this early exposure of the Salesians to the lifeworld of the Shuar as one of the dimensions that marks a difference from the Franciscan experience.Footnote 53 The Franciscans returned to Zamora in 1921 at the time of an emerging gold boom along the banks of the Zamora river and its tributaries. The panning of gold initiated migration from the Andean highlands to the south-east, and it caused the influx of a floating and semi-permanent population that far outnumbered the agricultural settlers. During the 1920s and 30s the Franciscans founded mission stations, new settlements and schools in Cumbaraza, relatively close to the mission centre in Zamora, and, in an area to the west along the Yacuambi river, at Cansama and San José de Yacuambi.Footnote 54 From the 1940s colonisation was driven by livestock agriculture in both vicariates.Footnote 55 Colonisation was a process that both missions facilitated and promoted, but the timing of the Franciscan return to Zamora, together with a significant difference in the size of the Shuar population in the two vicariates,Footnote 56 oriented missionary work in Zamora towards the colono population. These circumstances prevented the Franciscans from having more prolonged direct interaction with the Shuar independent of their relations with the colonos.
This relatively weak connection to the Shuar had implications for the ways Franciscans related to Shuar forms of being and knowing. Information about the Franciscans’ approach to the Shuar language is scarce in the literature and historical sources. In 1931, ten years after the mission's return to Zamora, the Franciscan Fray Tomás Conde wrote about the importance of learning Shuar in order to ‘communicate with the Jíbaro soul’.Footnote 57 From Conde we learn that the Franciscans did not write their own dictionaries, grammars and catechisms, but used those produced by the Salesians. Conde wrote that without explaining religious faith in the language of the target population ‘one will achieve little’,Footnote 58 echoing a view expressed by missionaries in Zamora in the 1890s.Footnote 59 He concluded: ‘to learn Jíbaro nowadays there is no other way than to immerse oneself in the forests and listen to the savages themselves, to study it with determination and speak it with them’.Footnote 60 Conde mentions Father Fernando Jaramillo (a Franciscan based at the missionary station in Cansama) as one of the few who reached a more comprehensive understanding of Shuar language: ‘He spent periods living with the savages, catechising in their houses, learning the Jíbaro language better than any other missionary.’Footnote 61
The Shuar language challenge that Conde comments on formed part of a general problem related to evangelisation and conversion: few missionaries had sufficient access to Shuar informants, and most lacked opportunities to expose themselves to and hence learn the Shuar language. In their desire to ‘save souls’ through baptism and the creation of native settlements, the missionaries gave gifts to the Shuar, but contact established this way depended on continued exchange. When the missionaries reduced gift-giving, the Shuar walked away. Conde explained this behaviour as an expression of Shuar's sense of independence. The ‘savages’, he wrote, are ‘inimical to accepting any oppressive power that prevents them exercising their seminomadic freedom’.Footnote 62 What the Franciscans thought of as a mode of facilitating conversion, the Shuar more likely viewed as an opportunity to trade and barter. Consequently, the missionaries’ access to Shuar, and hence their possibility to learn the Shuar language, depended on what they viewed as a bad habit: expecting a material return for willingness to learn about the Christian faith.
For both Salesians and Franciscans, the system of boarding schools was the main solution to the problem of conversion, which at the same time altered the language barrier issue. Through boarding schools the missionaries created a context where Shuar speakers could be accessed, controlled and moulded. Taking Shuar children captive, placing them in boarding schools and forcing them to speak Spanish restructured the dynamics of interaction and communication. According to Bottasso,Footnote 63 the Salesians initiated boarding as institutional practice in the vicariate of Méndez and Gualaquiza in the 1930s–40s, and they established most of their boarding schools in the 1950s and 60s. Somewhat later, the Franciscans established their first boarding school in Zamora in 1936, but the majority of these institutions were built from the late 1950s to the late 70s.Footnote 64
In the boarding schools the missionaries worked with what they saw as the most malleable Shuar human material, the children. Disconnected from ‘savage’ ways of life, the baptised Shuar child was regarded as the indigenous subject of change. Descriptions by religious and secular authorities in the 1950s documented in the Historical Archive of the Franciscan Mission illustrate that the Shuar were construed as remote from white-mestizo experience and moral order. The missionaries described the ‘Jíbaros’ as ‘indolent and obstinate by nature’ and as having inferior mental capacity,Footnote 65 who outside the white-mestizo sphere of influence led immoral polygamous lives not recognised in the Catholic institution of marriage.Footnote 66 The Shuar were also characterised as people without culture, unwilling to abandon their forest lives and spaces.Footnote 67 As a consequence, there was a perceived need to create spaces where the ‘Jíbaros’ could be exposed to ‘civilisation’ and patriotism and elevated culturally and morally.Footnote 68 Opening up the immense forest implied, according to the Bishop of Zamora, circumscribing areas where the indigenous population could be concentrated for this purpose. Boarding schools, together with the institution of the monogamous family and the establishment of Shuar settlements, constituted core elements in the work of creating ‘reductions’, delimited spaces that both religious and secular authorities could use in a project to ‘civilise’ the ‘savages’ and to incorporate them into the realm of the state.Footnote 69
The religious authorities used boarding schools to bring about a fundamental rupture with the Shuar's social origins. Children were removed from their family context, indoctrinated with the Christian faith through the catechism, and renamed with ‘appropriate’ Spanish names.Footnote 70 Boarding schools also meant the incorporation of Shuar children into an unfamiliar disciplinary order and their exposure to a new epistemology of ‘civilisation’ conveyed through a foreign language. The boarding school, however, not only constituted an ambiguous space of learning for Shuar children. In the case of the Salesian Catholic mission, boarding schools became in addition live laboratories for the study of Shuar language – as a proper semiotic universe tied to structures of cultural meaning and practice – and of Shuar mythology and religion. This is one of the intriguing insights one can gain from reading Bottasso's accounts. Nevertheless, the missionaries’ conversion work was for a long time separate from their parallel linguistic work, and the extension of the Shuar language from ‘a simple material of study […] to a language used in school’Footnote 71 came late. Not until the end of the 1960s did the Salesians introduce bilingual educational practice.
Focusing on the process leading up to this substantial change sheds light on the development of a Salesian sensitivity to the Shuar other, which Bottasso relates to the Salesians’ scientific attitude and their interest in indigenous Amazonian peoples. The earliest of their linguistic and ethnographic inquiries was the Enciclopédia Bororo, a work begun in the Brazilian province of Mato Grosso by Antônio Colbacchini and César Albisetti in the mid-1920s, and later edited by Ângelo Venturelli and published in the early 1960s.Footnote 72 In Ecuador too Salesian missionaries were involved in research, both through their own initiatives and projects and through contact with academics. Many of them ‘became more and more aware of the complexities of the Shuar language and culture […] some of them started to distance themselves from Eurocentric assumptions which uncritically assumed the indisputable superiority of Western knowledge and forms of representation.’Footnote 73
At the time of the Second Vatican Council, and inspired by its intellectual and political reorientation, a group of progressive Salesian missionaries were instrumental in turning cultural sensitivity into a central feature of the Salesian approach towards the Shuar. Through their religious training (in Bogota, Rome and Buenos Aires among other places) these scholarly missionaries acquired knowledge about several academic disciplines – missiology, linguistics, pedagogy and anthropology. Their new insight helped redefine translation work. In addition to and more than as an instrument for evangelisation, translation became a method for approaching Shuar otherness. Bottasso has drawn attention to the contributions of some of the personalities of this generation:Footnote 74 Sirio Pellizzaro worked on Shuar grammar from the 1950s and subsequently on Shuar mythology. Alfredo Germani built on Pellizzaro's work and further elaborated and systematised the linguistic study of Shuar. He was instrumental in introducing bilingual education in Morona Santiago in the late 1960s, and his studies of Shuar history resulted in a two-volume work published in the 1980s.Footnote 75 Juan Shutka arrived at the Salesian mission in Sucúa in 1960s and soon became involved with territorial rights and Shuar organisation. He facilitated the founding of the Shuar Federation. Luis Bolla, through his missionary work from the 1950s, revealed an extraordinary sensitivity towards the Shuar and, from the 1980s, towards the neighbouring Achuar population. By living permanently in indigenous communities he exemplified an alternative missionary role which resembles an ‘ethnographic’ approach. Finally, Bottasso himself should be acknowledged for his contribution. Strongly academic, he facilitated research on indigenous people and promoted applied anthropology, first through the publishing channel Mundo Shuar, and later through the publishing house Abya Yala.Footnote 76
With their interest in and concern for Shuar beliefs and cultural practices, the Salesian missionaries started to search for parallels to the Catholic faith in the mythical and spiritual universe of the Shuar,Footnote 77 replacing a perception of superstition and building in this way a new understanding of Shuar religiosity and culture. Culture was no longer viewed as something introduced by Western civilisation, but rather as a dimension that informed the (still profoundly asymmetrical) interaction between distinct worlds. In a period of transition for the Catholic mission, this re-conceptualisation of translation work had important implications for the Salesians’ recognition of Shuar cultural difference. The missionaries mentioned above – the drivers of this process of change – were granted significant room for manoeuvre. Their Bishop, José Felix Pintado, did not actively support their many initiatives but neither did he block them. This passive acceptance of new practices paved the way for the integration of a novel cultural sensitivity into the Salesian governance approach: the missionaries’ multifaceted exploration of the Shuar linguistic and cultural universe was coupled to a process of Shuar political organisation and territorial claims.
There are no indications in the literature or in the archive material of a parallel process taking place in the neighbouring vicariate and province of Zamora. While the two missions in previous decades had held similar ideas about the Shuar, the Franciscans did not undertake a reorientation comparable to that of the Salesians in the 1960s. For example, the two missions shared in the 1950s–60s the same view on the Shuar children's capacity for learning. The Salesians questioned their ability to acquire scientific knowledge and ‘culture’ through schooling,Footnote 78 which echoed Franciscan views: in various letters to the Minister of Education in the early 1950s, the Bishop of Zamora wrote that it was impossible ‘to adjust teaching here [in the Amazonian south-east] to the exigencies of the establishments of instruction of the civilised world – given the mental capacity of the Jíbaro child’.Footnote 79 It is striking in these accounts that the Catholic missionaries regarded the Shuar as capable only of practical learning owing to their supposed inferior mental capacity, and that they viewed manual work (agriculture for boys, needlework for girls) as a method to modify the natural inclination of the Shuar to be ‘indolent’, ‘idle’ and ‘obstinate’.Footnote 80 In subsequent decades the leaders of the Franciscan mission in Zamora Chinchipe, headed by Bishop Manuel José Mosquera, retained a vision of the Shuar as racially inferior with an inherent potential for improvement. Yet at the same time, in the neighbouring vicariate and province, the Salesian Bishop José Felix Pintado accepted missionaries who were interested in exploring the Shuar cultural world, and this set the Salesians on a path towards cultural translation and recognition.
Perhaps surprisingly, the boarding school – one of the main institutions for the colonisation of the Shuar, for putting into practice mechanisms of elimination (abduction, concentration and conversion) – at the same time created an opportunity for cultural translation and facilitated an interaction with the potential for a rethink of what incorporation into ‘civilisation’ could entail. While the Salesians took advantage of this potential, the Franciscans seem to have been detached from it. This difference indicates that governance sensitivities started to diverge between the two missions in this period, and this also influenced missionary practices. In the next section I discuss how the two missions’ divergent governance approaches influenced land tenure and territorial politics in Ecuador's Amazonian south-east in the period 1940s–80s.
Agricultural Expansion and Territorial Politics in Shuar Lands
Starting from the idea that cultural translation is an activity where the intention (intentio) of the original source should have some bearing on the translated other in the destination language and context, I ask in this section how this intentio (or the lack of it) also had implications for colonial missionary practices. My focus here is on a period when the quest for land and the control of national territory intensified and became the chief concerns of colonisation. As a result, dispossession became a main structuring force, both in relation to the expansion of the frontier of livestock agriculture, and regarding military control of the border zone. The underlying issue I address in this discussion is how the Salesians’ recognition of Shuar otherness informed their undertakings to protect Shuar territories. Conversely, I explain how the Franciscans’ emphasis on linking conversion to a peasant work ethic and to the labour of remoulding the Shuar into a new colonial subject seriously weakened and even damaged the protection of Shuar lands.
Colonisation of the south-east changed character from the 1940s due to two intertwined processes: militarisation of the border zone and expansion of cattle-based agriculture. Both processes were closely tied to the projects of incorporating these areas into the national economy, politics and consciousness. The Ecuadorean–Peruvian war of 1941 was a turning point. The defeat of the Ecuadorean army at the confluence of the Yaupi and Santiago rivers that year was one of several incidents that demonstrated Peruvian military superiority. Armed battles in disputed border areas resulted in the drawing of a new line of division recognised in the Rio de Janeiro Protocol of 1942: this mandated the secession of more than 200,000 km2 (80,000 square miles) of Amazonian territory to Peru. This terrible humiliation made it clear to the Ecuadorean government that it had to ‘take possession of the national [Amazonian] space through an increased human presence’.Footnote 81 Human presence meant several things in this context: the presence of the military in the Amazonian borderlands; the opening up of the territory through the construction of transportation infrastructure; and the building of human frontiers through a combination of colonisation and the ‘taming’ of the Shuar.
The latter was a difficult and ambiguous governance task in this period. The authorities conceived of the indigenous people who inhabited the disputed zone between the two countries in the south-east as having weak if any understanding of national sovereignty or allegiance to projects of nation building. People of the forest could easily get away – from those who would ‘civilise’ them and, also, over to the Peruvian side. A pronounced view within the Ecuadorean army was that ‘treacherous Shuar’ served as spies and guides for the Peruvian enemy, and contributed significantly to the defeat of Ecuador in 1941.Footnote 82 In opposition to this view, Ortiz Batallas emphasises that Shuar moved around due to their semi-sedentary settlement practice, and to protect themselves from abusive and violent military and other colonial authorities.Footnote 83
The Ecuadorean–Peruvian conflict and the militarisation of the border zone introduced the military as a complementary governance actor to the Catholic missions. Military garrisons were established next to mission stations, chapels, schools and boarding schools. This built infrastructure constituted the basis for the demarcation of reductions, from which colonisation and ‘civilisation’ could be coordinated and administered. As noted in the previous section, one of the main objectives of the reductions was to concentrate the Shuar population in fixed spaces. Another was to free up so-called ‘vacant’ land for the expansion of livestock agriculture and for converting the forest into land for grazing (pastizales) and timber production. Parallel inhabited spaces were thereby established in governance terms: land attached to the missionary stations was allocated to the colono population, while the Shuar were granted specific Indian reserves. Under a contract signed by the Ecuadorean government and the Salesian mission in 1935, and renewed (for 25 years) in 1944, the government ceded a considerable extent, of approximately 600 km2 (200 square miles), to the mission on condition that it took responsibility for the ‘Ecuadoreanisation’ of the Shuar.Footnote 84 The creation of the Indian reserves – which were held in trust by the missionaries – was meant to simultaneously colonise the Shuar and protect them against colono expansion and aggression, and to reduce conflicts due to divergent land use and land ownership practices.
Nothing indicates a similar development of Indian reserves in the vicariate of the Franciscans in Zamora. The governance of agricultural expansion concentrated here on the colono population. The first Indian reserve to receive brief mention in the literature and archive material, El Pincho, comprised 8560 ha (21,200 acres) and was established in the central Zamora valley as late as 1959.Footnote 85 Several differences between the two vicariates contributed to bring about the missions’ diverging territorial governance projects. One is that the Shuar population inhabiting the areas of the Salesian vicariate was considerably larger than that in the neighbouring vicariate of the Franciscans. Moreover, rivers such as the Upano and Zamora and the Cutukú and Cóndor mountain ranges were barriers that for a long time hindered and curbed the colonos' eastward expansion. East of the Upano river and the Cutukú cordillera in the Salesian vicariate there was an extensive hinterland that remained Ecuadorean after 1941, and which by and large was populated by Shuar and Achuar people. Further south in the Franciscan vicariate the situation was different: the area east of the Zamora river and the Cóndor cordillera constituted a transnational border zone. Shuar withdrew to this zone in the 1940s–60s as a response to the rapidly increasing presence and dominance of colonos in the central valleys of the Zamora and Yacuambi rivers.Footnote 86
From the 1950s, the literature speaks of the Shuar reductions in the Salesian vicariate as centres (centros). The formation of these Shuar centres coincided with the massive influx of colonos from the highland province of Azuay, and with a state policy promoting colonisation. In the 1960s and 70s these centres became sites where Salesian missionaries, in collaboration with a new generation of converted Shuar, built an organisational apparatus to counter the marginalising effects of colono expansion. As discussed in the section above, a reorientation in the conception of the Shuar on the part of some of the Salesian missionaries played a decisive role in promoting indigenous political organisation and facilitated a process in which the Shuar could be ‘the subjects of their own development’.Footnote 87 This involved the training of new Shuar leaders, the establishment of a radio service broadcasting to the Shuar centres and eventually the gradual withdrawal of the mission as intermediary in Shuar dealings with the state. The organisation process initiated by the Salesians, the rationale of which was to transform the Shuar into a ‘civilised’ and productive people who could coexist with the colonos,Footnote 88 resulted additionally in the formation of a robust organisational structure led by Shuar síndicos (leaders). This structure comprised three levels – the centre, the association of centres, and from 1964, the Shuar Federation. This organisational structure allowed the Shuar to be redefined as subjects with their own political agency that with time – and at times – diverged from the missionaries’ agendas and ambitions.
The 1960s and 1970s were a time of agrarian reform and authoritarian rule under two military juntas (1963–7; 1972–9) in Ecuador. In this period, one can speak of a formalisation and intensification of agriculture and especially of livestock herding as the core elements of a new Amazonian economy. A legal framework regarding the utilisation of so-called vacant land, a notion based on the definition of ‘non-exploited’ areas in the Amazonian lowlands as non-inhabited state property suitable for colonisation,Footnote 89 was put into practice through the IERAC. Agrarian expansion presupposed the establishment of formal systems of land tenure and livestock ownership, and was based on the notions of the cultivation of land and the herding of livestock as signifiers of civilisation. Colonisation of this kind had land as its primary object. It was invasive and expansive and rested on colonos’ institutionalised land allocation privileges and the justification of these privileges through their perceived status as ‘superior’ land users to the Shuar population. These decades were also a period of politically leftist tendencies partly inspired by the Cuban revolution, and which manifested themselves for example in new liberation theological and social justice propositions and practices in Latin America. Moreover, this was a time of social unrest in Ecuador around the issues of land tenure and indigenous citizenship.Footnote 90 Andrés Guerrero identifies these decades as a transitional period of burgeoning indigenous contestation. Indigenous activists and organisations embarked on a process of dissociation from the white-mestizo definition of the Indian, reaffirming their identity and establishing ‘for the first time a direct dialogue with the State’.Footnote 91 Certain regions in the Andean highlands were the centres of this indigenous mobilisation, but it also reverberated in the Amazon region, with an early organisational manifestation in the establishment of the Shuar Federation.Footnote 92
The governance project which the Salesian mission implemented together with the military and public institutions combined over time aggressive colonisation with the increasing promotion of indigenous organisation, political leadership and agency. The Shuar of Morona Santiago were undoubtedly transformed into colonial subjects by this process, yet at the same time they appropriated new instruments for the protection of indigenous territory and gained ground for the negotiation of cultural identity. The role of territorial politics in the neighbouring province of Zamora, however, is another story. I will now discuss how the protection of Shuar living spaces was informed by a dominant conception among the Franciscans of the Shuar as malleable human material which could be subjected to ‘civilising’ work related to agricultural expansion and development. The case considered here is the Indian reserve established in the northern part of the Zamora valley in the late 1960s in a place called El Pangui.
In the second half of the 1960s access to El Pangui was significantly improved by the construction of the highway connecting the valley of Zamora to the road network further north. This resulted in a sudden influx of colonos to an area populated by ‘more than 40 Jíbaro families who make up the numerous eastern indigenous community’. The parish priest stationed at the mission centre in El Pangui, the Bishop of Zamora and the IERAC regional representative all expressed worries about these families, who were ‘being expelled from their lands and forests’.Footnote 93 In response to violent conflicts regarding colono land invasions, IERAC gave the Shuar a concession to establish an Indian reserve of 2200 ha (4500 acres) in El Pangui in May 1966, established in the following year as an agrarian cooperative.Footnote 94 The Franciscan mission played the main role in its facilitation, establishment and administration. This was natural since, according to the IERAC, the mission ‘was the first to settle in the area and to establish a first source (fuente) of civilisation and culture’.Footnote 95
Let us dwell briefly on what this improbable statement about ‘the first to settle’ might have referred to in this context. According to the logic of colonisation, expansion of the agricultural frontier required access to unoccupied land, i.e. non-cleared and uncultivated land, including land not in permanent active use for pasture. This, however, was in conflict with the notion of ancestral land, also held by the missionaries. Especially in relation to the creation of indigenous agricultural cooperatives in the province, IERAC and the Franciscan mission recognised that land conceived of as vacant also had a deeper social history. This recognition was expressed by the terms ‘traditional settlements over long time’ and ‘immemorial ancestral possessions’ used in the IERAC land grant.Footnote 96 Ancestral ties are also indicated in the ambivalent characterisation of the Shuar as the primitive and authentic ‘owners of the forest’.Footnote 97 This notion resonates with the view the Franciscans had of the Shuar in the 1960s and 70s as racially inferior and at the same time as being in the process of incorporation into ‘civilisation’. According to this logic ancestral ties could be cancelled out by the idea of settling, and by creating a relationship to land through livestock agriculture.
The ways the Franciscans connected the ‘civilising’ of the Shuar to the transforming of land through agricultural development is very clear in the case of the El Pangui cooperative. In November 1972 Edwin Wirth, a Swiss Franciscan missionary, arrived in Zamora ‘bringing with him a great number of machines, tools and work equipment to start a project for social and economic community improvement, exclusively for the Shuar farmers and the colonos of El Pangui’.Footnote 98 The project was financed by a Swiss development agency tied to the Franciscan order.Footnote 99 In order to take advantage of this development initiative, Bishop Mosquera proposed in 1974, together with several public institutions, to dedicate 175 ha (430 acres) of the reserve to a model farm ‘for research and teaching’.Footnote 100 According to the Ministry of Agriculture, the initiative and resources would ‘permit the installation of modern and technical agriculture and other industries’ in the El Pangui area.Footnote 101 Although these initiatives failed, the agricultural development approach to the securing of indigenous territory is very clear in this case. The cooperative united several important ingredients of ‘civilisation’ and colonisation: the establishment of a territory where the indigenous population was concentrated and protected, and which at the same time served as a context where the Shuar could be introduced to and trained in the peasant work ethic and moulded into agricultural producers. The establishment of a boarding school for Shuar children near the mission centre and farm formed part of this approach.Footnote 102
Setting up the cooperative, however, did not foster a parallel process of indigenous political organisation. The Franciscans in Zamora established Shuar centres for their own educational purposes, and in order to concentrate the Shuar population. However, there is no indication in the AHMF/Z material nor in secondary sources that these centres also served as a context for the building of indigenous political leadership comparable to what happened in Morona Santiago. There are sporadic examples of Shuar centres in Zamora associating with the Shuar Federation during the 1970s, and this trend is stronger and more visible in the 80s: contact between Shuar centres in Zamora Chinchipe and the Shuar Federation of Morona Santiago, and the assistance and influence of the latter, laid the ground for a series of new land claims and the establishment of several relatively small indigenous territories.Footnote 103 A few of these new territories are mentioned in the Franciscan mission's reports to Rome in the early 1980s, such as the Indian reserves of Guadalupe in the Yacuambi valley and Shaimi in the Nangaritza valley.Footnote 104 From other sources we also know of additional centres that obtained communal land titles in this period with assistance from the Shuar Federation.Footnote 105
It is in areas relatively distant from the central colonisation zone in the Zamora valley that we see the formation of communities with collective land titles. Pressure on land in the main areas in the central valleys of Zamora and Yacuambi, through colono land invasions, the ceding of land to colonos as part of the ‘resolution’ of land conflicts, and the individual purchase of land, gradually ‘eroded’ and broke up Shuar communal lands. The diverging tendencies between the central valleys and the areas of the Cordillera also generated internal differences amongst the Shuar in the province regarding allegiance or resistance to the Shuar Federation. In 1985, Shuar leaders and communities discontented with the Shuar Federation formed their own federation, the Federación Shuar de Zamora Chinchipe (FESZCH). The FESZCH has maintained independence from the indigenous regional and national organisations to which the Shuar Federation in Morona Santiago is party, i.e. the Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas de la Amazonía Ecuatoriana (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorean Amazon, CONFENIAE) and the Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, CONAIE). Other Shuar communities in Zamora province, however, have maintained contact with the Federation in Morona Santiago and with the indigenous regional and national organisations.Footnote 106
This preliminary comparison of territorial governance related to the Shuar in the Ecuadorean south-east provides us with a couple of insights: Shuar political organisation in Zamora Chinchipe did not emanate out of a process internal to the Franciscan mission's field of action, but rather in spite of it. Governance of the Indian reserves and land tenure issues in the two provinces formed in this sense part of different territorial politics. In Morona Santiago, the consolidation of Indian reserves created an important basis for Shuar organisation, territorial protection and over time a remarkable indigenous territorial consolidation.Footnote 107 In contrast, the establishment of Indian reserves in Zamora Chinchipe formed part of a governance that promoted agricultural modernisation and resulted in the formation of Shuar islands within colono territory. This fragmentation of Shuar lands influenced ethnopolitical organisation, which was and continues to be weak and divided. In the Conclusion I will place these insights within a wider framework of understanding.
Conclusion
My discussion of colonial processes of elimination and dispossession has focused on missionary activity in and in relation to certain units: the boarding school and the Indian reserve / Shuar centre. These units constituted basic building blocks in the colonial project of the Amazonian south-east of Ecuador, namely concentration, control and conversion. Delimiting Shuar territorial occupancy was the central precondition for the expansion of livestock agriculture in Shuar land, and for carrying out military strategy in the contested Ecuadorean–Peruvian border zone. Concentrating Shuar population in institutions secured and stabilised access to the subjects of conversion, the human material whom the missions intended to modify and reshape. Without losing sight of the coercive and abusive dimensions of recent Salesian and Franciscan colonial histories, I emphasise in this study the relevance of developing an analytical sensitivity towards the kind of activity that missionaries carried out in their central institutions of conversion.
An important insight is that innovative work of cultural translation – of recognising Shuar knowing and being as substantially distinct and of granting relevance to this difference – could emerge in the core context (the boarding school) of colonial subjection and formation of colonial subjects. I have sought to explain why this change happened in the case of the Salesians and why it did not in the case of the Franciscans. The archival material from the Franciscan mission in Zamora provided me with empirical substance which made it possible to do a comparison, in combination with secondary sources and academic studies. The Catholic missions were delegated central functions in the colonisation of the Ecuadorean part of the Aénts Chicham-speaking area. As colonial actors, I argue, they developed different governance sensitivities, and these sensitivities had different effects that are important to understand. The distinctions alluded to have had – and continue to have – territorial as well as organisational consequences. And these consequences contribute to affecting and conditioning Shuar livelihoods and lifeways in highly different ways. The current colonial expansion into the core areas of the Shuar is no longer targeting land per se, but rather underground mineral-rich geological strata.Footnote 108 In this new colonial wave, the Shuar of Zamora Chinchipe and Morona Santiago are differently equipped to protect their lifeworlds and define and advance their own life projects. Their place-specific life trajectories and their particular colonial histories matter.
Acknowledgements
I am most grateful to Monseñor Walter Heras Segarra, who generously received me and gave me access to the historical archive of the Apostolic Vicariate of the Franciscan mission in Zamora. I would also like to express my gratitude to María Eugenia Tamariz, Cecilia Ortiz Batallas and Juan Bottasso who, in different ways, guided me in constructive directions within an empirically and analytically challenging field of study. Likewise, María Antonieta Guzmán-Gallegos and Gard Frækaland Vangsnes helped me elaborate my arguments though their engaged and critical comments on various versions of this manuscript. Finally, I thank four anonymous reviewers and two editors at JLAS for constructive critique and highly relevant suggestions and recommendations that helped me improve the text.
