The two Shipibo Indians–one with a metal disk dangling from her nose–stared at the fish swimming in the Shedd Aquarium’s Amazon River exhibit, seeing them as none of the other visitors did.
“That one,” said Jose Roque Maynas after spotting a green pacu, a giant fruit-eating fish they call gamitana, “is really good eating.”
For 32 years, Field Museum research associate Ron Weber has been visiting the Shipibos, a remote tribal people who in many respects still live as they did before Columbus first sailed to the Americas.
Finally, Weber decided it was time for the Shipibos to visit him–a peculiar blend of anthropology and tourism intended in part to help the Shipibo culture survive.
Roque Maynas and his wife, Juana Cumapa Rengifo, spent a month in Chicago before returning home last week. Often dressed in full tribal regalia, they toured the city’s museums, rode the subways, traversed the Loop on foot, were awed by the Picasso and met with native North Americans. At times they resembled two brave, time-traveling pilgrims from an earlier civilization.
In other ways, however, they seemed like anyone else trying to understand and come to terms with the future. For his children, Roque Maynas hoped to find a typewriter here, or even a cheap computer, for the day when electricity comes to his village.
Coming from one of the more primitive places left in the world, what has caught their attention here has not been entirely predictable even to Weber.
The couple have seen skyscrapers, traffic jams and conspicuous wealth in Peru’s capital, Lima. But the subway–their first ride ever on a train–was a thrill. Elevators were scary, especially for Cumapa Rengifo, who leapt off them as fast as she could, afraid of being trapped in the strange moving rooms.
And the Picasso sculpture at the Daley Center stopped them in their tracks. The work seemed to make perfect sense to them, perhaps because in designing it Picasso borrowed heavily from motifs and abstractions in primitive African folk art not much different than that of the Shipibos.
More Top Picks Best Garden Tractors For Small Farms
“Oh, look at the woman’s lips and nose,” Cumapa Rengifo, 51, said to Weber as she approached the sculpture from the rear. She and her husband circled the piece, talking excitedly in Shipibo. “Definitely,” said Roque Maynas, 52, as he eyed it from the front, “it is the face of an animal.”
One surprise for the couple was that they attracted little attention around the city. At home, two or three times a month they put on their best Indian clothes and go to the nearby city of Pucallpa to sell handicrafts.
“When people see us dressed as Shipibo in cities in Peru, they swarm all over us,” said Roque Maynas. “We thought in Chicago it would be the same, but here people do not notice us so much.”
At the Shedd they drew few glances, seeming to blend right in with the Amazon exhibit.
Roque Maynas certainly did not like the Shedd’s anacondas, which loom large in supernatural Shipibo lore.
“When people come into his waters, the anaconda will attack them, tip over their canoes and eat them,” he said. “When you paddle a canoe, they hold the back of the canoe in their jaws so that you actually do not move anywhere. When you run away from them, they magically make it so that you are running straight for them so that they can get you and eat you.”
The supernatural seemed present, too, when Roque Maynas and Cumapa Rengifo sat down to watch the dolphin show in the Shedd’s Oceanarium. While the rest of the audience whooped in delight at the dolphins’ acrobatic leaps, the Shipibo couple watched with brows knitted in fascination.
There are two species of freshwater dolphins where the couple live, and Shipibos have long thought of them as magical beings, Weber said. At night, bad dolphins are thought to be capable of donning wigs and clothes to enter the villages and seduce Shipibo women.
“For Shipibos,” Roque Maynas explained, “the dolphin is the equal of people.”
Spanish conquistadors and missionaries first made contact with the Shipibos more than 300 years ago. At first, the Indians killed them. But as the Spanish kept returning with more and better-equipped troops, the tribe began moving ever deeper into the jungle.
Today, the 10,000 Shipibos still living along the Ucayali River are the only riverene tribe in the Amazon basin to have survived the Spanish and Portuguese conquest without losing its language and culture, said Weber.
The women still dress in traditional clothes. Most families still live off fishing and subsistence farming. Their artisans are renowned for continuing to produce exquisite tribal pottery, beadwork and textiles.
But the modern world economy and all its attendant technology are creeping ever closer.
As recently as 10 years ago the sprawling, gritty city of Pucallpa was still an hour and a half away by canoe from the village, San Francisco de Yarinacocha. Now a new road, the village’s first, puts the city just 20 minutes away.
Loggers from Pucallpa have cut down the rain forests that buffered the tribe from the outside world and provided game. Fishermen have destroyed the populations of the fish Shipibos like to eat.
“They are afraid what they have is in real danger of being lost,” said Weber. “The new road is changing things. They are going to get hooked up to electricity in another year or two, and that will bring more change.
“Men used to be judged by their skill as fishers and hunters, but now it is by how much education they have. To get an education, they have to leave home, and while they are away they have affairs and get married, so you don’t see arranged marriages anymore. Family life is changing.”
Jose was 16 and Juana was 15 when their parents arranged for them to marry. He was against the idea at the time, he said, because he didn’t yet know enough to have a wife. “I didn’t know how to build a house then, or how to carve a canoe from a tree,” he said.
Now with three grown sons, two grown daughters–all married and teachers in government schools–and a teenage boy at home, the couple preside over a village barrio consisting of their thatched hut and those of three married children. They call it “Nuevo Chicago” in honor of the Chicago-based scholars and missionaries who long have been part of their family’s lives.
A few years ago, Weber said, Roque Maynas noted that it would be interesting to come to the U.S. and try to find outlets for tribal crafts as a way of building jobs at home.
While in Chicago, the couple visited the Field Museum. Curators took careful notes as the couple helped to identify Shipibo cultural artifacts in the museum’s vast storage vaults on the upper floors.
For the occasion, Roque Maynas joined his wife in wearing traditional regalia; his included a traditional shirt called a “cushma,” bead work and a headdress with a sprig of long feathers sprouting from the rear of the headband. He also carried a ceremonial war club.
Much of what they wore was replicated by items in the storage drawers and bins, most of them collected by museum scientists before 1950.
Cumapa Rengifo spotted a couple of Shipibo pots she was certain were made by her late mother, Casmira, who was famous for her skill. She seemed pleased that the pottery was preserved in the museum–following Shipibo custom after her mother’s death, she had broken all of the family pottery made by Casmira.
The museum’s vaults also contained wooden tools for liquefying bananas and plantains, a scraper made from the tongue of the Paiche fish to scrape out manioc and sweet potatoes, and small knives once carried by all Shipibo men for the sole purpose of disfiguring cheating lovers.
A bizarre device made out of small boards was identified as a sort of press to flatten the foreheads of infants, so that they would grow up with elongated, pointed skulls. Dating to the pre-Incan era, skull flattening is a custom that survived into modern times, thought to be a way of distinguishing humans from animals.
Shortly after Jose was born in 1948, his father, a noted shaman, had such a press fitted on the baby. But a missionary nurse from Chicago persuaded his parents not to deform him.
“We don’t do it anymore, because there is prejudice against the custom now,” he said. “When kids with flat heads went to school when I was a child, others made fun of them.”
The museum curators led him down a narrow aisle between towering rows of storage shelving, pulling out Shipibo spears, bows and arrows. Roque Maynas, who still fishes with a bow and arrow from a dugout canoe, handled them knowingly.
More Top Picks Best Desktop Dacs Under 1000 Dollars
Then, in a beautiful tenor voice, he broke into an eerily melancholy Shipibo song.
“The song is about war and battles,” he said afterward. “Warriors would sing it after discharging their first arrows toward their enemies. Then they would listen for the enemy to sing back to them.”
Though none of the Shipibo artifacts are on display in the museum, it does sell contemporary Shipibo pottery in the main museum shop. “These were made in a place far from ours, but I know the person who makes these,” Roque Maynas said, examining two of the pots.
As part of the purpose of their trip was to look into exporting handicrafts, the couple were fascinated by the prices. A bowl selling at the Field for $35 would bring $1.50 when sold to tourists in Peru, they said.
Weber hopes to interest somebody in financing two or three small museums in Shipibo communities in Peru, simple, traditionally built buildings that he said would cost about $3,000 each.
“This would be a way of keeping archeological material with the Shipibo,” he said, “and they could use them to attract more tourism to their villages.”
When it was time for the Shipibos to go home, they took back plenty. Some items were tools for the future, including that sought-after portable typewriter and a used computer. They also purchased men’s and children’s clothing at a Salvation Army resale shop that they will distribute in the village.
And soon, a Chicago flag will fly at Barrio Nuevo Chicago. Twenty dollars was too steep a price to pay for a new one, so Cumapa Rengifo took home a small decal instead.
“From this,” she told her husband, “I can sew one just like it at home.”