THE AWAJÚN POPULATION
The Awajún people, also known as Aguaruna, are an indigenous group situated in the Peruvian jungle, along the Upper Marañon River, close to the border with Ecuador. More precisely, they live mainly in the Amazonas department, even though some clusters are also found in the Loreto, Cajamarca and San Martín department. Traditionally, the Awajún, being a seminomadic population, lived in widely dispersed hamlets, each composed by several kin related households and they were used to relocate depending on the fertility of the soil or the wild game populations declining in the immediate vicinity of their houses. Today instead, with the construction of roads and the establishment of bilingual schools, together with other infrastructures, and for the attachment to their lands, farms and villages, the majority resides in communities or near the major rivers of the region. There are three principal areas: Lower Cenepa, Middle Cenepa and High Cenepa, with a total of 52 communities. With these numbers they are the second community most populated in the Peruvian Amazon: according to the national census of 2017, the inhabitants of the Awajún population are around 65,828 people.
Their main activity is hunting: the species most hunted are the white-lipped peccary, the tapir, the little red brocket and the ocelot. The population doesn’t hunt only for dietary needs but also for making handcrafts, medicines and witchcraft tools, in fact, from the animals, they preserve not only the meat, but also the skin, the feathers, the teeth and bones. For what concerns gathering instead, they mainly gather the wild fruit and buds of palm trees as well as stems, bark and resins. They gather the honey of wild bees, worms, beetles and medicinal plants. They have a sophisticated knowledge of rainforest flora and fauna. With the tools they find in nature the men mainly make ropes, baskets, canoes, textiles; while the women craft ceramics, necklaces from seeds and beads.
We can get a glimpse of the daily life of this population with this short video of Jeff Cremer, a National Geographic photographer who lived in the Peruvian Amazon for over six years.
Between the 1960 and 1970, both Peru and Ecuador started oil exploration campaigns “colonizing” the area in which the Awajún, together with other indigenous populations, lived and establishing settlements of non-indigenous people and military spots.
Their settlement continued due to the discovery of oil in the Alto Marañon area and today they are still threatened by a possible contamination in their ancestral territories, due to the illegal mining for the extraction of gold in the Cenepa river.
Furthermore, today they are facing another threat, just like the rest of the world: COVID 19.
Main sources
Bdpi.cultura.gob.pe. 2020. Awajún | BDPI. [online]
Available at: <https://bdpi.cultura.gob.pe/pueblos/awajun>
Centre for Indigenous Peoples' Nutrition and Environment. 2020. Global health case study - Awajún. [online]
Available at: <https://www.mcgill.ca/cine/resources/data/awajun>
Fondationensemble.org. 2020. Alternative Development Pathways For Indigenous Awajun Communities: Building New Livelihood Opportunities From Indigenous Cultural And Natural Capital. [online]
Available at: <https://www.fondationensemble.org/en/projet/alternative-development-pathways-for-indigenous-awajun-communities-building-new-livelihood-opportunities-from-indigenous-cultural-and-natural-capital/>
LR, R., 2020. Comunidad Awajún Denuncia Contaminación Del Río Cenepa Por Minería Ilegal. [online] Larepublica.pe.
Available at: <https://larepublica.pe/sociedad/1252699-comunidad-awajun-denuncia-contaminacion-rio-cenepa-mineria-ilegal/>