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Peru is a country with 48 native languages, eight of which are endangered. In Pucallpa, a group of linguists has set out to keep them alive. In front of a celestial mural depicting a cosmic vision of ayahuasca, Roberto Zariquiey, a linguist who has worked with 25 languages — from collecting a lexical list to writing a grammar — recounts the exact moment when his spiritual connection with the Amazon began. In 1997, when he was still underage, his university ethics professor suggested that a group of students should visit a Shipibo community. It was his first experience with the jungle, and also his first plane trip. He often says that from that time he knew he would return. The plant would confirm it later on. In Pucallpa, the capital of Ucayali, Zariquiey found a mentor in the Kakataibo teacher Emilio Estrella, managed to increase the number of Iskonawa speakers from five to 120, and on this scorching October Thursday — like any other in the Amazon — he has fulfilled a project that had been on his mind for a long time: to establish a scientific station to research and preserve the languages of this part of the world.
It is midday in the district of Yarinacocha, in the San José neighborhood, and dozens of people have gathered at the Chana headquarters to celebrate its inauguration. The name owes itself to a local bird that mimics the song of other birds and whose brains were eaten by children from the communities to become smarter. The land where Chana is settled also has a special connotation: on this same terrain, a decade ago, the Iskonawa people received classes to relearn their language as part of a project led by Zariquiey. Several of them are present this afternoon, such as Nelita Rodríguez Campos, a wise Iskonawa, emblematic of this revitalization process: she was one of the few who survived leaving the forest and entering the city.
If Zariquiey is the driving force, his wife Mariana Poblete is the coordinator of Chana, responsible for the academic and logistical aspects. Poblete is a walking diversity: Venezuelan mother, Chilean father; born in Caracas and raised in Santiago and Viña del Mar, she gave birth to her son in Boston and is now captivated by the Peruvian Amazon, where she says she has reunited with the plants of her childhood. In Chile, this woman with curly hair like a lush tree had focused her professional work on the Huarpe languages, considered dormant due to their lack of speakers. Chana represents a peak in that progression.
"In much of South America, many generations of natives were stigmatized, suffered racism and exclusion, and preferred to hide their indigenous identity. That meant abandoning their language and speaking only Spanish, which guaranteed them a job in the city. This cut off the transmission from parents to children. In addition to fear, it was mistakenly believed that speaking one language harmed the other," says Mariana Poblete while breastfeeding her baby, a little "Tarzan" of ten months known in the area as Tamasari, in honor of a request from a wise Iskonawa who renamed Roberto Zariquiey.
The Chana scientific station has two pillars to keep indigenous languages alive: recreational activities and technology. In this regard, it has an eye tracker, a device that observes eye movements to try to understand how a person cognitively processes language and their language. "A language that has very long words, with many suffixes, is processed differently from a language with small words like Chinese. Each one has its grammatical peculiarities and, therefore, its psychological peculiarities. We are studying the system to combine sentences that Shipibo has, which is a very complex language," says Zariquiey. Both Iskonawa and Shipibo-Konibo belong to the Pano linguistic family.
Peru is a pluricultural nation with 48 native languages, eight of which are endangered. The Taushiro language, for example, has only one speaker: a 74-year-old man named Amadeo García who lives in Loreto. Chana is a torch in a desolate context. A torch lit by the persistence of its team, but whose flame is sustained by the alliance of three institutions: the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP), the Max Planck Institute, and the University of Zurich.
"For a long time, psychology conducted research with white people of Western education instead of considering diversity. 70% of studies have been done with those who represent 12% of the world's population, and that cannot be representative. The same has happened with linguistics. It is not correct for science," criticizes the New Zealander, Russell Gray, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, one of the visitors to this initial kickoff in San José de Yarinacocha. In the same vein, Balthasar Bickel from the Department of Comparative Language Sciences at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, points out that this adventure to delve into the vocabulary and sounds of other latitudes arose from a twist: "We realized that we should aim to understand all languages and not just a few. We have gone through scientific stations in Nepal, Canada, Vietnam, and we welcome the existence of one in Peru now." Meanwhile, Aldo Panfichi, the Peruvian Vice-Rector for Research at PUCP, predicts vitality and projection for Chana. "We have to be less Eurocentric and work more on our roots," he emphasizes in this collaboration.
Adelina Maldonado, chosen by Forbes as one of the most powerful Peruvians in 2023, recounts that her aunt, a highly regarded shaman in the area, told her many years ago that she would meet "important people" who would inhabit her house. The prophecy has come true: Chana has risen on land that belonged to her and that she used to rent out. She feels, in a way, that it is a way to contribute to her Shipibo-Konibo people. "I live proudly of my ancestors and my customs. It excites me that work is being done for our language because that's how we connect with nature and our surroundings," says Maldonado. Her face and that of her aunt, Olivia Arévalo, are painted on the mural in Chana's main hall.
The scientific station is preparing to host projects and build knowledge. Involving communities and ensuring they emerge alongside Chana is the commitment. The sun burns and boils in Pucallpa. Clothes stick to the skin. It's time to go for a masato.
