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The history of San Jose de Payamino is a three-stranded story, taking in the history of the community itself, the history of the lowland Kichwas and the history of the colonisation of Ecuador’s Amazonian region. Of these, the community’s history can be gathered together in bits and pieces from stories handed down over time. The colonisation of the Amazon has also been well recorded, starting off with the chroniclers who accompanied the first conquistadors, then through census reports, tax records and other legal documents, and finally through the memory of the area’s living inhabitants. The most mysterious part of the story is the history of the lowland Kichwas: a culture that didn’t exist in the Amazon when the Spanish first arrived, but somehow grew to become the most numerous indigenous group in Ecuador’s Amazonian territory during the following five centuries.

 

The origin of the lowland Kichwas presented in this history is a conjecture based on the few historical texts I have managed to find about the area and the Kichwa culture. This history has been compiled from a number of sources, most notably a study that was carried out by an American anthropologist, Nickie Irvine, who lived for two years in San Jose de Payamino in the mid 1980’s.

 

The oldest known ancestors of the community of San Jose de Payamino are the Quijos culture, the earliest evidence of whom is found in the Quijos valley, on the eastern slopes of the Andes, from around 300 BC. Over time their territory expanded until, by the time of the Spanish conquest, they governed an area that stretched from the Andes in the west to the land between the Napo and Coca rivers in the lowlands.

 

Around 500 years ago, the Quijos families who would eventually found San Jose de Payamino were living in a community called Sumaco, on the flanks of the volcano of the same name, at about 1600 metres above sea level.  During the next five centuries they would undertake a migration down into the lowlands, stopping at ten known settlements before finally arriving at their present home in the late Twentieth Century.

 

Historical records of the Quijos begin in the early sixteenth Century, with three Inca expeditions into the area; none of these were successful in conquering the Quijos, but the Inca leader Huayna Capac brought a few representatives of the Quijos back up to the highlands after an expedition in 1520 in order to try and learn their language.

 

The Quijos’ first contact with the Spanish was in 1538 when the conquistador Gonzalo Diaz de Pineda mounted an expedition to explore the lowlands to the east of the Andes in search of the fabled city of El Dorado. This expedition was turned back by fierce resistance from the Quijos. One of their methods of attacking the Spanish, which is still recalled in the oral history of San Jose de Payamino, was to crush the Spanish explorers with boulders that they would roll down from the slopes above. A second Spanish incursion into the area - Gonzalo Pizarro and Francisco de Orellana’s quest to find the Land of Cinnamon - departed Quito in 1540. Their captured Quijos guides led them around the headwaters of the Payamino River for seventy days. When the expedition was unable to find more than a few scattered trees, Pizarro became furious, punishing his guides by burning some of them alive and turning his dogs loose on the others to devour them. The inhabitants of the area were described by the Spanish chronicler Pedro Cieza de Leon as being “savages, lacking in culture, with many wives, but skilled and agile in the forest“.

 

Pizarro’s next stop was in the “Province of Capua”, which the Ecuadorean archaeologist Pedro Porras has identified as being the upper Payamino Valley. He captured an indigenous leader called Delicola, who told the conquistadors of rich, populated lands further downriver. Following this recommendation, Pizarro continued down the Payamino to the river Napo, where the city of Coca is now located. At this point the expedition split in two: Orellana, ordered by Pizarro to explore further downriver, followed the Coca to the Napo and continued from there to discover the Amazon, becoming the first person to navigate its entire length to the Atlantic. Pizarro, meanwhile, declaring his expedition to be a failure, returned to Quito following a different route. Of the 220 Spaniards and 4,000 natives who had left Quito the previous year, only a handful of men returned. To add insult to injury, Pizarro’s expedition was a wild goose chase: cinnamon is only native to Asia, the plant that he believed to be cinnamon was actually a different species, ishpingo (Ocotea quixos), which, although similar in taste and odour to cinnamon, has never achieved the same value as a spice.

 

Nearly two decades later, Gil Ramirez Davilos became the first governor of the Province of Quijos and succeeded in pacifying the inhabitants of the area with the help of an indigenous leader from Loja, whose brother-in-law was a leader in Jatunquijos. Davilos attempted to encourage trade, offering the natives many gifts and promising indigenous control of lands. The Quijos, in turn, requested for a city like Quito to be built in their territory. Davilos would only remain in office for a year and in 1559, Rodrigo Nunez de Bonilla, the governor of Baeza, divided up the Quijos lands and placed them under the control of 80 encomenderos, responsible for evangelising the natives and collecting tributes for the Spanish crown.

 

The natives rebelled in response to this, blocking roads, destroying bridges, houses and crosses and killing Spaniards. Highland Kichwas were sent to restore the peace, but they were captured. The rebellion was finally put down when it reached the town of Baeza.

 

Under the encomenderos, the natives were forced into working in textile manufacture or as agricultural labourers. Cruelty was common in the encomiendas and many Quijos retreated to the jungles and mountains to escape. In 1576, Diego de Ortegon was sent to investigate allegations of abuse. In his record of the visit, he calls the inhabitants of the Payamino valley “Calientes” and describes them as living in family groups, without any allegiance to chiefs or lords and inhabiting small clusters of huts scattered throughout the forest. They were naked and traded in ishpingo fruits.

 

One of the immediate results of Ortegon’s visit was an order to kill many of the attack dogs that the Spanish had trained to hunt natives. This may have been a factor that facilitated a second indigenous uprising in 1578, organized by shamans who coordinated a number of communities after claiming to have received messages from God or the Devil, ordering them to kill the Spanish. The towns of Avila and Archidona were destroyed, but once again the rebellion was defeated at Baeza.

 

The arrival of Catholic missionaries during the 17^th century caused a second indigenous exodus from Spanish-occupied areas. However, the fortunes of the region’s Spanish inhabitants were in decline: by 1724 only ten encomenderos remained in Quijos. As the encomenderos’ influence decreased, the luck of the native population began to improve. In the 19^th Century the indigenous population in Quijos is believed to have increased, and the Jesuits - whose methods of evangelisation were more sympathetic to the natives’ welfare than their secular counterparts - began to strengthen their presence.

 

The Jesuits founded missions in Loreto, Tena and Archidona, with occasional visits to 13 outlying centres. To facilitate communication with the local tribes, who spoke a variety of different languages, they introduced the use of Kichwa as a lingua franca. The missionaries manipulated existing native customs for the purposes of evangelisation: the head of each family group was trained to deliver the catechism, and encouraged to share this with the whole family during the daily wayusa-drinking ritual.

Despite continuing hostilities from non-pacified indigenous groups, the Kichwa language schools that the Jesuits set up permitted them to bring together rival communities from a variety of cultures, assimilating them under a single language and thus creating what we now call the Amazonian or lowland Kichwa ethnic group, or Runas, to which the inhabitants of San Jose de Payamino belong.

 

The presence of the Jesuits had its negative impacts on the inhabitants of Payamino. Members of the community alive today still tell tales of a flu-like disease that arrived with the missionaries. The stories describe how they would try to unblock their noses by pushing sticks so far up their nostrils that they would bleed. Angered by this, they killed one missionary with spears, throwing his body into the river, along with the bells and saint effigies of the mission. In retribution, the government sent soldiers into Payamino, who killed much of the population.

 

Around this time the population was also suffering as a result of in-fighting amongst shamen and recruitment for forced labour. Around half the population left Payamino to escape these problems, some migrating downriver to Peru to find work during the rubber boom.  

 

In 1895 the Jesuits abandoned all of their Amazonian missions, except for the one in Loreto. The following year they were expelled from the country by President Eloy Alfaro. Before departing, the missionaries placed all of the mission’s possessions, along with the duty of continuing their evangelical work, into the hands of native sacristans. To mark the custodial duty entrusted on the sacristans, these would often ended up taking the Spanish name ‘Custodio’.

 

The sacristans were instructed to hand over the mission’s possessions to the next missionaries to arrive in the area. The Jesuits would never return to Ecuador, however, and the jungle eventually reclaimed the land that the missions were built on. Many objects, particularly those made of metal, managed to survive. Following the arrival, in 1922, of Josephine missionaries in the east of Ecuador, followed shortly afterwards by Dorothean nuns, a number of artefacts from the Jesuit missions were discovered. These include a number of bronze bells, seven of which were from San Jose de Payamino, of which four remain there – three in the community hub and one at Pato Rumi.

 

A number of stories exist relating to the recovery of the bells. One tells of a member of the Puraquilla family who heard a bell ringing from the bottom of the river while he was out fishing. He reported this strange event to the community and the guinaro (community leader) decided to send a delegation to Quito to report it. Two soldiers were sent back to Payamino to investigate, under the condition that if the community was found to be lying, they should all be killed. Guided to the place in the river, the soldiers heard the bell ringing. One of the soldiers dived down and found a bell and a statue of a saint. The saint was taken out of the water first, and then the bell. Both were handed over to the guinaro for the community to keep.

 

There is also an account of an expedition mounted in 1947 to search for one of the Payamino bells for the chapel in San Francisco de Borja. The expedition, under the leadership of Guillermo Vinuez, the founder of Borja, discovered the remains of a Jesuit Chapel at Payamino, and found two bells and four candlesticks. One of the bells was taken to Borja, where it remains to this day as part of a memorial to Vinuez; the other ended up in Tena.

 

In the 1930’s there were two communities in the San Jose de Payamino territory: a town called Payamino which was located where the current community hub of San Jose de Payamino is, while the other community, called San Jose, had settled in Chuspicocha, next to a big waterfall along the Bigay River in the east of the territory. When the community of San Jose merged with Payamino, it is said that only two residents remained in the latter: Arsenio Condo and Custodio Bigay (note the name Custodio, as given to those who had been entrusted with the care of the Jesuit missions’ possessions). At this time there was a chapel still standing in Payamino, which contained two bells that were given to the residents of San Jose. We can assume that these are two of the three that still exist in the community hub today.

 

The Josephine and Dorothean missionaries arrived at the Chuspicocha settlement, but never settled there; they would stay for a few weeks at a time, preaching the gospel and teaching the inhabitants to sing and pray. Older members of the community remember how one of these missionaries sexually abused young girls. They say that the guinaro and sacristan travelled to Quito to complain about his behaviour, leaving at night so that the missionary did not know what they were doing. They returned with soldiers who arrested the priest, taking him away with his hands tied behind his back. They say that the priest cursed the families of San Jose so that they couldn’t have any more children.

 

San Jose also suffered from another curse that had been placed on them by a neighbouring community who had requested for a young girl from San Jose to marry one of their men. The people of San Jose refused, so the other community’s shaman placed a spell on them, under which they became ill, shaking, turning pale and dying.

 

These problems, along with the missionary’s requests that they move to a more accessible location lead to the people of San Jose abandoning Chuspicocha, despite the fact that it was a good place to live, with enough land for all the families and plenty of game and fish available. They headed south from the Bigay river and over the hills to the Tutapishcu river, settling at the mouth of the Timuyacu River in the mid 1960’s.

 

In addition to contact with Josephine missionaries and the 1947 expedition, occasional contact between San Jose de Payamino and the outside world in the early to mid 20^th century also included the passage of an expedition in 1932, mounted by Ernesto Augusto Witt, searching for a route from Loreto to Borja that would permit onward travel to Quito. A third expedition arrived in Payamino 1959. This venture, under the leadership of Simon Bustamante Cardenas and Julio Rodriguez, was attempting to find a route to connect Quito to the upper tributaries of the Amazon, in order to create an interoceanic transportation link.

 

A dark episode from this time was recruitment for the repartos, a system of debt bondage in which indigenous people were tricked into accepting gifts, in return for which they were forced into working for large estates. There are stories from the early 1900’s of white men from the Napo River entering the community to trick people into going into forced labour near the Peruvian border. The strangers brought gifts of clothing, machetes and bowls. After handing these out they explained that the natives had to work for them as payment, and were taken away to Nuevo Rocafuerte to clear land. Some avoided capture by hiding in the forest. Those that managed to escape and return to Payamino told of beatings that drew blood.

 

Community members remember that members of the Jipa and Ajon families were taken first. A second group of people arrived and took a young girl; they went to a house in Paushipunku where she was made to cook and clean for them and at night would have to share a hammock with a young man. Other men would hang their hammocks across the door so that she couldn’t escape in the middle of the night. One day, while they were all out working, she hid under a pile of felled trees and waited until nightfall. Under cover of darkness she slipped away and returned to Payamino. The men returned to Payamino in search of her, but the community refused to let them take her again and placed a complaint with the teniente politico (similar to a justice of the peace), who went to Tena and then Quito to report the incident. The men were arrested an imprisoned for a year and “white river people” were prohibited from entering Payamino ever again. 

 

Older residents of San Jose de Payamino remember occasional journeys to Quito on foot during this period, following the Borja River; the journey would take a week to complete. In Quito they would trade pita (a pineapple-like plant) fibre for cloth, belts, salt, matches, machetes and axes. Upon their return they would take care to keep their tracks hidden so that people from outside couldn’t follow them. If people from the mountains wanted to find a route into the lowlands, the people from Payamino would use a longer route to put them off coming again. It is said that part of the route that the people from Payamino used would follow a paved path that they believed to have been built by the Incas.

 

The modern colonisation of Ecuador’s Amazon begins in 1967, when, after sixty years of searching, Texaco-Gulf discovered oil in eastern Ecuador. The first barrel was exported in 1972. Ecuador became an OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) country in 1973. The oil boom fuelled an epidemic of road-building projects, linking the major cities in the Amazon and connecting them to Quito. The region was opened up for mass colonisation for the first time since the colonial era. Migrants from Ecuador’s highland and coastal regions moved in, displacing indigenous communities who did not hold land titles. Between 1974 and 1977, immigration levels were higher than anywhere else on Earth, with an average of 25 people moving in to the area every day. By 1982, 47% of the population in what was then Napo Province (including the area now occupied by Napo, Orellana and Sucumbios Provinces) had been born elsewhere: 31% were from the highlands and 10% from the coast. 

 

As well as oil exploration, the newly-accessible lowlands permitted agricultural expansion: between 1983 and 1986, 60,000 hectares of land were granted as land concessions for African oil palm cultivation and 120,000 hectares were opened up for colonisation. A further 200,000 hectares were granted as a concession to British Petroleum.

 

As the Twentieth Century progressed, the five hundred year-long migration of the founders of San Jose de Payamino was nearing its end. The community remained based at Timuyacu for roughly six years, during which time the parish of San Jose de Payamino was formed (in 1967) and the first school at Payamino was set up under the teacher Eugenio Garcés. The community remained there for a further two years before moving further down the Tutapishcu River to the mouth of the Ahuano River in order to have easier access to the Payamino River for travelling to Coca. A new teacher, Romulo Garcia, arrived there in 1972; he would also become the teniente politico for San Jose de Payamino. The settlement at Ahuano was only in use for two years before the community decided that there wasn’t enough land available there, so in the late 1970’s they moved to their current location, at the mouth of the Tutapishcu River, where the old community of Payamino used to be, and adopted the name San Jose de Payamino in the process. The families who founded this community were Ajon, Bigay, Cejua, Condo, Jipa, Puraquilla and Tusupa. 

 

Romulo Garcia remained with the community until 1984. He was eventually evicted, with help from FICCKAE, a Coca-based indigenous rights group, after his sons physically attacked Ernesto Jipa, then president of the community. Mr Garcia’s house was destroyed and he was ordered never to return to Payamino.

 

By the early 1980’s, the new community hub had a school, a chapel, a meeting house and one home. The rest of the community was dispersed throughout the forest, along the rivers Payamino and Tutapishcu. By 1984, six houses had been built in the community hub, but only one family was permanently in residence there. Around this time, the incoming migration of indigenous groups from Tena, Archidona and Loreto left San Jose de Payamino as the only native indigenous community in the area; fears of their land being colonised by migrant settlers motivated the community to obtain their land title.

 

In 1992, in response to an earthquake caused by an eruption of the Reventador volcano, the EEC and the Banco Ecuatoriano de la Vivienda donated materials for the construction of 48 houses in the community hub. Currently, 35 of these are still standing and in use, with the families dividing their time between them and their fincas (farms), further upriver. They obtain most of their food from the fincas, through swidden agriculture, hunting and fishing. Additionally, cash crops, such as rice, cacao, coffee, citrus fruits and maize are grown for sale in Loreto. The chapel is now gone, but a health centre (built in 2009) stands in its place, near an office building of the Sumaco Napo-Galeras National Park (built in 2007). As recently as 1999, a socioeconomic study in the area reported that two older community members still spoke a pre-Kichwa language, and of all of the indigenous communities in the Loreto area, San Jose de Payamino remains one of only three (and the only one in the north-eastern sector of the Sumaco Biosphere Reserve) that can claim to have a historical link to its territory predating the migrations fuelled by the petrol boom.