Bora (ethnicity)
The Bora is an indigenous community in Colombia in the area of the rivers Caraparana, Caquetá and Igaraparána well as in the Peruvian region of Loreto , between the rivers Ampiyacu, Putumayu and Yahuasyacu near the Amazon .
history
According to Steward, about 25,000 Bora were counted in the area of southern Colombia at the time of first contact with Europeans in the mid-19th century. These had the reputation of a warlike tribe that attacked neighboring ethnic groups and ate human flesh . In the course of the rubber boom , the "rubber baron" Julio César Arana del Águila brought the area on the Putumayu under his control from 1896, and the Bora hired themselves to him in debt bondage as rubber collectors in the woods in exchange for tools, glass beads and other industrial products . It quickly became apparent to the Bora that they could no longer get out of the system, because they were made to work like slaves with firearms and whips. Escaped bora were hunted by gunmen, from 1904 by a troop of 200 human hunters from Barbados who whipped or shot insubordinate men . In addition, imported diseases resulted in the death of many indigenous people. In 1926 the number of the Bora was given as 12,000, in 1941 only 500. Many Bora fled deeper into the woods and thus also evaded the counts. The Bora group, which lives in Peru, goes back to immigrants from Colombia who, after their arrival , fetched wood and other products from the forest in addition to rubber for the Patrones of the Loayza family.
language
The Bora language belongs to the Witoto family of languages .
Much information about the Bora and its language comes from Wesley Thiesen and his wife Eva from the Wycliff translators and SIL International , who have lived with the Bora in Peru since the 1950s. With their help, a translation of the New Testament into the Bora language was published in 2008 .
tourism
Not far from Iquitos (Peru) they present traditional dances and customs for tourists.
Trivia
The activists of Fuck for Forest meet the Bora in the documentary of the same name by the Polish director Michał Marczak.
literature
- Pedro Major Aparicio, Richard E. Bodmer: Pueblos indígenas de la Amazonía peruana . Centro de Estudios Teológicos de la Amazonía (CETA), Iquitos 2009. ISBN 978-612000069-4
- Julian Steward: The Witotoan Tribes . In: Handbook of South American Indians , Volume 3, pp. 749-762. Smithsonian Institution, Washington (DC) 1948.
- Wesley Thiesen, David J. Weber: A Grammar of Bora: With Special Attention to Tone . Chapter The Bora People , pp. 1-25. SIL International , 2012.
- Píívyéébé Ihjyu . El Nuevo Testamento en el idioma Bora de la Amazonía en el Perú. La Liga Bíblica, 2008.