Ika
The Ika or Arhuaco are an indigenous people and live on the southern side of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia . It is about 6,000 and together with their closely related neighbors, the Arsarios (also Malayo or Wiwa ) and the Kogi , a larger tribe, at least 20,000 people.
The Ika are descendants of the Arawak . Their language belongs to the Chibcha language family.
Way of life
The peaceful Ika lived from growing corn, manioc , plantains, potatoes, cocoa and various fruits. Hunting used to be important too. The Ika were expelled from the coastal areas early by Spanish settlers. The white settlers also cut down the cocoa trees - a rare variety with white beans. The Ika retreat in the Sierra Neas, where they lived as mountain farmers, was occupied by Capuchin missionaries in 1916 , who enslaved them as slave labor and denied them any education. Since the 1980s, land occupations followed by white settlers who use the land for growing marijuana and coca. This pulled the Ika into fighting between the army, left-wing guerrillas and paramilitaries; many were killed.
In 1962 a television station was set up on a sacred mountain of the Ika, which aroused their resistance and over time led to their politicization. Since 1982, a well-organized Ika freedom movement has been fighting against land grabbing and for the return to the old settlement areas and driving out the Capuchins. At the beginning of this century the Ika returned to their old settlement areas, while the white settlers continue to cultivate the lower-lying, more fertile fields.
Today the Ika also live on crops such as coffee, sugar cane, wheat and keep cattle. Recently they have been growing the local cocoa variety again with sustainable, forest-friendly methods of use.
Culture and religion
The Ika believe in a paternal creator god, the Kakü Serankua . The sun and snow-capped peaks are other male deities, the earth and the moon are female deities. They consider the Sierra Nevada to be the center of the world. The spiritual head of the Ika, the Mamü , is selected as a child and prepared for his tasks in a cave.
The Ika call themselves “the older brothers” because they assume that they have a greater understanding of the world than other people, who therefore call themselves “the younger brothers”. The men wear a conical white hat that symbolizes the snow-capped mountain peaks of the Sierra.
literature
- José Antonio Orozco: Nabusímake, tierra de Arhuacos . ESAP, Bogotá 1990.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Cocoa from Colombia: Tribal chocolate from the Arhuaco tribe on www.reise-nach-kolumbien.de
This article is based on the article Ika ( Memento from July 1, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) from the free encyclopedia Indianer Wiki ( Memento from March 18, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) and is under Creative Commons by-sa 3.0 . A list of the authors was available in the Indian Wiki ( Memento from July 1, 2007 in the Internet Archive ).