Omagua
The Omagua or Karijona (also called Umawa , Umaua , Umanas or Cambebas , as well as "flat heads") are or were a South American ethnic group in the Marañón and Amazonas in Peru and in the western border area of Brazil .
The Omagua are also known under the name Guaques and today under the name Karijona . Omagua or Umawa is the name given to these Carib peoples by the Arawak peoples, who are traditionally hostile to them , and means “the toads” in the Arawak language . You refer to yourself as Karijona . The term "flat heads" used by Europeans came from the fact that, according to reports from chroniclers, the Omagua tied boards in front of their babies' heads so that the head would have a correspondingly flat, in their opinion "beautiful" shape.
In the 16th century rumors about the legendary wealth of the Omagua attracted adventurers from Europe, including in 1529 Nikolaus Federmann and in 1536 Georg von Speyer as representatives of the Welser , in the 1540s Gonzalo Pizarro and Philipp von Hutten and in 1560 Pedro de Ursúa .
In 1645 the Jesuits began missionary work and set up over 30 missions close to the river, which were last supervised by the Bohemian missionary Samuel Fritz , who had been with the Cambebas as a “medicine man” since 1685. When the Portuguese took over the area in the first two decades of the 18th century, the Jesuit reductions had to be abandoned and the settlements disappeared.
The Omagua were one of the largest Amazonian peoples at the time of the Conquista . Today they are largely absorbed by the mestizo population. In the 1970s, the Bavarian ethnologist Helmut Schindler conducted field research on the last remaining Omagua group, which then numbered around 150 people, and recorded the myths of this tribe.
Archaeologically significant are rock carvings from the Chiribiquete culture in today's Colombian Chiribiquete National Park , which probably belonged to the Omagua ethnic group. Many of the figures wear tight-fitting abdominal and chest belts typical of traditional Omagua costumes.
The Omagua language is loud SIL International of less than 100 people in the Amazon today Iquitos spoken (Peru). It is probably already extinct in Brazil. The language belongs to the Tupi-Guaraní languages and is most closely related to the Cocama language, which is also almost extinct .
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Jörg Denzer: The Conquest of the Augsburg Welser Society in South America 1528–1556. Munich 2005, ISBN 978-3406534843 , p. 180.
- ↑ Robert et al. Evamaria Grün (ed. And edit.): The conquest of Peru. Pizarro and other conquistadors 1526–1712. The eyewitness accounts of Celso Gargia, Gaspar de Carvajal and Samuel Fritz. Tübingen 1973, pp. 291–330 (most recently published as a fully, thoroughly, and abridged new edition by Ernst Bartsch and Evamaria Grün (eds.): Stuttgart / Vienna 1996, ISBN 3-522-61330-9 ).
- ↑ Jörg Denzer: The conquest of the Augsburg Welser Society in South America 1528–1556. Munich 2005, p. 179.