Andoque

The Andoque, who call themselves "people of the axe," live along the Aduche stream and the middle Caquetá River below the Araracuara rapids, in Colombia's Amazonas department. Their language is classified as an isolate: proposed connections to the Bora-Witoto languages have never been demonstrated, and the variety once spoken in Peru is extinct. Before the twentieth century they numbered perhaps ten thousand people in dozens of patrilineal lineages; the rubber boom, and above all the atrocities of the Casa Arana rubber regime, destroyed most of the population, and today's community descends from a small group of survivors who returned to the Caquetá.

Five patrilineal clans — among them Hawk, Deer, Sun, and Leaf-cutter Ant — structure Andoque society, and ceremonial life is anchored in a small number of malocas that serve as ritual and political centers. Families practice shifting cultivation, opening new gardens every few years for manioc, peach palm, plantains, and other crops, supplemented by hunting and fishing.

Despite their small numbers, the Andoque have been central to the cultural and political life of the middle Caquetá, participating in the regional association of traditional authorities and in the large Predio Putumayo indigenous territory. Their oral tradition, ritual discourse, and memory of the rubber-era violence have been the subject of important ethnographic and linguistic work.