Kotiria (Wanano)

The Kotiria, long known in the literature as Wanano or Guanano, are an Eastern Tucanoan people whose villages line both banks of the middle Vaupés River where it crosses the Colombia-Brazil border; the larger share of the population lives on the Colombian side, in settlements such as Villa Fátima. Their self-designation, Kotiria, means "water people." They are a textbook case of Vaupés linguistic exogamy: Kotiria must marry speakers of other Tucanoan languages, so households are thoroughly multilingual, yet Kotiria remains the first language of most of the community and is considered one of the healthier indigenous languages of the region.

Their economy combines fishing — central for a river people — with hunting and shifting cultivation of bitter manioc. They are known for producing annatto dye and woven goods of palm fiber that move through regional exchange, and harvest festivals such as the dabucuri sustain ties among intermarrying communities.

Contact with missionaries reaches back to the eighteenth century, and boarding schools later reshaped education and religious life. Today the Kotiria live within legally recognized indigenous territories on both sides of the border, participate in river-basin indigenous organizations, and have collaborated extensively with linguists and anthropologists documenting their language and social system.