Siekopai (Secoya)

Siekopai is the name this people uses. Secoya is the name in the official record, and Angotero, Encabellado, Huajoya and Piojé are the names in the older one — a stack of labels applied by outsiders to a people who held the country between the Putumayo and the Napo across what is now Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.

Two events cut them apart. The rubber boom of the early twentieth century displaced communities, moving people from Santa María in Peru to Puerto Bolívar on the Cuyabeno. Then in 1941 Ecuador and Peru went to war, and the Rio de Janeiro Protocol drew a border straight through Siekopai territory. Families ended up on opposite sides of a line neither country consulted them about, and the split is still there.

Today there are roughly 400 Siekopai in Ecuador, in Eno, San Pablo de Katëtsiaya and Siecoya Remolino along the Aguarico, and around 700 in Peru.

In November 2023 a provincial court in Sucumbíos ruled that the ancestral territory of Pë'këya must be titled to them. It was the first judgment of its kind in Ecuador, it took more than eighty years to obtain, and as of 2025 the state had still not handed over the title.

The Siekopai hold roughly 40,000 hectares in Ecuador along the Shushufindi, Aguarico and Cuyabeno rivers in Sucumbíos province, with communities in Peru across the border.

The territory that matters most is the one they do not live on. Pë'këya — known in Spanish as Lagartococha — is a lake and wetland country of about 42,000 hectares now enclosed inside the Cuyabeno Wildlife Production Reserve, which covers more than 590,000 hectares. The Siekopai were displaced from it during the 1941 war and never went back.

On 24 November 2023 the multi-competent chamber of the provincial court of Sucumbíos ordered the Ministry of Environment and the state attorney general to adjudicate and hand over a collective title over Pë'këya to the Siekopai Nationality, in the court's words as a form of reparation for the protection of their identity, their culture and their spirituality. The figure in the order is 44,882 hectares.

In March 2025 a judge fined the Ministry of Environment for failing to comply with that judgment. The archive records both facts together: the ruling is real and the title has not arrived.

The Siekopai speak Paicoca, in the Western Tucanoan family — the same small branch that holds Siona, Koreguaje and Orejón, spoken across a compact stretch of the northwest Amazon in four countries.

Siona and Paicoca are close, and the closeness is not academic: Siekopai and Siona communities recognise each other as relatives, and the 1941 border cut through a linguistic continuum as well as through a territory.

With roughly 1,100 Siekopai across two countries, the language is spoken by very few people, and the pressures named in the sources — oil operations, missionary presence, colonists — are the pressures that end languages. A 1974 relocation carried out with the Summer Institute of Linguistics moved communities to San Pablo, which is a reminder that even the institutions that wrote the language down reorganised the people who spoke it.

Spanish is the second language in Ecuador and in Peru, and the border means Siekopai children on either side are schooled in different national systems while speaking the same first language.

Siekopai households live from gardens, fishing, hunting and gathering on the Aguarico, Shushufindi and Cuyabeno — manioc and plantain as the base, with fish from rivers and lakes that have been the centre of the food economy for as long as there is a record.

The lake country is the point. Pë'këya is a wetland, and the Siekopai food and seasonal calendar was built around lakes rather than around a single river channel. Losing access to it in 1941 was not only a loss of land, it removed a whole class of fishing and gathering from the annual round.

Cash comes from craft sale, from wage work in an oil province, and from tourism in the Cuyabeno reserve. The reserve is the same institution that encloses Pë'këya, which means the Siekopai now work inside a protected area declared over territory they were displaced from.

Oil is the constant background. Siekopai organisations have been in conflict with oil operations in the province, including over drilling in Block 15, and the province's economy is built on an industry the communities have spent decades resisting on their own ground.

The Siekopai have something almost no other people in this archive has: a painter known worldwide under his own name. Ramón Piaguaje, a Siekopai artist, won first prize at the United Nations Millennium Art Exhibition from more than twenty-two thousand entries submitted internationally.

That matters beyond the prize. Amazonian art reaches the world almost always as anonymous ethnographic material, sorted by people rather than by maker. A named Siekopai painter judged against the world's artists rather than against a regional category is a different kind of visibility, and a people of a few hundred obtained it.

The community traditions run alongside: beadwork collars and chest pieces, feather work, carved wood, basketry, and the making of canoes, nets and traps that a lake and river economy needs.

The archive attributes work to makers wherever the record allows it. Where it does not, the archive says so rather than letting a piece stand as generic Amazonian craft, because the Siekopai case shows exactly what is lost when it does.

The Siekopai present is a judgment that has not been executed.

The November 2023 ruling ordering the state to title Pë'këya to them was reported internationally as historic, and it is: an Ecuadorian court recognising ancestral territory inside a national protected area, more than eighty years after the displacement that caused the claim. In March 2025 a judge fined the Ministry of Environment for not complying with it. Both halves are the situation.

The other structural fact is the border. Roughly 400 Siekopai in Ecuador and 700 in Peru are one people administered as two, and every programme — schooling, health, language, land — arrives from a different state on each side.

Oil, colonists and missionary presence continue to press on a population of about eleven hundred people. What the Siekopai have set against that is organisation, litigation and a claim they pursued for four generations without giving it up, which is the fact this section exists to hold.

The Siekopai wear the cushma, the long straight tunic of the western Amazon, and it is the garment that identifies them in every photograph of a community assembly or a court appearance.

As with their Cofán and Siona neighbours, the designed surface is not the cloth. Bead collars and chest bands are worn over the tunic, and it is there and in painted work that Siekopai pattern lives.

The fibre economy is the constant one: hammocks, nets, carrying baskets and cordage from palm and forest fibre, made for use, replaced when they wear out, and largely absent from the collections that decide what a people is understood to make.

Commercial cloth supplies most tunics now, as it does across the region. The archive treats that as a change of material and not a change of meaning.

The sources consulted describe Siekopai beadwork, feather work, basketry, canoe and net making and painting, and do not describe a distinct Siekopai ceramic tradition. The archive marks the gap rather than filling it.

Ceramics are used in Siekopai households as in every household of the upper Amazon, and pottery has a long regional history. Use and manufacture are different claims and only the first is supported here.

The Siekopai case carries the same caution as the Siona one. A people displaced by a rubber boom, cut in half by a war, relocated again in 1974 and now numbering about eleven hundred has had several occasions on which a craft tied to a fixed place could have stopped. Absence from a modern description does not establish absence from the history.

The section is left open for a Siekopai potter or a firmly attributed museum holding.

Siekopai music belongs to community gatherings and festivals, played on flutes, drums and rattles in the manner of the western Amazonian lowlands.

The healing repertoire is held by the practitioner, learned across years, and is not performance. The archive records that the category exists and reproduces nothing from it — no words, no melodies, no recordings — the standard it applies across this whole region.

With Paicoca spoken by roughly a thousand people across a national border, song is one of the settings in which the language is used at length and collectively. That gives community music a function beyond music, and it is why language programmes in Siekopai communities have worked through it.

The sources consulted do not offer a detailed ethnomusicology of the Siekopai. The archive states that rather than importing a neighbour's description and relabelling it.

Yajé is central to Siekopai ceremonial life, as it is throughout the Aguarico and Putumayo country, and the person who holds that work carries an authority built through long apprenticeship rather than claimed.

The archive names the practice and its holders and goes no further: no preparation, no plant part, no quantity, no combination, no method appears anywhere in this profile. The rule is the same one applied to the Inga, Kamëntsá, Cofán and Siona, and the reason is the same — outsiders come to this region looking for exactly this, and a description written as instruction will be used as one.

Pë'këya belongs in this section as well as in the territorial one. The court that ordered the title described it as reparation for the protection of the Siekopai identity, culture and spirituality, which is a state institution saying in its own words that the lake country is not merely land.

Ceremonial dress is the cushma with bead collars and feather work, worn at community occasions and in the public appearances that a four-generation land claim has demanded.

Siekopai healing rests on a practitioner trained over years, working with yajé and with plants. This entry publishes no medicine: no plant named as a remedy, no part, no preparation, no quantity, no combination, no method, for yajé or for anything else.

The health picture, as distinct from the healing tradition, is shaped by the province the Siekopai live in. Sucumbíos is an oil province, and the communities are close to operations whose environmental record in this watershed is the subject of the longest environmental litigation in the region's history.

Distance is the other health fact. Around eleven hundred people in river settlements across an international border reach clinics through two different national systems, and neither was built for them.

What the sources do support is that the healing tradition survived the rubber boom, the 1941 war, the 1974 relocation and the oil era, and is still held by trained practitioners. The archive records that it exists, states where it sits, and publishes nothing that could be followed.

Siekopai houses are river and lake houses: timber framed, palm thatched, raised against damp and flood, built where a canoe can come in.

Settlement has been moved more often by other people than by the Siekopai. The rubber boom moved communities from Santa María to Puerto Bolívar; the 1941 border stranded families where they stood; a 1974 relocation carried out with the Summer Institute of Linguistics moved communities to San Pablo. The three present-day Ecuadorian settlements — Eno, San Pablo de Katëtsiaya and Siecoya Remolino — are on the Aguarico, and their locations are the record of those moves.

Pë'këya has no Siekopai settlement, and that is the architectural fact the court ruling is about. A people that built on lakes now builds on a river, because the lakes were enclosed in a reserve after they were pushed off them.

Community buildings — the meeting house, the school — carry the weight in a population of a few hundred, and they are where the organisation that won the 2023 judgment does its work.