draft manuscript - Linguistics - University of California, Berkeley

of Faith. The texts were produced by Jesuit missionaries in the 17th or 18th centuries as part of
the broader missionary effort of the Society of Jesus in the Government of Maynas (Province of
Quito, Viceroyalty of Peru), which lasted from 1638 to 1767, when King Charles III expelled the
Jesuits from Spain and all territories. 3 Together, these works constitute one of the more extensive
records of a western Amazonian language from this period. In addition, we include an analysis of
brief fragments of Omagua present in the diary of Manuel Uriarte, a Jesuit missionary who worked
among the Omagua. 4 The Omagua ecclesiastical texts discussed in this work have come down to
us in different ways, which we discuss in the chapters devoted to each text. 5
At the time of Europeans’ arrival in South America, the Omagua people were one of the most
numerous and powerful groups in Amazonia, occupying an extensive territory along the Amazon
River, from somewhat below the mouth of the Napo, in present-day Peru, to the mouth of the
Putumayo/Iça, in present day Brazil, as well as occupying two regions in the upper Napo basin
(where they were known as the Omaguayeté), 6 one on the Coca River, and another in and around the
mouth of the Curaray (Métraux (1927:36-41), Oberem (1967/1968), Grohs (1974:21-27), Newsom
(1996:206-208, 218-220)). 7 The Omagua are first thought to have encountered Europeans in 1538,
when the expedition of Diego Nunes carried out exploration of the Huallaga, Marañón and Amazon
basins (Stocks (1978:99-102), Myers (1992:129), citing Hemming (1978:185)). 8 The earliest surviving
description of Omagua society was written Gaspar de Carvajal ([1542]1934) 9 (b. c1500 Trujillo, Spain
– d. 1584 Lima), a Dominican priest attached to the expedition of Francisco de Orellana (b. 1511
Trujillo, Spain), which travelled down the Napo and Amazon Rivers to the Atlantic.
Colonial era estimates of the total Omagua population dating from 1542 to 1649 range from
roughly 6,000 to 100,000 (see Myers (1992:137-139) for a summary), but since several 16th- and 17thcentury
epidemics ravaged the Omagua, some estimates of pre-contact populations reach 2,000,000
(Myers 1992:148-149). The Omagua appear to have exerted significant politico-economic influence
throughout the part of Amazonia in which they lived, and exhibited large-scale social organization.
Omagua society collapsed in the 1690s, however, under intense pressure from Portuguese slave raids,
which resulted in the capture of many thousands of Omaguas and led the majority of the remainder
to flee upriver (Anonymous [1731]1922). By the 1720s, the surviving Omagua lived mainly in a small
number of mission settlements in Peru and Brazil, and by the early 20th century, ethnographers
3 Over the course of approximately the next two years, all Jesuits left Maynas under the supervision of the provincial
president José Diguja and a special commissioner José Basave (see Ferrer Benimeli (2000, 2001)).
4 Note that throughout this work we will spell the names of missionaries of various linguistic backgrounds as they
would have been spelled in their native language (e.g., Spanish, French, German, etc.). This is meant to avoid
confusion between different historical sources that often translate personal names into the language in which that
source is written. At the first mention of a non-Spanish missionary, we will footnote the Hispanic name by which
they are known in most sources, since the majority of those sources are written originally in Spanish.
5 Significantly, these texts are merely the surviving remnants of a much larger body of work mentioned in the Jesuit
record, including a number of dictionaries and grammars now lost. Most of this larger body of materials was burned
in São Paulo de Olivença (Amazonas, Brazil) in December 1768 while the Jesuits were awaiting transport back to
Europe. Other materials were lost in 1749 in a fire at Santiago de la Laguna (Huallaga River, Peru), the headquarters
of the Maynas missions, and no doubt more was lost as that mission site deteriorated in the years following 1768.
6 That is, the ‘true Omagua’. Note the reflex of the Proto-Tupí-Guaraní genuine marker *-eté (Jensen 1998:511).
7 Various pressures within the first ∼100 years of contact forced the Omagua of the upper Napo region to relocate to
the Suno, Aguarico and Tiputini basins (see especially Oberem (1967/1968) for details and Grohs (1974:21-23) for
summary). Note that the toponym Tiputini corresponds to the Omagua word t1p1tini ‘murky, turbid’.
8 de Varnhagen (1840), cited in Stocks (1978:102), reproduces Diego Nunes’ report on this expedition.
9 This is the first English translation of de Carvajal’s account, though a summary of it was published in English as
de Herrera y Tordesillas (1859) by the British geographer Sir Clements Robert Markham, which itself was extracted
from de Herrera y Tordesillas (1726), translated from Spanish by Captain John Stevens, although the Spanish
original appears to be lost. The first full Spanish edition was published as de Carvajal ([1542]1894).
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