Cofán
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The Cofán (also called Kofan, Kofane, or A’i) people are an indigenous people native to Napo Province northeast Ecuador and southern Colombia, between the Guamués River (a tributary of the Putumayo River) and the Aguaricó River (a tributary of the Napo River). Their population is only 1,000 people, down from approximately 15,000 in the mid-16th century. They speak the Cofán language or A'ingae a language of the Chibchan family. The ancestral land, community health and social cohesion of Cofan communities in Ecuador has been severely damaged by several decades of oil drilling. However, reorganization, campaigning for land rights, and direct action against encroaching oil installations have provided a modicum of stability. Major settlements include Sinangué, Dovuno, Dureno and Zábalo, the latter of which has retained a much more extensive land base.
At the moment they are doing things in Zabalo to bring back some of the traditional animals of their culture to the tributaries of the Amazon where they live. They are raising turtles and allegators to be released. They are also starting to raise chickens as a source of food. Many animals that live within their domaine are endangered including several monkeys, tabir and pink dolphin.
Political representation and coordination takes place through the Federation of Indigenous People of the Cofan Nationality of Ecuador (Organizacion de Indigenas de la Nacionalidad Cofan del Ecuador- FEINCE), a member of the regional indigenous federation CONFENIAE.
The Cofan are entitled to live in and patrol the 195-square-mile Bermejo Cofán Ecological Reserve (Reserva Ecológica Cofán de Bermejo), which was created on January 30, 2002.
[edit] History
The Cofáns have had many encounters with Europeans, Spanish colonial forces and Ecuadorians and Colombians. They defended their vassals and allies from Spanish colonization in the late 16th Century and eventually destroying the Spanish town of Mocoa, inducing a Spanish retreat. Padre Rafael Ferrer, a successful Jesuit missionary who arrived in 1602, was chased out only after soldiers and colonists sought to follow his lead. Occasional visits from outsiders seeking gold, land, trade, and converts occurred over the next few centuries as European diseases caused a population crash. The Amazon rubber boom, in the 19th and early 20th Century, brought increased contact, especially with missionaries, both cultural and religious. Measles, malaria, and tuberculosis brought the population down to no more than 350; before contact there had been 15-20,000 Cofáns.
Randy Borman describes the Cofan response to this traumatic history as follows: an attitude “which can be best termed stoic acceptance of the incomprehensible ways of the outsiders as a survival strategy. Rape and robbery are preferable to death, and if we do not rock the boat, the outsiders will eventually go away, and we will pick up the pieces and continue.”
An abortive oil surveying mission by Shell Oil visited Cofán territory from 1945 through 1949.
Bud and Bobbie Borman, a husband and wife team of missionaries from the Summer Institute of Linguistics, were among the few outsiders to stay. SIL’s mission was to translate the New Testament into new languages and introduce Christianity. The Bormans provided medicines, opened a school in the Cofán language, and offered skills training. The Bormans went further by raising their children in Cofán culture and acting in cooperation with the Cofán chief Guillermo Quenama.
In 1964, Geodetic Survey, Inc. cleared seismic trails and detonated underground explosives to locate petroleum deposits for a Texaco-Gulf consortium. A road was built in 1972 from Quito to the new oil town of Lago Agrio and oil extraction began. Colonization by landless peasants from the highlands followed. By 1982, 47% of the population consisted of migrants, 70% of whom had arrived in the last decade of major oil development. Meanwhile, oil spills, gas flaring, and untreated wastes undermined the environment, and compromised the subsistence and health of both the Cofáns and the colonists.↑
[edit] Sources
- ↑ Randall B. Borman, “Survival in a Hostile World: Culture Change and Missionary Influence Among the Cofan People of Ecuador, 1954-1994,” Missiology 24, no. 2 (1996).
- ↑ Randall B. Borman, “Survival in a Hostile World: Culture Change and Missionary Influence Among the Cofan People of Ecuador, 1954-1994,” Missiology 24, no. 2 (1996): 186.
- ↑ Hicks, James F., et. al. Ecuador’s Amazon Region: Development Issues and Options. Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, 1990.
