Month: June 2024

Categories
Reading Blog

Agriculture as a mark of civilization

In Royal Commentaries, Garcilosa opens with a transcription of the oral retellings he grew up with of the origins of the Inca Kings. He writes that before the Incas came, the people lived “without tilling or sowing the soil”. Then, the first Inca prince and princess taught the people to “till the soil, and grow plants and crops, and breed flocks, and use the fruits of the earth like rational beings and not like beasts.” During our visit to the Pisaq ruins today, the tour guide said the Incas brought “civilized society” to the peoples of these mountains through the introduction of agriculture. It wasn’t very clear, but I think he explained that before the Incas, the people gathered wild foods.

I think it’s interesting that in both these narratives, the implementation of organized agriculture is a defining factor for what makes a society “civilized”. I think about this in relation to “Canada”, where European agriculture was very much weaponized by the government as a tool of assimilation. Perhaps you’ve heard of the forest food gardens of the Coast Salish and Ts’msyen peoples along the northwest Pacific coast. For the longest time, academics believed these forests were untouched and that these peoples were solely hunter-gatherers before they were introduced to European agriculture, because they failed to recognize that ways of actively cultivating food existed outside of our narrow idea of what agriculture entails. People were actually harvesting from very carefully managed gardens designed to be in-tune with the surrounding forest. The dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands was justified by the claim that they were not using their lands to their full potential; that their lands weren’t productive enough. The idea was that a claim to land was only legitimate if you intended to cultivate it in the way the Europeans did. This destroyed Indigenous food systems, both physically and through the severance of lineages of intergenerational knowledge transfer, and severely disrupted Indigenous diets.

So, I wonder about pre-Incan systems of agriculture. Were the people really just gatherers? Maybe agriculture wouldn’t even be the right word for their way of growing food. How do we define agriculture? Is any human system of working with plants in a way that benefits them an “agricultural” system? In my classes where we’ve discussed Indigenous food systems in “Canada”, we don’t (or we very rarely) use “agricultural” to describe Indigenous systems of growing food because in this context, the colonial connotations outweigh it’s usefulness as a descriptive term. In this case, the sign or the representation (our knee-jerk image of what agriculture looks like) is too far off from the reality to be of use.

But even if a people were solely hunters and gatherers, does that make them less “civilized”? Or less deserving of respect? Since we’ve really been on a let’s define things streak recently, how would we define civilization? And under that definition, is it an ideal that we should or must strive towards?

Edit: Changed my question and title according to Jon’s comment.

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Uncategorized

languages??? how did I get here?

After my post about trees, I don’t think Jon is going to like this one either.

On page 7 of The First New Chronicle and Good Government, Quechua and Inca are listed as separate languages. I was under the impression that Quechua was the language spoken by the Incas. Was Quechua not the official language of the Inca empire? Is Inca perhaps referring to an more professional/elite/secretive form of Quechua used for administrative purposes? Also, there are so many variations (?) of Quechua, what would have been considered just “Quechua” back then?

On the same page, several other Indigenous languages are listed: Aymara, Puquina Colla, Canche, Cana, Charca, Chinchaysuyu, Andesuyu, Collasuyu, and Condesuyu. This sent me down a tangent.

  • Aymara is an official language in both Peru and Bolivia.
  • Puquina Colla appears to have gone extinct in the early 19th century, but has influenced the existing (but endangered) Kallawaya language spoken by the Kallawaya people in modern-day Bolivia.
  • I can’t seem to find anything about the Canche language, though perhaps there is an alternative spelling that I’m unaware of.
  • When I tried spelling Cana as “Kana”, I could only find a language in Nigeria and a dialect in the Philippines.
  • Charca seems to be a dialect? subgroup? subcategory? of Aymara. I’m not in linguistics so I’m not sure what I would refer to it as.
  • Chinchaysuyu referred to the northwestern region of the Inca Empire and was likely named after the Chincha people. Today, Chincha is a province in southwestern Peru where many dialects of Quechua are spoken, collectively referred to as Chincha-Quechua. However, the Chincha people themselves disappeared a few decades after the start of the Spanish conquest. I’m confused as to whether Chinchaysuyu refers to the language spoken in the northwestern region, to the language of the Chinca people, or to the variation of Quechua spoken in the southwestern province. Perhaps all three are actually the same language? Hence, I also can’t figure out if Chinchaysuyu is still spoken today.
  • I am also experiencing a dilemma with Andesuyu. Andesuyu refers to Antisuyu, the eastern part of the Inca Empire. Numerous distinct Indigenous peoples call that region home, such as the Asháninka and Tsimané, and are now collectively known as Antis. These peoples also speak their own distinct languages. However, during the Inca reign, it seems only the Asháninka were referred to as Anti, so perhaps Andesuyu refers specifically to their language, which is still spoken today despite countless threats over the past five centuries.
    • Fun fact: “Andes” likely came from “Anti”. Although Anti was only used by the Incas to refer to the eastern portion of the modern-day Andes mountain chain, the Spanish may have generalized the term and used it to refer to the entire mountain chain.
  • “Suyu” means “quadrant” in Quechua. The Inca Empire was divided into quadrants: Chinchaysuyu and Antisuyu as previously mentioned, as well as Qullasuyu (Collasuyu) (southeastern) and Kuntisuyu (Condesuyu) (southwestern). The latter two are also the last two languages listed that I have yet to discuss. Note that these quadrants are not of equal size, with Chinchaysuyu and Qullasuyu significantly larger than the other two, and that the corners of the quadrants met at Cuzco. Qullasuyu likely got its name from the Qulla people, who speak a form of Quechua called Northwest Jujuy Quechua (or simply Qulla). “Collasuyu” is likely referring to this language, which is still spoken to this day.
  • Last but not least, Kuntisuyu, the smallest suyu of them all. There doesn’t seem to be much information about this suyu. As my understanding of the geography and peoples of Peru is not yet that deep, I’m unsure who inhabits this region and what language(s) they speak. Maybe another Quechuan language?

The Indigenous peoples of modern-day Peru include much more than the Inca, and there are many more languages than Quechua (or a form of Quechua?). This was a very shallow deep-dive that stemmed from my childhood habit of reading Wikipedia pages for fun. My word should in no way be taken as absolute because 1) I am an outsider with internet access but no real connection to these communities and 2) I have not even come close to encapsulating the depth and vitality of these cultures.

P.S. I read a cool fact about chinchillas that I need to fact check. I may also read up on ayllus because I briefly skimmed the Wikipedia page and realized I don’t understand local Indigenous self-governance (?) in the Andes at all.

Categories
Experience Blog

big rocks, also rivers, and a bit of tree

My questions about what materials the Spanish would have used to construct their buildings has been answered (at least in Cusco). I’m deeply saddened. I think the grandeur of the Catedral del Cuzco would not even have come close to the grandeur of Saqsaywaman.

When we visited Qorikancha, the tour guide told us the walls of the temple had been painted over with plaster, and holes had been made for the hanging of colonial paintings. But all that was shaken off in an earthquake (I can’t recall which one). In the aftermath of earthquakes, the Spanish buildings would lie in ruins on the ground, while the Inca walls would remain standing. I felt grimly satisfied. Perhaps this is Pachamama’s revenge. Pachamama feels the damage inflicted by the colonizers firsthand and decides to act on behalf of her children. Pachamama said NO to plasters and paintings, and YES to potatoes.

I was also deeply saddened to learn the Avenue El Sol is built on top of a large river. The river still runs beneath the road and, according to the tour guide, should become visible again further down. I have yet to confirm this for myself, but it’s in my plans for the next few days. I wish I got the name of the river.

Arguedas writes about the lines and stones of the Inca walls as rivers:

“The wall was stationary, but all its lines were seething and its surface was as changeable as that of the flooding summer rivers which have similar crests near the center, where the current flows the swiftest and is the most terrifying.”

At Saqsaywaman, the tour guide told us about the drainage systems built into the walls. I wonder if they’re still operational to some degree, even with most of the stones robbed. The walls would have literally become rivers during the six months of rain. I wonder if this runoff, and the runoff from the agricultural terraces, would have fed the river below the Avenue El Sol.

So I think about what it means for colonial forces to steal the stones take away the river. In a way, they’re robbing Cusco of the same thing. I think about the painting over of the stones and the paving over of the river. Is this meant to cover what was here before; to make invisible the forces that shaped the land before the Spanish arrived? The colonizers are rewriting the narrative through reshaping the land.

I believe the colonization of the people is intimately intertwined with the colonization of the land. On our walk up to Saqsaywaman yesterday, I observed the sheer number of eucalyptus trees growing on the slopes of the mountains. And it was pretty much only eucalyptus trees. Eucalyptus has long since taken up the space previously occupied by various native Andean species, in the same way that archbishops took up the space previously occupied by Inca Roca.

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