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SPEAKING INCA
Looking beyond the litter
and New Age travelers bound
for Machu Picchu
by Edward Marshall
Salasaca is the ancient name for one of the many Quichua Indian communities that dot the Andean highlands of Ecuador. It is a cold, semi-arid, and unforgiving patch of land brightened by inhabitants filled with beaming, cherubic smiles, melodic voices, and brightly colored scarves and shawls atop black ponchos and skirts. I love the sound of Salasaca, of how it rolls off the tongue with its simple alliterative appeal. To me, Salasaca is synonymous with Quichua, though each individual community maintains distinct variations of pan-Quichua customs and traditions.
The Quichuas are the largest indigenous group in the country and make up about 40 percent of the total Ecuadorian population. The people and language, you may be surprised to know, are growing. The language Quichua is an offshoot of Quechua, which is spoken throughout Peru and Bolivia and was the official language of the Inca Empire.
Present-day Ecuador roughly comprises what was known as the Northern Inca Empire, a product of aggressive and hostile Inca expansion during the twilight of the empire's long history. Over the years the region's language developed separately and distinctly from its Peruvian origins to give us Quichua. Ecuador's official language is Spanish, thanks to the second conquest of Ecuador by the conquistadors fewer than 80 years after the Inca invasion. The Spaniards remained, as did their language. Nonetheless, Quichua's pervasive presence in markets, on buses, and throughout the countryside begs the question, who in the end conquered whom?
The word for Quichua in Quichua is not Quichua, it is Runashimi: runa means person and shimi means tongue. And while "person" in English or other western languages universally refers to human beings without regard to origin, background, or culture, runa has some definite parameters. In Salasaca, to be a runa you have to speak Runashimi, eat runa micuna, wear runa churana, and live within the runa limiti. "The people" in Salasaca is self-referential, those individuals who conform to a certain collective way of life-perhaps the best definition of Quichua culture and society. I lived in Salasaca as a Peace Corps volunteer, but I could never become a runa, like Kevin Costner becomes a Sioux in "Dances with Wolves." Runa is not a title you earn and is universal only insofar as it relates to the world of the Salasacas, a club to which many cannot claim membership. Nonmembers, for example, might speak Gringoshimi.
Salasaca identity is connected to a strong pre-Colombian tradition that is enhanced, not diminished, by the contrast of the runa causai-the people's life-to the outside world. In that respect, Salasaca defies conventional logic that through cultural contact the more dominant culture-in this case, Ecuador's Spanish-speaking society-will eventually engulf a smaller counterpart culture, the Salasaca. That Salasaca sits on an Ecuadorian highway between a major urban center and a tourist town is a testament not to Salasaca's inevitable assimilation but to its cultural resilience. As the outside world encroaches upon Salasaca land, its residents' sense of identity is only heightened.
There are a number of words for "land" in Runashimi. Llacta and Pamba are two frequently used Ecuadorian place-names. So frequent are they used, in fact, that they connote neither Spanish nor Quichua sentiments, but a purely Ecuadorian one. Papallacta, one of my favorite Ecuadorian town names means potato land in Quichua. Pacha is another Quichua term for land. Its scope of meaning additionally encompasses time. We can thank Einstein for introducing us to "time-space" in English through the theory of relativity, but this concept, pacha, was an integral part of Quichua spirituality long before we knew what an atom was. Pachacutik, the Indian political movement of Ecuador, signifies a return, or cutik, to a former pacha, a reference to the lost Inca world and the belief in a vanquished race. My skepticism of Ecuadorian politics penetrates even my love for Quichua society though, and I sometimes wonder if the same people clawing away for political power under the rainbow-colored banner of Pachacutik would return to their respective pachas, they'd learn it was never lost to begin with.
Judging from the amount of trash littering the pathways and dirt roads crisscrossing Salasaca land, a visitor would be hard-pressed to believe
that this pacha is any more sacred than the urine-stained walls in Quito's bus station. Looks can be deceiving. The Quichua connection to land is as permanent as the snows atop the volcanoes encircling the highland valleys. Within Salasaca, a rather modest section of Andean highland, there are various sites the Salasacas visit for spiritual power. One such site sits between the summits of Catitahua and Quinlli Urcu. Urcu means mountain or hill in Quichua and quinlli is the spiny plant found at the site that gives the urcu its name. Anthropologist Peter Wogan pointed out to me early in my service that the two mountainsides are affectionately referred to by Salasacas as Punisikiurcuguna, or the Sleepyhead Hills.
I do not subscribe to the New Age revolution underway in the travelers' corridors of Ecuador or Nepal. I do not believe in energy lines or a mystic connection between Druids, Incas, and Australian aborigines. I do, however, hold a special reverence for Quinlli Urcu, littered with offerings left by Salasacas hoping for weaving or music skills, longer hair, birth control, or luck in love. I used to make the solo trip to the site before attempting any high-altitude climbs. Quinlli Urcu is a quiet, peaceful spot offering an open view of Ecuador's central valley, a peek at the Pastaza Gorge as it winds down to the Amazon Basin, and when lucky, majestic glimpses of the towering snow-capped volcanoes that gave shape to so much of this spectacular scenery.
Teligote, Quinlli Urcu's better half, is a source of countless legends as well as medicinal plants and natural dyes that Salasacas harvest each October for use in the home. I loved to embark on the day trip from my house up to the mountain and dive into the forest's primeval confines. At times, I expected Yoda to pop out from behind one of the gangling, moss-covered trees, along with Obeewon Kanobee, which is not a Quichua word. One legend I frequently would hear about the forest concerned a sacred lake that has the habit of disappearing and reappearing when the curious go searching for it. "How convenient it should do that," I thought, for, each time I wandered in that forest I would search for the lake, and never find it. I was unconvinced of its existence.
One afternoon, my Salasaca friend, Joseth, a self-described Teligote expert, led me and another Peace Corps volunteer, Raj, up a different route along the north ridge of the mountain where, low and behold, a lake appeared. It is no wonder that Salasacas cling to traditional beliefs, though in all fairness the "lake" is only about 10 meters by 20 meters in size. Joseth said that if we dove into the lake, which by my reckoning was about two feet deep, we would reemerge in the Llanganates mountains, legendary home to the lost Inca treasures. I declined to jump in. Raj, however, sipped from the sacred pool because we had forgotten to carry water with us on the hike. The next day Raj emerged with an acute case of giardia.
About the lake's disappearing act: it inhabits an open field of high Andean grasses that could easily conceal or reveal its whereabouts, depending on recent rainfall. Salasaca folklore and logic never cease to impress. I fear, however, that rapid rates of deforestation may make Salasaca's sacred forest, and this vanishing lake, permanently disappear.
The pre-Colombian Andes were home to a highly advanced as well as brutal empire. I wonder what the Andes would be like if the Inca Emperor, Atahualpa, had refused to meet with his Spanish enemy and eventual executor, Francisco Pizarro, and instead ordered an ambush of the small group of conquistadors as they slowly made their way up from the coast into the heart of the empire. Excluding the scourge of disease that would soon confront them, the Incas could have become trading equals with the Europeans rather than subjects of its transplanted feudalism. They could have swapped portions of their massive gold reserves for weaponry and even learned to fashion firearms, because there were expert craftsmen, engineers, and architects throughout the empire. With the additions of the wheel and writing to their society, the Incas could have outpaced Europe's blossoming enlightenment and today be a powerful non-western society: Imagine an Inca passport written in Runashimi.
Alas, the turn of events for the Quichua-speaking world was a bit different. Today, respectful tourists, soul searchers, and New Age fanatics go to the Andes to pay homage to relics of the Inca empire at Machu Picchu. But they are worshipping a lost world and I close my eyes and remember a mud hut in Salasaca where I would sit and listen to a distant drum beat and a lonely melody play, privy to the great living secret of the Quichua world.
The author was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador from 1996 to 1998.
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