The indigenous communities that I hardly knew from above, I found them very organized spacely.  A deep contrast with the Colombian cities.  In these communities each house is separated from the other by almost a meter and they form a square around a common space.  They don't usually exceed the 40 houses, including the social infrastructure (school, maloca, center of health).  Each home is inhabited by a family nucleus of aproximately three generations, depending on the ethnos.  If the population grows a lot, a new community is created at a considerable but accessible distance by foot or by oar.

The normal thing is that the bongos (big canoes) with overboard motor overboard for transporting people and goods.  The curiaras, or smaller canoes, are usually used for fishing, setting turtles traps and for arrive to areas where the hunt pieces are usually found.

The heart of each community is the maloca, a big construction (20 x 40 m in the base for about 9 or 10 meters high) elaborated by the same community in bahareque(e28), guadua(e29) or wood, with roof of palm leaf.  In it they are carried out all the important meetings, like religious, political, informative ones and those for discuss and make community decisions.

The curripaco and puinave indigenous is very neat in his public space.  He doesn't throw garbage to the floor and he sweeps it daily.  Most communities have built sport courts in the common space.  The children use it more than the rest, chasing and playing.  Men and women are in charge of in the daily works, divided sexually.  The women cook, they take care of the conuco (communal earth of farming), they make food, wash the clothes and raise the children.  The men hunt, they fish, build the houses when they are needed, they trade and take charge of the administration and the relationships that have to do with the Colombian and even the Venezuelan state.

I had scarce contact with women.  An indigenous leader presented me two ladies, curripaco leaders.  They made me a deep and punctual critic of the state work.  What they told me that it wasn't made, not even begun, the officials said that yes, that already everything was well.

The state supposes that the communities, be mires, belong to peasants, colonists or natives, they are already organized and the reality is the opposite.  The nation human groups are in frank dispersion.  The hegemonic culture is centered in individual, not in community.  The commercial form of being related with people enters in collapse if it has to enter in relation with a community.  To face a client, with their whims, their likes, or whatever, is easier than to face a community.  With the community it has to wait for a meeting, the everyone attendance, a not-so-quarreled decision, to inform and consult those that have not attended, a non sectarian and a not-only-his-group position from the leader in charge, the victory over distrusts created by the previous leaders and so forth.

The indigenous communities, for the fact of being smaller, to have long family ties to each other and a tradition of internal collaboration, they consider selfishness a defect.  Its form of seeing the life is nearer to the far East cultures than to "our" western world.  It is normal that people passing trough difficulties are not looked as "them" but like part of the whole, as a member of the family, not like a separated individual (by no means an object, as sometimes it happens in the cities).  That, added to their historical conditions of isolation, in exceptional natural regions if they are compared with the rest of the country, he/she makes that those ties are given spontaneously.  Still if they were not given, they would be terribly necessary for them.  A community that doesn't have them, or it is disappearing or it was already culturally alienated.

Don Mauricio, a yeral indigenous that worked cutting grass in The Safari.  He spoke four native languages, besides Spanish and Portuguese... And he didn't know anything.

The communities of the Inírida surroundings get goods easier, but they feel the pressure from the group toward the shame of being indigenous.  They are pushed to recognize their selves as what they are not and to feel below a more advanced society that knows how to make things that they do not.

I don't cease of comparing with what happens us at national level, because my family lives almost all in the U.S. and the forgetfulness processes and cultural shame are very similar.  The Unitedstadian has the strange belief that Latinos are all lazy and tricky, if not criminals.  The media maintain that stereotype, even in cartoons (be seen the friends of Speedy González, by Warner Bros.)  That generates attitudes from employers and from security organisms that many times end in injustices.  In our case the question is mediated in the opposite way, but the prejudices about the Indian are more oral than another thing.  They are transmitted through coterie jokes or expressions like "That is hard for the peasant!" or "You seem from the mountain, don't you"? used to point out how silly is the other one.  It is common to hear references almost or clearly pejorative to the "little Indians", or how it is recommended to such or which person to don't do that because "he seems an Indian".  The general conscience is that to be Indian is a defect, it is not virtue, or, what should be, something that is neither faulty neither advantageous, but different indeed.

It is not to put on in a level of equality, because it would be a mistake.  We are different and we have the right and the obligation of to respect, to take advantage and to enrich those differences.  Each human group has aspects in those it takes a considerable advantage with regard to the rest and others in those has been straggler, not because it is inferior, but because the cultural, historical, natural conditions, didn't give for another thing.  The enslavement of whole cultures and, what is worse, whole groups of cultures make us lose something that is impossible to recover, with virtues that we ignore, but that we feel while we come closer.

The computerized West society worries a lot about the extinction of animal species, but the languages still disappear at a bigger speed and they make part of the same problem.  Before 1492 the number of languages used by the mankind was enormous; nowadays the tendency is to affirm only some few ones that have arisen from previous cultural dominance processes.  Still the same United Nations only have 6 official languages:  English, French, Russian, Chinese, Spanish and Arabic.  In time to sign San Francisco's letter, Arabic didn't figure.  The Muslim nations had to put the scream in the sky so that the Koran sacred language was considered in a minimum level of equality.  But the languages reflect the structure of power that there is at the interior of the organism and they don't a world reality millions of times more diverse and more complex.

Simplification for management generates the erasure of "small" differences as if they were a spelling error.  The Colombian state recognizes in its constitution that «the indigenous languages will be official in the territories inhabited by this groups», but all the laws, even those that affect directly those territories, are only published in Spanish.  It is supposed that the Direction of Indigenous Matters in the government's ministry correct that defect, but to make it with a joking budget and with a terrible legislators' indifference, it is other business.

An indigenous leader of the Guainía River had to issue a civil right sue in Inírida so they allowed him to speak in his language through the radiophone.  The authorities impeded it to him using security justifications.  They assured that messages could be transmitted to the guerrilla in an unknown language, thanks to that they didn't understand them.  The sue was approved by the constitutional court and published by the municipality in billboard; in it, they alleged that the same thing could be made with keys elaborated in Spanish language, and recognize the graveness of the supposed protectors of the groups cultural identity, they were exactly who sought to repress it.

Something as natural as the language, the spontaneous vehicle of the traditional thought, is attacked daily.  The radio, the nascent local tv, the agreements, the departmental and municipal ordinances, and all that comes from the state administration comes in Spanish; it doesn't care that it has been approved and generated in the same Inírida or, even worse, in an indigenous community.  The territorial identity is managed by the less interested in affirming it.

The colonist feels the effect when telling him that the lands where his properties are locate, the ones he has worked during such a long time, they cannot be sold neither bought.  That they are "inalienable, imprescriptible and inembargable(*)", according to constitution.  But it doesn't stop the approach of the peasant on "the agricultural frontier" that he simply takes and what he considers works fallow.  «That earth was unoccupied, it was not but stubble!  We work it and we put it to take place! And the foods that the same communities are not able to take out take place!» they told me.  They believe that the natives are lazy, and that's the reason for they don't have anything."

The conceptions of earth, both so different, don't face, because they are not under equality conditions.  One depends on hunting and fishing, it considers the earth like part of life, home of all the sacred things, an extension of the family.  The other one sees in it an opportunity to improve the own life, to give a hope to their children by work means that it only can be empowered through individual initiative and property.  It knows about products to fertilize, of foods market and similar things.  It considers that only the guy who is able to take and take care is able to produce the foods, something for the others.  The state, the western society, the peasant, the colonist and the professional from Bogotá share the latter vision.

The cities impose a way of think, of being related with earth and they don't leave place to another thing.  The city dweller aesthetics only considers beautiful a field when it looks like a golf field; the rest is a rupture of order, it is stubble, it is negligence.  It is not animals home, neither a place full with unknown forces to those it is necessary to request permission to cut a tree or to sow.  The towns of the region call the payé, jaibaná or their equivalent mediator so he prays and he requests permission to the spirit of the tree to cut it and to make a craft.  The probability of a bongo trunk cracking is much bigger if they doesn't pray.  The same thing with the conuco, the earth portion for the communal sow:  The crop is not the same if they don't dance, if it is not made the correspondant ceremony to the crop beginning or things as important as to regulatethe entrance of pregnant women, virgins or with period.

The time, the moon, the level of the river, the humor of people, the plant that originated the seed, the signs that animals give, everything is regulated by a belief or a special technique.  Only the youths, or those that have been influenced by other forms of thinking, surpass them and they use products arrived by air or by cargo boat.  Many of the latter have been proven under very different wheather and chemical conditions.  They can produce a crop with a visible change, but their consequences on such a fruitful environment and filled with life forms it can generate long term unexpected changes, and even in the short one.  The habits and the abilities of regional insects and animals are not known in other places, there are penned species that it is not even known that they exist.  People in the Amazon cultures have equally unknown customs, founded in their symbolic universe that make them act in a very different way.  All that can make that a chemical product works the other way around, or generate things difficult to foresee.

NOTES

e28	Mud mixed with fiber.  Ý
e29	Big bamboo variety.  Ý

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