Pech and Garifuna music threatened by the Destruction of the Rainforest

Traditional Indian and Garifuna Music Threatened by the Destruction of the Rainforest, Inadequate Hondurans Protected Area Policies, and Misleading Development Projects

By Wendy Griffin (2013)

Without a doubt the rarest Honduran craft recently donated to the Burke Anthropological Museum at the University of Washington in Seattle  is a Pech Carrrizo Flute, none of which had been made in the last 20 years. The reasons why this flute had not been made in 20 years highlight a whole range of the problems faced by rainforest Indian or Afro-Honduran crafts, especially those related to the religious ceremonies of Indian or Afro-Honduran peoples. 

 

The first thing I heard about this flute over 20 years ago, was that no one knew how to play it any more. There used to be two Pech flutes—one made of a jaguar bone and black wax, and one made of Carrizo, a bamboo like plant, and black wax. One of these flutes should sound like the rainforest bird the pavon, and the other one should sound like the rainforest pajuil. Both of these birds are considered delicious eating by almost every group in Honduras, and they are larger, so they have more meat to eat. The reason Pech young people can not play the flutes correctly, even if they had one, was that  there are almost no pavons or pajuiles left in Honduras. They are among the animals in danger of extinction in Honduras. Most things the Garifunas, the Pech, the Miskito Indians, and the Tawahkas ate sounds like a who’s who of endangered animal, bird, and aquatic life species in Honduras.

 

The story of the origin of the jaguar bone flute among the Pech is interesting, because it is the same story shown in an Aztec codex. The grandfather thunder assigned the two grandsons, the morning star Kapani and the Evening star his twin, to hunt the animal with big whiskers and after they had killed a lot of different kinds of animals and him saying that is not the one, the morning star hunts the yellow tiger or jaguar, and kills it. When they show it to grandfather, he says that is the one. The scene in the Aztec Codex shows the morning star as the god of hunt killing a yellow jaguar. Then they have to get the wax for the flute. The evening star get stung in the testicles while he tried to get the wax. After they made the flute, they were allowed to go to the sky, so actually it is a pretty important story, as it is the origin of the morning star (known as Quetzalcoatl to the Aztecs) and his twin the evening star.

 

Since there are no jaguars in Central Mexico, but there are jaguar bone flutes in the ruins in Mexico and in the archaeological ruins near Trujillo, it seems that the Nahua speakers of Trujillo were exporting jaguar bone flutes to the Aztecs before the Spanish conquest. They also seemed to have exported whole jaguars, as whole skeletons are found in Aztec ruins as sacrifices. Wouldn’t that have been fun to travel from Trujillo to Mexico by canoe with a jaguar in the canoe?  Eduard Conzemius reports the jaguar bone flutes still being made in Honduras in the 1920’s when he was visiting the Pech, the Misktios and Tawahkas before the Truxillo Railroad, a subsidiary of United Fruit (now Chiquita) moved onto their areas. The lack of jaguars is only one reason why these flutes are not being made today in Honduras.

 

Teresa Campos, the Director of the San Pedro Sula Museum, is particularly interested in traditional musical instruments, having recently published an article on the 1,200 whistle, ocarina, and flute like objects in the San Pedro Sula Museum’s collection in a new journal devoted to the field archeomusicology. While “aerophones”, musical instruments that  make music because you blow air through them made of clay or jaguar bones will remain the archaeological record, but those made of the bamboo like plant “Carrizo” will rot, and so she was excited about the possibility to acquire a collection of modern Honduran Indian musical instruments, including the Pech Carrizo flute known as a “arwa” in Pech, for the new San Pedro Museum’s  Indian Craft Exhibit due to open in Janaury 2014.

 

I was also interested in obtaining a Pech Carrizo flute, the arwa, because it is similar to all the other Carrizo flutes in Honduras-the ones previously made by the Maya Chorti, by the Lencas, and still made by the Tawahkas and the Miskitos, who call it bra or bará. Because the ceramics of the Lencas during the Classic period, known as Ulua polychrome,  are so clear, in the collection at the San Pedro Museum, you can see what musical instruments the Lencas played in the Classic Period (300-900 AD), which included the Carrizo flute.  Most Lencas and Chortis have forgotten how to make them and how to play them, and have replaced them with plastic soprano recorders for their ceremonies needing this instrument. My Tawahka Carrizo flute that I was given by the Tawahka dance group Mayagna Rikni (Our Roots) in 1993 when they stayed at my house in Tegucigalpa, I had donated to the Ethnobotany lab at the UNAH in Tegucigalpa together with some other Honduran crafts like Garifuna maracas made in Trujillo, so that they would expand their understanding of ethnobotany to include craft plants used by the ethnic groups, instead of just medicinal plants.

 

I also wanted a Pech Carrizo flute, because I was annoyed because the new textbooks in the Pech language, part of the Cipotillos de Mi Pais collection (the little children of my country, cipote being a Honduran Spanish word derived from the Nahua word xipe or small)  of the Honduran Minsitry of Education’s PRONEEAAH project,  has pictures of the musical instruments of all the ethnic groups in one section and pictures specifically of Pech musical instruments in another section, that were wrong. A Pech Carrizo flute, and none of the Honduran Indian Carrizo flutes, look like a Chinese bamboo flute which was what was shown in the book.  Not only was the picture of the Pech flute was wrong, but the musical bow, the bobo, was wrong as it was missing the gourd bowl resonator, the maracas were wrong, particularly the painting of them, etc.

 

Not only the musical instruments were wrong, but almost all the Pech crafts in the book were wrong. A large round majao string bag used for storing meat before there was refrigeration is called ara’, but in the Pech book for the word ara’ they have a drawing of  a modern leather purse. They had a word canasto, with a picture of a basket that no one in Honduras makes, while the Pech do not make “canastas” or closed weave baskets like those of Carrizo made by the Lencas and the Chortis, but rather they made “yaguales” called “arkás” in Pech, which are hanging baskets with a vine rim and a spider web weave inside. Two of Doña Juana’s yaguales, the pech chief of Moradel outside of Trujillo. are in the San Pedro Sula Museum and one is in the Burke Museum at the University of Washington. 

 

Almost every Honduran ethnic group made yaguals—the Maya Chorti, the Lencas, the Miskitos, the Tawahkas, the Pech and even the Ladinos, although they vary whether they use pita (from a agave or maguey like plants that needs 90-125 of sun) or majao (purú in Pech, sani in Miskito, weñu in Garifuna) twine made from tree bark, because these groups live in rainforest where that much sun is not available and a number of people still have them in their houses hanging from the roof beams. They were good for storing lard, gourd bowls, salt, things you did not want rats to bother. Some ladinos hung gourd bowls above them to help the rats slip down, and some more modern people put a hole in the bottom of a Coca cola bottle, and hung it on the string above the yagual, because with its curved shape and slippery glass, the rats just slide to the floor.

 

I thought maybe the problem with these books was that the artist did not have examples of what the Pech or other Indian crafts looked like and so I began last year having Pech crafts made that were no longer being made or used so that we could photograph them for a book on Pech crafts for Pech schools and for the San Pedro Sula Museum exhibit. 

 

But after two and half years of looking we were unable to have a Pech arwa Carrizo flute made due to the lack of availability of Carrizo, which only grows above 1,500 feet, also the recommended altitude to raise coffee, and also because of the lack of the special black wax made by a special bee which also makes “miel de blanco”, the best medicinal honey in Honduras. For example, it is used to treat chronic bronchitis by Doña Juana whose mother suffered from this. The Pech considered this bee so important, they used it to demonstrate the sound of one of the words in the Pech alphabet in their literacy book, like American children learn I for igloo or for ice cream.  For the letter e, the Pech taught ejtama, the Pech name for the rainforest tree liquidambar that only grows in the tropical cloud forest.

 

Each culture teaches words that it considers essential in first grade, and the Pech considered the name of this bee essential, even though I usually can not distinguish it from other bees, although it is quite different from the Africanized bees, which have reached the Pech area, because African bees will swarm around your head as you walk through the rainforest. This bee which makes the miel de blanco and the special wax, will not live in an area with African bees, which someone introduced further south in Latin America, thinking it was a good idea, and instead it was such a bad idea, horror movies have been made about them in the US. It is actually common that Honduran rainforest Indians can identify by name a number of different bees by things like their buzz, their flight pattern, the type of area they like to live in, while Western scientists tend to classify dead bees pinned under glass, said ethnobotanist Paul House. The Tolupan Indians of Montaña de la Flor are famous for their beekeeping in pieces of wood near their house, not in hives.

 

 Only the wax from this special bee, called “cera prieta” (very black wax) in Honduran Spanish can be used, because it hardens, actually to the point that you could polish it, pointed out Hernan Martinez. Once you put the reed in place with it, it remains in place, while another black wax made by Honduran wild bees called “jimerito” always remains soft and gummy (pegajoso) so if you try to store a flute made with this, the reed becomes displaced, the flute is deformed, and you can’t play it. But this special bee of the miel de blanco and cera prieta is very scarce, as it only lives in certain rainforest habitats which are disappearing at an alarming rate. I don’t know if the general problems that are affecting US bees that are dying out in massive numbers is also affecting this bee in Honduras.

 

It took us two and half years to get together both a few pieces of Carrizo and the wax. We had previously contacted the Pech craft people in El Carbon, a Pech village in Olancho near San Esteban, that we wanted to get this Carrizo and the wax. Don Natividad Garcia, who had previously been chief and is a good craftperson and knows what the carrizo looks like, and previously a hunter so he knows his way around the mountains above El Carbon, got up at dawn to try to get high enough in the mountains to find Carrizo, but even there, which is a protected area, there was no Carrizo and cera preta. The Pech of El Carbon have had troubles before with Ladinos moving into the area above their village, even to the point of drying up one branch of the Aso Sewa (yellow water in Pech) River due to deforestation. The Trujillo area where Don Hernan and Doña Juana live is totally the wrong eco-system to find either one.

 

I thought it was important to have the Carrizo flute made now, like most Pech crafts, because the main people who knew how to make them are either dead or ill or blind or quite old. Don Hernan is 67 years old. If we do not make the Carrizo flute and the other Pech crafts soon, there will be no one alive who knows how to make them. I heard about the last Miskito drum maker when he was 93 years old. Because the  Moravian church is against traditional Miskito music from pre-Christian ceremonies, no one dared to learn to make the drum to accompany them. No one knows how to make the Twahka drum or any of the Bay Islanders musical instruments. Part of that is also the coming of Protestant churches to the Bay Islands against dancing.

 

No one had made a Pech flute in 20 years, partly because the traditional Pech religious ceremonies which required three musicians playing the Pech flute and drum and marracas and a fourth person to say the prayers,  had not been done since the road went into Culmi in the 1960’s, and all the ladinos began moving in and the Catholic priest arrived every week, as opposed to once a year.  It took Don Hernan two tries to make a Carrizo flute correctly, because since he had not made one in twenty years, he forgot where the finger holes went and did it wrong the first time. Fortunately he got enough Carrizo and cera prieta to make two more flutes, one that is now in the Burke Museum in Seattle, and one he kept to add Pech flute music to his son Angel’s traditional Pech music group in Moradel, which also uses the Pech drum tempuk, and the maracas. When I was able to buy all three, he told me proudly, “Now you have the whole orchestra”.  I was excited.

 

The San Pedro Sula Museum of Anthropology and History currently has money problems, and the board chair has threatened to close it if they can not figure out how to generate enough income to pay their bills, so that was why this first flute was given to the Burke Museum in the US, rather than the San Pedro Museum, which does however, have all the rest of the Pech crafts, except a musical instrument called a deer caller, which the Director of the Museum would still like to acquire.  Hopefully they will be able to resolve their money problems and the craft exhibition can open next year on schedule.

 

I also wanted to have an example of the Carrizo, because one of the curing techniques of the Pech is called “soplo”, literally blowing on people. But the healer does not blow directly on the person, the healer blows through a hollow Carrizo tube.  This healing technique of soplo through a Carrizo tube is also used by some South American Indians. According to the Wikipedia article on shamanism, all shamans have pipes, and the Pech equivalent of a shaman’s pipe is a Carrizo tube.  

 

The Olancho Indians believed that this higher up area was closer to God, and that may have made the Carrizo  (Acatl in Nahua as in Acalteca, Yoro and Agalta Valley, Olancho) growing area more sacred. There is an Olancho story about how God put the jilquero bird which has a beautiful song in this highest up place in the tropical cloud forest, so that it would be closer to him and he could hear it better. According to Conzemius, the Pech did not go to the very tops of mountains as there were sacred lagoons there and they avoided them.  That the Nahua Indians of Olancho said their ancestors did human sacrifice in a secret cave beside the Mescal Lagoon along the way from Catacamas to the Ciudad Blanca or White City, shows that they may have had a good reason to avoid these highest mountain area. A number of Mesoamerican Indians including the Guatemala and Honduran Mayas and the Honduran Lencas did and still do ceremonies on mountain tops, which would have been good for the Pech to avoid.

 

The Pech culture has developed in the Olancho and Colon rainforest especially over the last 500 years, and probably over the last 1,000 years, due to the Nahuas occupying the low lands in their area, so the Pech culture depends on plants in the high mountains, which is threatened as Ladinos move into the area to cut wood and grow coffee and raise cattle.  I think one of the most important studies I have heard of is Paul house’s study of what plants Ladinos use, and what plants do they consider important and where do they grow.

 

In that study, the Ladinos only used two plants in the uncut forest—liquidambar for straight roof beams (as opposed to the Pech who take out this tree’s resin) and Carrizo for baskets. All their medicinal plants, their wood plants, most of their craft plants, their food plants, came either from their crops, but especially from the “guamiles”, the secondary forest that grows up after you cut the primary forest down and plant for a year and then let it lie fallow.  To most Ladinos, the uncut forest is in the way. You have to cut it down to get the good stuff, like grass for cattle.  And while this reduced the rain, this reduction  in fact favors Ladino crops which come from seeds developed for the arid areas of Central Mexico that do better with less rain, rather than the Garifunas, the Miskitos, the Pech and Tawahka root crops that are fine in the rain of the Central American and South American and African rain forests.

 

The Pech of El Carbon heard this difference reflected in the accusations of the Mayor of San Esteban, Olancho which is the municipio or county where El Carbon is located. When they complained about Ladinos invading their lands and cutting down the forest there to him, the Mayor said, “You Pech are lazy, you were not doing anything with the land.” The wife of the chief of El Carbon said, “It is thanks to us that we have not cut down all the trees, that all of us have any air to breathe.”  The Mayor of San Esteban apologized. In fact, the practices of Southern Honduran Ladinos have changed that area from having a rubber and a pink Mahoghany wood cutting industries, both of which require rainforest, in the 19^th century, and there still being jaguars in southern Honduras which also requires rainforest, to there being cactus. 

 

That is pretty incredible in only one hundred years. The lack of rain and the problem of cattle meat for export not being accepted for export to the US due to contamination with agrochemicals, and so the farmers move into uncontaminated areas that still have water like the Colon, Olancho and Mosquitia rainforests, are some reasons why Ladinos are moving into the areas previously controlled by the Pech, Garifunas, the Tawahkas and the Miskitos.

 

 I asked what I thought was rhetorically to a Ladino cattle rancher, Why did they move into the area, and steal the land, but he answered me, saying, “The Honduran milk companies paid such a low price for milk that the cattle ranchers could not afford to buy the land, so they just stole it.” The two main fresh milk companies in Honduras  Sula in San Pedro Sula  and Leyde in la Ceiba were originally associated with the two main banana companies in Honduras, Standard (now Dole), and the Tela Railroad (originally United fruit Company now part of Chiquita), but I do not know if they are still the owners.