A child is not considered responsible for any damage it may contrive to do. If it commit any mischief that entails loss to others compensation is claimed from the parents, but no chastisement would in consequence be meted out to the little offender. Children are never beaten, whatever their offences, and rarely punished. They are looked upon as the potential warriors and mothers of warriors, and treated very differently to the old and worn, who may be left to forage for themselves. The parents, in fact, show great affection for their children, despite the stoical way in which infant lives are sacrificed. Often have I seen the father, who would on no account carry food or any part of his woman’s burden, however heavy, give his small son a lift over the bad ground. Although he will never play games with his children as western folk do, the Indian father will do his best to please the youngsters and make them happy. He will make little javelins, a small blow-pipe, a toy sword for the boys. They have their miniature weapons from the tenderest years, and imitate their fathers in all that they do, just like the girls, who go with their mothers to the plantations, and take a share in women’s work as their form of play, and shoulder a share of women’s burdens when hardly more than babies themselves. Their games, in short, are all mimetic. They have no games with string or balls.
It follows naturally enough that there is little or no elaborate ritual of initiation among most of these tribes, so far as I was able to ascertain, for no part of a man’s life is kept secret from a child. The elders simply take the young of each sex apart and teach them. Nor is there much ceremony on the attainment of the young warrior to tribal rank. He has been instructed by the elder men as to the ways of hunting; he is allowed to join a tobacco palaver; he is presented by the chief with a pouch of coca; he is permitted to lick tobacco, and he affirms as he does so that he will bear himself bravely on all occasions. There is no further formality, and thus he enters the ranks of the fighting men. Among the Bara after a Jurupari dance all the youths of pubertal age are whipped, which is considered to be initiation. The whipping instrument, made from the hide of the tapir, is sacred. Women are excluded from this ceremony, and they believe when the boys shout that it is the expulsion of demons. The performance is regarded as strictly private, and if a man or boy tells of his experience he is outcast.
For the girls there are some secret lodges in the bush. But how far this is an Indian custom, how far a recent development for purposes of defence, I was not able to ascertain. The matter is not one on which the Indian is ever communicative. Certainly among all the tribes in the vicinity of the much-feared and ever-raiding Andoke, the girls who are bordering on puberty are segregated in the depths of the forest under the protection of old and wise women of the tribe. This may not be general, and I do not think it is a universal custom. It is done by these tribes principally, I take it, for the protection of the flower of their womanhood, to prevent the mothers of warriors-to-be from falling into the hands of the restless thieving Andoke. At the same time the girls are under instruction of their keepers, they are taught in these lodges presumably the duties that will shortly fall to their lot. They learn to dance, to sing, and to paint themselves for festivals. It is no unusual sight to see a party of small girls painting each other, if by chance one haps across a secret lodge. This is, I take it, in the way of practice, the Indian girl’s version of her civilised sisters’ “dressing-up” games.
The girls’ isolation is not absolute. There is always communication between the hidden lodge and the tribal house, but such communication is made with due care, no path is ever cut or worn to the hiding-place, and if one develops by usage it is speedily blocked the moment it is noticeable. When no inimical raiders are about, and all is considered safe, the girls repair to the tribal house, but no girl is allowed to return to the tribe for good until such time as a marriage has been arranged for her.
One writer on the Jivaro tribes mentions festivities held when a four-year old child is first initiated into the art of smoking.[254] This could never occur among any of the tribes on the Japura or the Issa, where it has been seen tobacco is only licked. Boring the ears, nose, and lips of the adolescent is done when they go to the lodges at the age of puberty. It is very carefully carried out, and is probably done with their ordinary boring instrument, the tooth of a capybara. Among the Menimehe the tribal marks are tattooed on face and breast at this time.
I have not met with the custom mentioned by Sir Clement Markham as existing among the Mariama, of a man cutting lines near the mouth of his twelve-year-old son, nor has the scourging of the Omagua, and their trial of the girls by hanging them in a net to smoke them, come under my observation, any more than the cruel scourging of girl children mentioned by Clough,[255] though boys on the Apaporis are thrashed, and I have heard of the custom north of the Japura. The Jurupari dance as described by so many authorities, and the girls’ whippings, as noted by Wallace,[256] have been told me second-hand by these tribes. I have never seen either, and south of the Japura I believe such customs to be unknown.
PLATE XL.
OKAINA GIRLS