Cholon

The Cholon were rainforest people of the Huallaga's left bank on the forested eastern Andean slope. Cholon was their Spanish name; their Seeptsá tongue named both people and language, and Seeptsá with the related Hibito formed a small family believed once important across the eastern foothills.

They lived by slash-and-burn farming, hunting and fishing; women grew cotton and wove cloth. For centuries the Cholon traded across the Huallaga with highland Hibito, exchanging feathers, wax, honey and herbs for stone and metal axes. A serpent's poisonous fang was their charm against snakebite.

The outside world knew them through missionaries: Franciscans first contacted them and founded mission villages in 1676; in the eighteenth century friar Pedro de la Mata wrote a Seeptsá grammar, the Arte de la Lengua Cholona, and a bishop recorded a word list in 1782 to 1785. Quechua and Spanish then displaced the old language along the Huallaga.