Gâ'tɨya pâín

The Gâ'tɨya pâín, better known as the Siona, are a Tucanoan-speaking people of the Putumayo and Cuyabeno rivers on the border of Ecuador and Colombia; their self-name means ‘people of the wild-cane river,’ and Spaniards called them Encabellados for the long hair they carefully tended.

They recall coming from the east up the Putumayo centuries before contact, and live by shifting cultivation of cassava and maize, supplemented by fishing and blowgun hunting, while women make pottery and men weave fiber hammocks and baskets.

A Jesuit first visited them in 1599, and through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries missionaries repeatedly tried to settle them in Catholic reductions; the villages never took root, and after the Jesuits were expelled in 1767 the Siona returned to dispersed river communities, speaking their Western Tucanoan tongue, which they call baicoca.