Itonama

The Itonama are an indigenous people of the Bolivian Amazon, at home in the seasonally flooded savannas of the Beni lowlands, where they have lived along the Itonomas River and the lakes of the Mamoré and Iténez provinces since their first contact with Spaniards in the seventeenth century. Their traditional language, self-named sihnipadara, meaning 'our language', is a linguistic isolate with no proven relatives.

They subsisted by slash-and-burn farming, fishing, hunting and gathering in small communities led by a village council, and held animist beliefs centred on a high god called Dijnamu.

In 1704 the missionary Lorenzo Legarda counted twenty-six Itonama communities numbering some six thousand people. Mission towns such as Magdalena then gathered them into settled Christian parish life, and over the eighteenth century the Itonama became a Spanish-speaking Catholic people while keeping their riverine villages and collective lands.