Kanisian

The Kanisian, better known as the Canichana, are a people of the flooded Llanos de Mojos in the Bolivian Beni, whose villages stood on the Mamoré and Machupo rivers and whose language is treated as an isolate.

In 1693 the Jesuit Augustín Zapata became the first outsider to enter their territory; two years later the Canichana gathered on the Mamoré asking for a mission, and in 1696 Lorenzo Legarda founded San Pedro with twelve hundred of them.

Floods, smallpox and fire twice forced the town to move, and its central position made it the most prosperous of the Moxos reductions, where the Canichana took to farming, woodworking and jewelry. When the Jesuits were expelled from Moxos between 1767 and 1769 San Pedro declined sharply and many Canichana drifted back into the forest.