Kofan

The Kofan, who call themselves the A'i, are an ancient people of the Amazonian foothills between the Aguarico and Guamués rivers, in what is now northeast Ecuador and southern Colombia. They speak A'ingae, a language isolate, and lived by farming, hunting and river travel in dugout canoes.

When the Spanish reached their country in the mid-sixteenth century, the Kofan may have numbered some fifteen thousand; they resisted fiercely, and late in that century they destroyed the Spanish town of Mocoa and forced the intruders to withdraw. The Jesuit Rafael Ferrer began missionary work among them in 1602, but soldiers and settlers following in his wake drove him out.

Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries sporadic expeditions sought gold, trade and converts, while European diseases steadily cut the population, leaving the Kofan a diminished but unconquered people in their forest homelands.