Kukakma

The Kukakma are the Cocama, who call themselves Kukama, a Tupi-Guarani people of the upper Amazon floodplain; the Spaniards knew them together with their kin as Omaguas or Cambeba. They held the island-dotted channels and banks of the lower Huallaga, Ucayali and Marañón, where they farmed terra preta soils and orchards, fished, and were acknowledged as the finest canoemen on the great river.

The name Cambeba refers to their custom of flattening children's foreheads with boards as a mark of distinction. Their Cocama language is closely related to Omagua and travelled with them upriver from Brazil; by the sixteenth century they had reached the Ucayali.

They first allied with the Spanish missions, but rose against them in 1662 and were crushed in 1666; epidemics and forced recruitment into Spanish armies then thinned their villages.