Tama

The Tama were a Tucanoan-speaking people of the Amazonian foothills of southern Colombia, whose ancestral lands lay along the Caguán River and around El Caguán in Huila. Their language is extinct. They practised slash-and-burn cultivation, hunting, fishing and gathering.

The Tama met the Spanish invasion of the upper Magdalena with armed resistance, but defeat left many enslaved in the encomiendas of Timaná and Huila haciendas. In the early seventeenth century the viceregal government authorised ranchers to seize Tamas and their neighbours along the Caguán to stock their estates.

In the second half of that century Tama families were resettled in indigenous reserves across northern and central Huila. In 1721 Tama warriors joined the general rising of the Putumayo and Caquetá tribes alongside the Andaquí and Mocoa, one of the last large indigenous revolts of the colonial south-east.