Uitoto

The Uitoto, also called Witoto or Murui-Muinane, are an Amazonian people whose original homeland lay in the middle Caquetá River basin and the rainforest stretching toward the Putumayo. They were once a constellation of more than thirty tribes and around a hundred villages, grouped into the western Murui, the eastern Muinane, who were largely absorbed into the Murui, and the Meneca of the Putumayo.

Society followed the father's line, and several families shared a communal longhouse, the maloca. Men gathered there to take mambe, a powder of coca leaf and yarumo ash, while great maguare drums carried messages between settlements through the forest.

Their language belongs to the Bora-Huitoto family. Their first fleeting contacts with Europeans came in the early 1600s, and outside intrusion remained sporadic through the rest of the colonial period.