Yanesha

The Yanesha, also called Amuesha, are an Arawak-speaking people of the central Peruvian rainforest, whose villages lie along the Palcazu, Pichis and Pachitea rivers. Yanesha is their own name for themselves; they lived by hunting, fishing and subsistence agriculture, and their language belongs to the Maipurean, or Arawak, family.

Mercedarian friars first entered their country in the later sixteenth century, but stable contact came only in the early eighteenth century, when the Franciscan Francisco de San José founded reducciones at Cerro de la Sal and Quimiri. The indigenous rebellion led by Juan Santos Atahualpa in 1742 destroyed these missions and kept the region closed to outsiders for several decades.