Moseten

The Tsimané, also called Chimane, are a forest people of the Bolivian Beni, scattered from the Quiquibey River to the headwaters of the Maniquí. Their language, Tsimané or Mosetén, is an isolate. They lived in villages of twenty to thirty families, farming bananas and manioc and following the fish runs upriver.

Jesuits made first recorded contact with them in 1693, when they founded the San Borja mission. Franciscans took up the work later, but epidemics brought the Tsimané to the brink of extinction, and many families dispersed deeper into the forest.