Tucanoan

The Tucanoan group gathers peoples of the northwestern Amazon who speak languages of the Tucanoan family. It includes the Karapana of Colombia and Brazil, the Siona of the Putumayo and the Ecuador border, and the Tama of the Orteguaza River, whose language died out.

They were swidden farmers who grew manioc in forest clearings and also hunted, fished and foraged. The Siona descend from the people the Spaniards called Encabellados, for their long hair. Jesuits first visited them in 1599 and gathered them into mission villages through the eighteenth century, but the reductions failed and the Jesuits were expelled.