In this photographic essay, Argentinian photographer Hernán Paz portrays the Huaorani indigenous people from the Bameno community. Check out below his report and photographic essay:

HUAORANIS FROM CONONACO

The Huaorani are one of the peoples that live in a more traditional manner in the Ecuadorian Amazonia.

They are a happy group integrated to perfection with the environment that is excessively humid and hot.

They are also a warrior people that know about killings between different clans for reasons of revenge among themselves.

Many of their practices could be questioned, but what is certain is that the Huaroni have known how to keep intact this garden of people, this magic jungle with all of its animals, trees and rivers, during many centuries.

Their ancestral lands go from the Napo in the north to the Curaray in the south.

Up until the present, only one third of their ancestral lands have been legally recognised as belonging to them.

But what is certain is that not even the legally recognised land’s limits have been respected.

On the other hand, petroleum companies, illegal loggers and other invaders are determined to make disappear in a few decades the entire Amazonia, the world’s most important lung and the scenario where the only people in the world who have opted to not adopt Western forms of life: isolated peoples.

Many petroleum companies from all over the world have set up shop in Huaorani territory, devastating the forests and establishing ambiguous relationships between petroleum companies and the Huaoranis.

The worst disaster was caused by the US’s Maxus, when it constructed a roadway, referred to as the Auca Via- which divides the Territory in two as a route of oil and loss of culture that grows constantly from north to south.

In these moments, more in the east, Petrobras is entering into the Yasuni National Park, home to Huaorani groups, including the Baihuaris and one of the three natural parks with the world’s largest biodiversity.

There exist various Huaorani clans with varying degrees of or no contact with non-indigenous people: Babeiris, Guequetadis, Piyemoidis, Huepeiris, Baihuaris, Tagaeris, Taromenanis, etc; are or were some of them.

Of those groups which have had contact, perhaps those who best maintain their traditions are the Baihuaris.  Far away down river from the Tihuino, the Mencaro and the Cononaco, one finds the Bameno community, the most important of Baihuari clan and even further on, Omeede.

In Bameno where 65 people live, half of them children, there exists much respect for the elderly: the warriors Kamperi and Ahua are the community’s two symbols and the elders, Miñimo, Bebanka and Mimá are reference for the entire clan.

Kominda is one of the best monkey hunters, the principal food of this clan in the hot months of November and December.

Omeede" ("Our Jungle" in Huao Tiriro), is the space for an ecological tourism alternative administered by the community itself and with support from the ONHAE, the responsible organisation.

It is being constructed near the Bameno community and already has the maloka- a traditional house for various families and various services for housing various tourists.

However ambiguous that it may appear, this option to generate their own sources of income is perhaps one of the few alternatives that remain for the community to defend its ancestral territories and culture in the face of advancing economic interests from the outside.