• News of this people

• DO PARAÍSO AO INFERNO: sucessivas mortes de índios revelam o retrato da miséria dos "povos da floresta" em aldeias do Acre
  
  26/03/2012
• Índios e ribeirinhos atingidos pela alagação continuam recebendo doações do Acre Solidário
  
  20/03/2012
• Filme debate saúde de índios do Vale do Javari (AM)
  
  19/03/2012

• Inhabited lands

• Riozinho
• Kumaru do Lago Ualá
• Deni
• Alto Rio Purus
• Cacau do Tarauacá
• Kaxinawa do Rio Humaitá
• Kulina do Igarapé do Pau
• Kulina do Médio Juruá
• Kulina do Rio Envira
• Jaminawa/Envira

Kulina

Name and language

The Kulina belong to the Arawá language family and, until the arrival of the Whites, they were one of the most numerous groups in the state of Acre and south of the Amazon. Their self-designation is madija (pronounced madirrá) which means “those who are people", while the Whites are generically called by the term “cariás”.

The madija speak predominantly the Kulina language in the villages, even the children, and all of the (few) bilingual speakers are elder males. Generally, those who worked in their youth for white bosses in the rubber camps and in timber extraction have greater knowledge of the Portuguese language, although in the villages close to the cities the need to establish relations with the surrounding society is changing this reality. Many young people have been training to become indigenous teachers, agro-forestry agents, and health workers, especially after 1970 with the implantation of a FUNAI office in Rio Branco and the presence of organizations such as the CPI (Pro-Indian Commission) and the CIMI (Indigenist Missionary Council).

The female linguistic style is markedly different from the male style: there is occlusion of vowels, condensation of entire words, at times creating situations in which the simple translation of a spoken phrase of four or five words becomes a complicated task. Only the Madija understand what their women are saying and, as there are neologisms that vary from village to village, this understanding is at times restricted to the local group itself.

Several of the few white speakers of the Kulina language whom I consulted on the female songs, like the Lutherans and members of the CIMI, were emphatic in affirming their difficulty in understanding, if not the the meaning, then quite often the very word spoken, reiterating the possible existence of a peculiar female linguistic universe. The women use a specific technique in their songs which consists of inhaling air when they reach the end of a phrase and are pronouncing the last syllable. This can clearly be observed in the accent placed on the conclusion of the phrases, a characteristic which I only perceived in the female song and in their length. I had the impression that they were singing cyclically, sucking in air at the end of the phrase in order to get a bit more breath.