HMNS Amazon Exhibit
Earlier this week, I went to the Amazon Exhibit at the HMNS to learn about all of the tribes that lived/live in the Amazon. The topic I will be focusing on is the rituals that the certain tribes had.
The Yanomamo Tribe ate banana soup with ashes as one of their yearly rituals. When someone died, they brought their body into the rainforest, covered it with leaves, and left them there for a while so the bugs could eat their flesh and tissue and everything except their bones. When all that was left was bones, the tribe burned the bones, collected the ashes, and mixed them into a banana soup that the entire tribe had to eat.
One of the most common foods for the Ye’kuana Tribe was manoic, or what we now call yuka. They are in the shape of sweet potatoes, but they are white on the inside. This was their best resource of carbohydrates. Some of them were poisonous back then, but they all looked the same. So how did they get rid of the poison? They smashed the food until it was just mushy stuff with liquid. The liquid was what contained the poison so to get rid of the liquid they had to pour the mush into a long woven bowl then they would ring all of the liquid out until it turned into a flour. They also enjoyed manoic beer. To make manoic beer everyone chewed the flour, and spit it into a communal bowl. The spit was important because of the enzymes that kept the beer from fermenting.
The Wayana Apalai had a very powerful and painful ritual they did in their tribe. They used bullet ants and wasps and weaved them into a sheet to sting children. They call them bullet ants because their sting hurts as much as a bullet. A child only gets stung a few times in their childhood. The stings are poisonous and they get stung multiple times on their body in this ceremony. They get stung so that their body becomes immune to things like that. It is also to prove that they are strong enough to become adults and face the struggles they have ahead of them. At their final ceremony they can’t eat for 2 days. The boys get stung by the priest and the girls get stung by their mothers. The boys get fancy woven sheets made especially for the final ceremony, the women get the normal plain sheets. In the final test they're not allowed to flinch at all or they don’t pass. After they passed they were considered full adults.
The Shuar was one of the most isolated tribes in the Amazon. Their most famous ritual was shrinking heads for warriors to wear in battle. They hunt down their enemy tribes and kill one of the men, (never women). They cut of their head and cut a slit in the back of their head. They pull out the brain, peel off the skin, and stitch the mouth and eyes together. The reason they stitched these things together is because they believed the soul of the person could escape from any openings on the head. They never cut the hair. They throw the skull into the river to show respect to the River God. They put the skin in hot water until it shrinks to the desired size.
Overall this exhibit was a great experience and very educational. Earlier this week, I went to the Amazon Exhibit at the HMNS to learn about all of the tribes that lived/live in the Amazon. The topic I will be focusing on is the rituals that the certain tribes had.
The Yanomamo Tribe ate banana soup with ashes as one of their yearly rituals. When someone died, they brought their body into the rainforest, covered it with leaves, and left them there for a while so the bugs could eat their flesh and tissue and everything except their bones. When all that was left was bones, the tribe burned the bones, collected the ashes, and mixed them into a banana soup that the entire tribe had to eat.
One of the most common foods for the Ye’kuana Tribe was manoic, or what we now call yuka. They are in the shape of sweet potatoes, but they are white on the inside. This was their best resource of carbohydrates. Some of them were poisonous back then, but they all looked the same. So how did they get rid of the poison? They smashed the food until it was just mushy stuff with liquid. The liquid was what contained the poison so to get rid of the liquid they had to pour the mush into a long woven bowl then they would ring all of the liquid out until it turned into a flour. They also enjoyed manoic beer. To make manoic beer everyone chewed the flour, and spit it into a communal bowl. The spit was important because of the enzymes that kept the beer from fermenting.
The Wayana Apalai had a very powerful and painful ritual they did in their tribe. They used bullet ants and wasps and weaved them into a sheet to sting children. They call them bullet ants because their sting hurts as much as a bullet. A child only gets stung a few times in their childhood. The stings are poisonous and they get stung multiple times on their body in this ceremony. They get stung so that their body becomes immune to things like that. It is also to prove that they are strong enough to become adults and face the struggles they have ahead of them. At their final ceremony they can’t eat for 2 days. The boys get stung by the priest and the girls get stung by their mothers. The boys get fancy woven sheets made especially for the final ceremony, the women get the normal plain sheets. In the final test they're not allowed to flinch at all or they don’t pass. After they passed they were considered full adults.
The Shuar was one of the most isolated tribes in the Amazon. Their most famous ritual was shrinking heads for warriors to wear in battle. They hunt down their enemy tribes and kill one of the men, (never women). They cut of their head and cut a slit in the back of their head. They pull out the brain, peel off the skin, and stitch the mouth and eyes together. The reason they stitched these things together is because they believed the soul of the person could escape from any openings on the head. They never cut the hair. They throw the skull into the river to show respect to the River God. They put the skin in hot water until it shrinks to the desired size.
Overall this exhibit was a great experience and very educational. Earlier this week, I went to the Amazon Exhibit at the HMNS to learn about all of the tribes that lived/live in the Amazon. The topic I will be focusing on is the rituals that the certain tribes had.
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