Tribes: Quechua

Those who speak Quechua as their first language are called Quechua Indians. They share, between them, approximately forty-six languages within the Quechua language group and, numbering over twelve million, form the largest population of Indian people in the Americas. The three million Peruvian Quechua refer to themselves as “the people” or Runa.  

Quechua culture originated in central Peru at least a thousand years before the rise of the Inca Empire in the early 1400s. The Inca requirements of public service did not much disturb their way of life. Indeed, Quechua was adopted as the official language of the Empire.

When the Spanish conquered the Inca Empire in the sixteenth century, and the Quechua came under Spanish rule, their society was drastically altered. The Spanish concentrated the Quechua in larger, more populous villages than they were accustomed to. They also required them to produce unfamiliar crops at the expense of their own food supply. And the Spanish system of forced labour –unlike that of the Incas –did not provide any welfare for the labourer and his family. By the time Spanish rule ended, in the nineteenth century, the Quechua way of life had been drastically changed. Many remained as servants on the grand haciendas and estates. Others went to the towns and cities of the lowlands to find employment. Some returned to their mountainous homeland.

In the twenty-first century the Quechua lead isolated lives as marginal farmers in the high Andes. There are some five thousand Indian communities but few densely populated settlements. Their religion is a mix of Roman Catholicism and native folk beliefs –leaning, in preference, towards the latter.

Making fabric is an integral part of life and the Quechua women can be seen preparing wool for their looms even when walking around the streets - they spin and weave for both domestic use and for sale to outsiders. Their brightly coloured shawls, an intoxicating mix of deep orange, blood red and electric pink, are multi-functional –they transport babies, firewood and maize. The bowler-style hats are said, by some, to have been adopted by the Quechua after a British hatter dumped a load in the nineteenth century. Others claim that they are a copy of the hats worn by the Spanish invaders.      

Quechuan society places great emphasis on mutual help or ayni –you help your neighbours and they will, hopefully, do the same for you. Their communities are focused around the family –a household of several siblings plus their spouses and children usually make up the basic domestic group. The individuals in the extended family may own livestock separately but they will farm together.     

Marriages are arranged with the consent of the parents and the approval of the whole community. Both men and women are not considered to be responsible adults until they are matrimonially hitched. After marriage, a couple will live with the husband’s parents.    

Quechua farming techniques have adapted to the ecological demands of the varied Andean landscape –a steep continuum of warm valleys, high plains and cold upper slopes. Llama and alpaca herds serve as beasts of burden but also supply meat, wool, grease, fertiliser, fuel and leather. Sophisticated irrigation systems, first introduced hundreds if not thousands of years ago, water the fields.    

Potatoes thrive in the harsh environment of the altiplano and provide the Quechua with their staple food. They have developed over one hundred different varieties of the vegetable which was unknown in Europe until the arrival of the Spanish. The Quechua have invented their own method of freeze-drying. They expose the potatoes to the hot daytime sun and the cold night frost. They then trample out the liquid, each morning, until the potatoes shrivel up and turn black. They are then stored for use in winter, along with dried llama meat, barley and maize.    

The Quechua, like many South American Indians, chew coca leaf. Coca performs an important role in popular medicine, curing dizziness, headaches, throat infections, stomach ailments, altitude sickness and rheumatism.

Coca also has a deep religious significance and is the medium through which many Indian peoples communicate with the spirit world. After the Spanish conquest, the Catholic church tried to forbid coca but the arguments of a rival, more commercially inclined, faction won. Without Indians there would be no precious metals and the only way to get the Quechua to submit to forced labour in the mines was to provide them with ample amounts of Coca. Also money, huge amounts of it, was to be made from the production and trade of coca. Today, coca leaves are still a basic and very important element in Andean culture. They form part of the k’intu –an offering to the ancestral gods –and are used by the community shamans to help predict the future.    

The Quechua make up almost half the population of Peru but, due to internal exploitation, have very little say in the running of the country. Quechua, along with Aymara, is recognised by the Peruvian government as an official language but teachers often refuse to use it.    

Most of the Quechua’s problems, though, focus around their lack of decent land. The whites have taken all the good, arable territory and the Quechua children are left to inherit shares of family plots which grow smaller and smaller as the generations pass. The Quechua are thus forced to move to the cities where the women sell market produce and the men have to work as lowly paid porters and labourers.    

Many of the ancestors of the present-day Quechua died mining gold and silver under the rule of the Spanish. Sadly, for many of their descendants, things are little better. But the Quechua culture, with its own unique history and vibrant life-style has survived against all odds for so many years and continues in many areas today.