The Quechua

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In a schoolroom in the highlands above Ayacucho, children take their lessons in a language their grandparents were punished for speaking. A generation ago a child caught using it in class might be struck across the hand or made to stand in shame; now it is the medium of instruction, printed in state textbooks and read aloud on the evening news. The language is Runa Simi — runa, “person” or “human being,” and simi, “mouth,” “speech” — the speech of the people, spoken by the people who call themselves, without ornament, Runa. The world files them under another name, Quechua, which the language wears the way a person wears a name given by a stranger. And the language is older than the empire that made it famous.

These are the peoples the maps call Quechua: not one nation but a family of Andean communities held together by a shared tongue, descended both from the Inca who ruled Tawantinsuyu and from the many peoples that empire gathered beneath it. They did not disappear when the empire fell. Counted today at ten to eleven million and spread down the spine of the Andes from Ecuador to Argentina, they are among the most numerous Indigenous peoples of the Americas — a living present, and not a ruin visited on the way to the ruins.

The people and their speech

The name is the first fact, because the Runa are named for what they speak. Runa is the person; runakuna, the plural, is the people; Runa Simi, “the people’s speech,” is the tongue that makes them one. The word Quechua comes from qhichwa, a term for the temperate valley zone between the cold high plateau and the hot lowlands; it was fastened by the Spanish onto the language, and from the language onto its speakers, so that the outward name of a whole people began as a description of an altitude. The Runa’s own name for the Runa is simply the Runa.

Nor is Runa Simi a single language. Linguists treat it as a family of some forty-five related varieties, split at the root into two great branches — a diverse central-Peruvian group and a peripheral group that carried north into Ecuador, where it is called Kichwa, and south into Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile. A speaker from the central sierra and a speaker from the Bolivian altiplano may not readily understand one another, which is why the thing is counted as a family and not a tongue. It is the most widely spoken language family of the pre-Columbian Americas, and it is spread unevenly across six republics: by the most-cited national figures, some 6.7 million speakers in Peru, 1.6 million in Bolivia, 1.6 million in Ecuador, and smaller communities in Colombia, Argentina, and Chile numbering in the tens of thousands each. How many speak Runa Simi altogether is genuinely uncertain — estimates run from about seven million by the censuses to eight, ten, and more by ethnographers — and the range is not carelessness but the shape of the thing counted: a long-stigmatized rural language that bilingual speakers have every reason to under-report.

That the Runa are the heirs of the Inca is true and misleading in the same breath. The empire of Tawantinsuyu was a Quechua-speaking state, and the Runa are descended from the peoples it ruled; but they are not “the Inca,” and Runa Simi was never the Inca’s private possession. The language long predates the empire. Historical linguistics places its likely homeland in central Peru and its beginnings perhaps two thousand years ago, and holds that it may have been carried across the mountains earlier — plausibly by the Wari state and its roads between about 600 and 1000 of the common era — before the Inca adopted a prestige southern form of it and standardized it as the administrative lingua franca of a realm that already spoke many tongues. The deep chronology of that spread is reconstructed from language and archaeology, not settled by testimony. So too are the tradition’s own accounts of how the people began: whether the first Inca rose out of Lake Titicaca or emerged from a cave with three windows at Pacaritambo, and how long the line of rulers ran before the conquest, are matters the post-conquest chronicles report and dispute rather than resolve.

For the record of the Runa is, at its written beginning, a record kept by others. After the fall of Tawantinsuyu in 1533 the Andean world enters writing chiefly through Spanish and mestizo eyes that must be read against their grain — the soldier-chronicler Pedro de Cieza de León, Juan de Betanzos, who married into the Inca elite, the Jesuit Bernabé Cobo — and through two authors closer to the inside: the mestizo Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, whose Comentarios Reales of 1609 remembered Cusco as a son of it, and the Andean commoner Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, whose thousand-page illustrated letter to the king, written around 1615, catalogs the colony’s abuses from within them. They disagree with one another and each has his angle, and the modern history of the Andes is built by weighing them one against the next. The living record, by contrast, is the Runa’s own, and it is not written but spoken and enacted, and it is still being made.

Weavers of the Chinchero community above Cusco, keepers of a highland textile tradition their grandmothers carried through the centuries. Jarek Tuszyński, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0.

The ayllu and the debt

The Runa world is organized, still, around the ayllu — a word that means at once the extended kin-group, its stretch of land, and the web of obligation that binds the two. The ayllu is older than the empire that used it and has outlasted the empire that tried to end it: a community that reckons descent from common ancestors, holds its fields and pastures and water in common, and treats survival as a shared task rather than a private burden. To be Runa is, in the first instance, to belong to an ayllu, and to belong is to owe and to be owed.

What runs through the ayllu is ayni, reciprocity — the standing principle that nothing is given for nothing and nothing taken without a return. Labor, goods, and care are extended in the confidence that they will come back: a household that helps another sow will be helped to sow in its turn, and the account is understood to balance over time. Ayni, the saying goes, is “today for you, tomorrow for me.” It is not courtesy but obligation, and the Smithsonian’s account of Andean reciprocity traces the same logic upward from person to community to the powers of the land themselves. At the scale of the whole community the same impulse takes the form of minka, or mink’a: collective labor freely joined for the common good, the terrace rebuilt, the irrigation canal cleared of silt, the roof raised in an afternoon by everyone who will one day need a roof raised. None of this is charity, and none of it is the market. It is the older arithmetic by which a people at the roof of the world have kept each other alive.

On these bonds rests a body of knowledge that is a patrimony in itself. The Runa are the keepers of high-Andean agriculture: the potato in its hundreds of native varieties, bred out over millennia to the exact demands of altitude, frost, and slope; quinoa and the hardy grains of the cold country; maize in the temperate valleys; the stone terraces that turn a mountainside into farmable steps and the irrigation that feeds them; and the herding of the llama and the alpaca, the pack-beast and the wool-beast of a world with no draft animals of its own. This is not folklore. It is a functioning agronomy of the high tropics, tuned over a very long time, and it is held and worked by living communities who did not inherit it from a museum.

Pachamama and the apus

The reciprocity of the ayllu does not stop at the edge of the human. It reaches the powers that own the world, and the relation is the same: one gives so that one may receive, and one keeps the account current. At its center stands Pachamama, the Earth Mother — not a symbol of the earth but the earth as a person, the ground that yields the potato and the maize and the grass for the herd, generous when fed and dangerous when neglected. She is thanked and toasted and given the first of every drink; she must eat, and she is fed. Around her stand the apus, the “lords” — the living spirits of the great snow peaks, who hold the glaciers that become the rivers and watch over the ayllu below. One greets them; one names them in prayer; one does not pass a high mountain in silence. Above the valleys of Cusco the greatest of them is Ausangate, addressed by name.

Nevado Ausangate, the highest peak of the Cordillera Vilcanota and the greatest of the mountain-lords above Cusco. Edubucher, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The earth and the mountains are addressed through a specialist. The Andean ritual practitioner is the paqo, who reads the coca leaves cast on a cloth and assembles the offering by which the powers are fed — the despacho, also called the pago a la tierra, a bundle laid up in careful order: coca leaves, seeds and animal fat, sweets, wine or cane spirit, small tokens and figures, wrapped and then burned or buried so that the earth and the apus may eat it as a person eats. The making of the bundle is a vocation with its own trained knowledge, and it is named here at the distance the public record keeps rather than opened as instruction. Its high season is August, and above all the first of the month, when the earth is said to open and to hunger and the offerings intensify before the planting. The paqo’s prayers over the bundle are spoken in Runa Simi and name, one after another, the mountains standing around.

None of this is a survival limping along beneath a Christian veneer, and none of it is the “idol-worship” the extirpators once called it. It is a coherent living veneration, and it has been woven, over four centuries, into a working synthesis with the Catholicism the Runa also profess. Pachamama and the Virgin overlap as a single mothering presence; the thunder-and-rain lord Illapa, who casts the water down from the celestial river, is greeted in the mounted figure of Santiago, Saint James, so that the crack of the storm and the war-cry of the saint fall together. The Runa who feed the earth in August and the Runa who fill the churches at Corpus Christi are the same Runa in the same week, and they find no contradiction in it. To read the fusion as confusion is to miss its intelligence: it keeps the surface of the world and the interior of the earth, the Mother and the mountain, the field and the church, all inside one order of obligation.

The campaigns against the huacas

The endurance of this world is written against a long effort to end it. When Tawantinsuyu fell to Pizarro’s Spanish in 1533, the imperial state was broken, but the religion had never been the state’s alone; the huacas — the powers and holy places of the landscape, the springs and stones and venerated ancestor-dead — went on being fed by the ayllus that had always fed them. And the huacas answered. In the 1560s a movement swept the Ayacucho highlands that the Spanish called the Taki Onqoy, the “dancing sickness”: between about 1564 and 1572 its followers held that the old huacas were rising in force to possess the living, to cast out the foreign god and defeat the invaders, and to restore the balance the conquest had wrecked. The ecclesiastical inspector Cristóbal de Albornoz made his name suppressing it, seizing its preachers and forcing their public recantation in Cusco.

The Church’s longer answer was systematic. In waves of inspection through the seventeenth century — the campaigns of 1609 to 1622, and again from 1649 to 1670, the latter under Pedro de Villagómez, archbishop of Lima — the extirpators of idolatry toured the highland parishes, cataloged the huacas, and smashed and burned the shrines and ritual objects they found, extracting confessions under punishment. “Idolatry” was their word for it, and “superstition” and “pagan survival” the gentler words of the folklorists who came after; all of them belong to the men who described the thing, not to the thing described, and the modern study of Andean religion has set them aside. What the campaigns could not extirpate they drove underground, and what went underground was in time absorbed. The veneration of Pachamama and the apus was not destroyed; it was folded into the Catholic year and carried on, which is why the offerings still go into the opened ground each August.

The pressure did not end with the shrines. The Runa endured the colonial tribute and the rotational labor draft that fed the silver mines; they rose in 1780 behind José Gabriel Condorcanqui, the provincial lord who took the name of the last Inca resistance as Túpac Amaru II and led, until his execution in the plaza of Cusco in 1781, the largest Indigenous rising of the colonial Americas; and through the republics that followed they endured centuries of contempt for their language, the schoolroom shame that a grandmother above Ayacucho could still remember. That the people and their veneration are spoken of here in the present tense is the plain measure of how far the effort to end them fell short.

The living present

Runa Simi is now a spoken family of some eight to ten million people, the largest Indigenous language community of the Americas, and in the last half-century it has begun to be counted as a possession rather than a stigma. Peru made Quechua an official language in 1975 — the first country in the Americas to grant an Indigenous language that standing — and though the law’s reach outran its enforcement, the gesture was real and it was first. Ecuador gave Kichwa constitutional recognition; Bolivia’s plurinational constitution of 2009 names Quechua among the thirty-six Indigenous languages official alongside Spanish. Intercultural bilingual education has carried Runa Simi back into the schools that once beat it out of children. In December 2016 Peru’s state television launched Ñuqanchik — the word means “all of us” — the first national newscast delivered entirely in Quechua, its veteran anchors reading the day’s news in the tongue their own teachers had forbidden. From Ayacucho, the young singer Renata Flores set Runa Simi to trap and rap and made it, for a new generation, a badge worn on purpose.

Against this runs a countercurrent the Runa did not choose. The despacho and the earth-offering are packaged and sold as “Andean ceremonies” to visitors at Cusco and Machu Picchu; the sacred landscape is mined for a spirituality that owes it nothing; and the glaciers that are the apus’ own body are retreating from the high shrines under a warming sky. A ceremony sold to a stranger who will never repay the earth is not ayni, and the difference is one the tradition itself can name. What holds beneath the sale is older and quieter and still going on: the ayllu that holds its land in common, the account kept current with the ground and the mountains, the first of the drink tipped to the earth before anyone drinks. The Runa are not the Inca preserved in amber, and they are not a chapter that closed in 1533. They are the Andean present, speaking of themselves in the oldest word they have for themselves, which is simply the word for a human being.

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