Language Contact and Documentation: Contacto Linguistico y Documentacion

146 Mutua Mehinaku & Bruna Franchetto
who began to kugihe hagatelü, ‘cast strong sorcery,’ to kill off the people living
there. Consequently the surviving population decided to move to Ihumba,
while other families went to meet up with their families in an old Kalapalo
village, probably Kuakutu. “Later we moved again to Amagü, where I was
born,” Jamiku recounts. He was about seven years old when his parents decided
to live with the people from Uagihütü, since just seven families of their
people, the Jagamü, were still alive. Afterwards they went to establish another
village at Ahangitaha. “I was the one who opened that first place, later the
Kuikuro arrived, as a result we left and founded Magijape. My poor father was
always very keen to return to Jagamü, but he did not know that one day I
would return there,” recalls Jamiku, who today lives in Jagamü, the place of
origin of the Jagamü/Nahukwá.
The other half of the village decided to stay at Timpa. Soon after its inhabitants
migrated to the headwaters of the Culuene River. Today we can see the
consequences of this long process: the Jaramü/Nahukwá and Uagihütü/Matipu
were reduced to a tiny number of families and merged. The jagamü variant
predominated over the uagihütü variant. The population is now growing rapidly.
This process of peoples and languages splitting and uniting enabled the
formation of the dialectal variations of the Upper Xingu Carib language. The
Kuikuro claim that the speech of the Uagihütü otomo samakilüi, ‘was the one
that fell,’ while the speech of those who founded the new and first Kuikuro
village remained titage ‘erect.’ I return later to the question of these dialectal
variants, which for us are ‘languages’ and as such distinguish one people from
another. Let us continue the history of the Upper Xingu Carib, as told by other
actors.
The Kuikuro elders recall the name of the first village of our people, Oti,
located to the west of the Culuene River. According to oral narratives, a number
of chiefs and their followers left Oti following internal political conflicts. This
led to the creation of new villages: these chiefs apparently claimed that there
was no fertile land left at Oti to plant swiddens. The elder Agatsipá, for example,
now deceased, pointed to the origin of the Kuikuro people, saying ‘ilangopenginhe’
and indicating an area south of the current village of Ipatse, confirming
that Oti was situated on the upper course of the Angahuku, today known
as the Mirassol River.
According to the narratives of the elders, the name Kuikuro came into being
when Mütsümü, chief of Oti, the first Kuikuro village, discovered a lake
containing many kuhi fish. He therefore named the place of the first village
kuhi ikugu, meaning ‘lake of the kuhi fish,’ today pronounced Kuikuro by the
whites (Mutua Mehinaku 2006).
When Mütsümü’s group was already living at Kuhikugu, Ihikutaha arrived
to visit: he was a chief too, still young at the time. So a new village of chiefs