Rainforest Radio: Language Oppression and REclamation in the Western Amazon

How is the past brought to life in the present? Placing media at the center of the study of language contact, shift, and revitalization, Rainforest Radio shows that Amazonian Kichwa (Quichua) radio programs are emergent sites for the production of social memory, which contribute to the reclamation and reconfiguration of regional linguistic and environmental practices.

Many Kichwa-speaking Napo Runa in the Upper Ecuadorian Amazon find themselves doubly marginalized by both settler colonialism and well-intentioned language revitalization projects. They first confront the effects of extractivist and settler regimes promoted by the Spanish-speaking state that have driven profound environmental, social, and linguistic changes in the region. But many speakers also confront the local effects of a standardized variety known as Unified Kichwa, the official written standard that has increasingly become a spoken form. Many in Napo do not identify Unified Kichwa as “our own language,” which they rather associate with deeply held memories of the embodied speech of their elders. According to many in Napo, both language and the cultural practices that sustained interaction are being “forgotten” in the context of ongoing social, political, and economic changes in the Amazon. Napo Kichwa cultural activists have turned to what some outsiders might still consider an unexpected practice for Indigenous Amazonians—the use of broadcast and performance media as a method to remember forgotten voices and to establish a collective memory of “our own” language and culture in the face of multiple forms of marginalization.

This ethnography, based on more than 18 months of multi-sited linguistic anthropological fieldwork on the Napo Kichwa community radio and media industry from 2015-2017, explores how various radio producers, cultural activists, and community members used media as a method to heal intergenerational ruptures in transmission as they made space for different fashions of speaking on the air. Their programs spoke to the members of a regional community of shared linguistic practices, who coalesced around the local, intimate, and affective speech used in Kichwa community radio. Following Napo Kichwa community media across multiple sites of production and reception offers an analysis of language shift and revitalization that is grounded in regional social and ecological conditions, as well as a nuanced picture of the day-to-day interactional mediation of cultural change. Viewed through the expansion of colonial society in the region, both linguistic and environmental disruption in the Amazon can be analyzed within the same frame.