Emberá Chamí community: surely a singular one, that needs to be preserved and that you

need to know.

Did you know that in Colombia there are communities that are developing apart from
the technology, economy, language and political system of the rest of Colombia? There is an
indigenous community that is named Emberá Chamí. This community is a branch from the
big family tree, the Emberá. Of this particular family I am going to state some facts and
interesting things that you need to know if you want to learn about other forms of living in
the West. There are some interesting particularities in the Emberá Chamí culture that give an
identity to their people that makes them a unique community. Therefore, this text is going to
work as a ‘mouth gag’, that works as a general introduction to the Emberá Chamí people
curiosities and stories, system of thought, customs, and location that are summarized here
from a considerable amount of different sources, in order to synthesize the information and
make it more accessible to you, the reader. Also, one of my intentions is to remember the
necessity to preserve this indigenous communities alive. You will see that these communities
still have something to tell us, the rest of the world.

The Emberá family is made up by the Chamí, Katíos, Dodibas, Eperara and
Siapidaras. Focusing on the Chamí family, it can be stated that the Chamí family represent
the 2.1% of the indigenous population in Colombia. Most of the Chamí population lie near
Río San Juan in the Pueblo Rico and Mistrató municipalities, from the department of
Risaralda, where the 55.1% of the Chamí population is found. Another place where the
Chamí people live is the Garrapatas and San Quiníni rivers, from the Dovio and Bolívar
municipalities, at the Valle del Cauca department and in the Resguardo de Cristiana at the
Antioquia department. Also, they can be found in the Jardín and Andes municipalities from
the Antioquia department, where 7,3% of its population is found. The Emberá Chamí people
can even be found at other places such as Quindío, Caldas —where 24,8% of the population
is found— Valle del Cauca, and Caquetá. In these places the DANE (Departamento
Administrativo Nacional de Estadística) has reported 29,094 people who acknowledge
themselves as part of the Chamí. According to this statistical report, the 50.2% of these
people are conformed by men and the 49.8% of them are conformed by women.

The Emberá Chamí people (the southern Emberá) keep their native language, a
language that belongs to the linguistic family named Chocó. This language is related with the
families arawak, karib and chicha, and to the waunan families. This language contains a
complex amount of dialectal varieties, making difficult to differentiate between one variety
and another. The Emberá Chamí people also cultivate coffee, cocoa, chontaduro, corn, beans
and sugar cane for economic purposes, and they are used to eating bush animals, cooked
green plantain, roasted ripe plantain, fish, beans and corn preparations. There are also some
recipes from the whole Emberá family such as chucula, arraciraba, bedá-betá, etc., that are
made with some of the foods that the Emberá people eat, reminding us that the Chamí is a
part of a whole body named Emberá. There is another thing that can be said about their
culture: they usually (at least some of the Emberás families) dress like westerns, but they also
have their traditional dresses (which are made by their own hands). For example, in some
regions the women use colorful dresses with long sleeve, parumas (clothing with design and
colors) and chaquiras; the men use shirts, long pants and/or guayucos (loincloth). It could be
said that they tell stories with their own clothes.

The Emberá Chamí people have a sense of respect for the Madre Tierra (“Mother
Earth”) that one could call devotion. For example, grandmother Lucía speaks about the
damage that we have done to our Madre, because we are risking her, although she is patient
and she needs to be cared as a whole body by all of us because she needs to be loved as a
Mother that she is. This view of the nature is more understandable when it is find out that
what they eat is goods from the nature, as it has been stated in this text, that the name
Emberá Chamí means (according to some sources) gente de la montaña (people of the
mountain). They have often been referred as people who live near the river. For them, the
river, is not just a “thing” but a living part of the ecosystem needed for the creation of the
Emberá Chamí people. The water is the connection between the upper world and the down
world. They also use products from the nature as economic resources with responsibility and
respect. They even believe that when someone gets sick is because there is an imbalance with
the Madre Tierra, so they search for plants, ancestral and traditional medicine in order to get
cured with help of a jaibaná (a sort of priest or wise from the community). Although, the
Chamís turn to western medicine if needed, because something else that can be learned about
the Chamí people is that they want us, as Lucía says, to be a whole family.

As you can see, the Emberá Chamí people, even when being different from the rest of
the culture that is developed all around the country, are full of richness and deserve respect.
With the Emberá Chamí community we have the opportunity to get connected to the world
before the Spanish people came to America, with the purpose of discovering something that
had already been discovered by them. This story of repression has not ended. Of course, not
everything related to the Chamís is beautiful. The Emberás have been addressing problems
related to the armed conflict like having to move from a place to another one in order to avoid
people or groups that can harm them (even the story of the foundation of the Emberá Chamí
family has to do with this problem). Even recently, a member of the Emberá Chamí
community was raped by a group of the Colombian military forces. At the beginning of the
year —the 14th of February— there was a place where the guerrillas (ELN, Ejército de
Liberación Nacional (“Army of National Liberation”)) were threatening the Emberá Chamí
community. And so forth, more examples could be given and more could be found. There is
an important thing with which you should leave this reading. The Emberá Chamí community
is one that, despite opposing the logics of our system and developing in a different way,
deserve to live and to build themselves as they consider the best: like a free, unique and
original family. This is a culture that I surely recommend you to know.

References:

● https://www.onic.org.co/pueblos/1095-embera-chami
● https://www.procuraduria.gov.co/portal/media/file/Caracterizacion%20CHAMI.pdf
● https://pueblosoriginarios.com/sur/caribe/embera_chami/embera_chami.html
● https://scielo.conicyt.cl/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0717-
75182010000300002#:~:text=H%C3%A1bitos%20alimentarios%3A%20el%20ideal
%20dietario,fr%C3%ADjol%20y%20preparaciones%20de%20ma%C3%ADz.
● https://pueblosoriginarios.com/sur/caribe/embera_chami/embera_chami.html
● https://catedra2embera.wixsite.com/embera/vestimenta
● https://www.icbf.gov.co/sites/default/files/recetario_antioquia_print.pdf
● https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6rqc8ZBGo0
● https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eT4Ir89rcZA&t=1296s