Tribes of the Amazon HMNS Visit

    I had a great experience at HMNS on Wednesday. The docents, Mary and Steve, were very informative and I learned a lot about the tribes living in the Amazon. I also learned a lot of things that I thought were very interesting, including information about the Shuar tribe shrinking heads, Yucca being the main food source in the Amazon and how they prepare it, the coming of age ceremonies for various tribes, and more. There were also some main points of interest to me that I learned a lot more about than other parts of the exhibit.
    The Shaman were a big point of interest to me, they were the “medicine men,” the priests and doctors for the tribes. It was very interesting because each tribe in the Amazon has very strong beliefs in the Spirit World, and their Shaman, which each tribe has, is their main connection to the Spirit World. Being Shaman is not passed on by ancestry in most tribes, but instead the current Shaman picks a sort of apprentice to be the next Shaman. In most of the tribes, the Shaman is a man, but the Ye’kuana tribe lets women become Shaman, which I thought was very interesting.
    Another point of interest to me was the Shuar Tribe and their Shelters. The Shuar Tribe is very distrustful of everyone, including their own tribe members, and they consider everyone their enemy. This has helped them to not be conquered. Due to their distrust of one another, every Shuar family lives in their own house, and every family lives on a different hill. Their shelters are unique in all the defense mechanisms they have. The first one is that all Shuar huts have to walls. This way, if a spear is thrown at their hut, and it breaks through the first wall, it will stop at the second. The Shuar huts also all have a trapdoor by the fireplace, so if they are under attack, they would leave using this door and abandon their hut and build a new one elsewhere. The Shuar men and women also sleep on different sides of the hut though I do not know if this has anything to do with defense. The trapdoor is on the men’s side of the hut.
    Over all I thought this was a very interesting exhibit, and the tribes of the Amazon are not things you learn about often. I also thought that it was interesting that everything the museum had were all things that the tribes would have thrown away and were not useful to them anymore though they are treasures to us. “Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes” said that museums often take artifacts from archeological sites, but these artifacts were willingly given by the tribes who did not want them any more.