Cotococho is a Kichwa community at the eastern foot of the Andes mountains in Ecuador’s Amazon Basin.


I


arrived on a tight schedule in Banos, a town on the eastern side of the Ecuadorean Andes where the mountains descend into the Amazon basin. Banos is one of the gateways to the Amazon and a popular departure point for tourists heading into the jungle. My goal of an in-depth excursion into the Amazon, which required three or four days, would elude me because my fl ight departing Quito didn’t leave me with


suffi cient time. My only option appeared to be a set daytrip along the edge of the jungle. It began with a stop at the Zoo Refugio Tarqui, where the environmental police bring animals that have been rescued from traffi ckers or whose habitats have been otherwise threat- ened. After the zoo we would visit the Cotococha jungle Kichwa community and then hike a short distance into the Amazon to a waterfall. I’ve never been fond of zoos. Seeing large cats, on the verge of madness, pacing in their


cages doesn’t appeal to me. For me the bigger and more complicated dilemma was the visit to the Kichwa community. The prospect of visiting a zoo of captive animals followed by a visit to an indigenous community left me ambivalent about the moral implications. It harkened to a colonial view of American Indians as part of nature, noble savages living within a pristine myth. Such romanticized perceptions of indigenous peoples as exotic protectors of the envi-


SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 35


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