Koreguaje

The Koreguaje people are an Indigenous people who live along the Orteguaza River in the Caquetá Department in Colombia. The Muina-Murui (Huitoto) communities are their neighbours along the Caquetá River.^[1] In 1948 the "Correguaje" tribe was recorded as inhabiting "a number of villages on the Oretguaza River in Colombia (lat. 1° N., long. 75° W.), and were categorized as one of five groups of Western Tucanoan-speaking peoples, who were "apparently closely linked" with the "Tama (Tamao)" people, on the same river.^[2]

The traditional lands of the Koreguaje tribe used to stretch all the way to Florencia, but today fewer than 2,000 Koreguaje remain on their lands, after a history of forced enslavement, Christianization, land grabbing, and displacement, since the 18th century. After the development of the cocaine trade, increasing violence, and dispossession of their land in the 1990s and early 2000s, some moved to slums of Florencia and Bogotá.^[1]

The Koreguaje have an intimate relationship with the forest, seeing themselves as not merely its protectors, but part of the forest. They refer to themselves and their language as "Korébajü", meaning "people of the earth". They have traditionally sourced their food through fishing, occasional hunting, and a type of subsistence slash-and-burn agriculture common to Amazonian tribes known as chagras.^[1] They rely on the river for transport to other places.^[3]