Nterview With Shipibo Ayahuasca Shaman Enrique Lopeiz in the Amazon Rainforest of Peru – Part 1
I was born in a Shipibo community called Roaboya which is on the River Ucayali about 10 hours downstream from Pucallpa. Roaboya means the place where the Koto monkey lives. In Shipibo this kind of monkey is call Ro, but Mestizos tend to lengthen words, so they called the place Roaboya. The first Mestizos to arrive in the area were loggers – Boya (Buoys in English) refer to the logs which they floated down to their saw mills.
Actually there are two places; Roaboya Nativa and Roaboya Mestiza a bit further down river. When I was young, Angel Sanchez Vargas was the local Curaca – who is both a chief as well as shaman – he was my grandfather and he knew all about plants for healing, for giving visions and increasing human intelligence.
They later named the school after him there. Roaboya was the first indigenous community to be officially recognized 114 years ago. Later the river changed its course and the banks crumbled and many Shipibo people moved to form communities elsewhere on the Upper and Lower Ucayali.
When the earliest missionaries came in the 1940s, at first the people didn’t want to know about their pharmaceutical medicines or clothes which they tried to give away. The Shipibo didn’t wear Western clothes at that time and even refused to meet with them. But the missionaries were clever and brought sweets and presents, and impressed them with their water-planes and eventually succeeded in introducing their evangelical religion. The effect was to threaten Shipibo customs and create divisions in the community.
Later in the 60s when I was in my infancy, my grandfather put up resistance to Western things and warned that his people should not forget their