Page 42 - Roots-EN

Rituals

Currently, the Tikuna continue to celebrate various
rituals around the cycle of life, highlighting moments in
their childhood, puberty, motherhood, among others.

One of the most common rituals, practiced by the
Tikuna, is the Pelazón or ritual of passage, where the
puberty of the girls is celebrated. They consider this
to be their most important stage and refer to it as the
metamorphosis of a butterfly that leaves its cocoon
to become a new being. This is how with the arrival of
the first menstruation, the girl must undergo a series
of processes and rituals, where she is isolated from
her family and remains in confinement for a period of
one month. Time in which her family prepares for the
celebration, gathering food and preparing a cassava-
based fermented drink.

The event takes place in the community's maloca
where guests dance and sing for hours in honor of the
young woman. In the midst of the celebrations, at an
unexpected moment, men dressed in costumes and
masks arrive, representing the spirits of the jungle
animals. The masked men invoke the forces of nature
and keep their deities in balance.

These suits are made by men, most of them from a tree, by means of
a delicate process they remove in long strips the bark of the tree and
also its external covering, thus obtaining a soft material, which they
subject to washing and is Processed to blows with a mallet for long hours
until it becomes a moldable fabric. Later it is dried and patched. For its
decoration, dry branches, plants are incorporated and it is hand painted
with pigments extracted from fruits.

During the ritual of passage, some of these creatures confront intensely
the young honoree with dances, this in order to represent that she has
reached maturity and therefore opens her way to sexuality.

34