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1. Materials of the Yaminawa Language Documentation Project 
   • Collection identifier: 2018-33
   • Primary contributors: María Luisa Garcerán Álvarez (consultant); Pascual Gómez Flores (consultant); María Miranda Llergo (consultant); José Ramírez Ríos (consultant); María Ramírez Ríos (consultant); Teresa Ramírez Saldaña (consultant); Kelsey Neely (researcher, donor)
   • Languages: Yaminawa (yaa); Yora (mts)
   • Dates: 2013-
   • Historical information: Yaminawa is an endangered Panoan language of Peruvian Amazonia. Yaminawa (also spelled Yaminahua) forms part of a large dialect complex that includes Nahua (Yora), Sharanahua, Yawanawa, Shanenawa (Arara), and other varieties. Speakers of these languages are distributed across dozens of communities in an area of over 50,000 square miles. There are around 2500 total speakers of the languages that constitute the dialect complex.
     The documentation in this collection comes from fieldwork in Sepahua, Ucayali, Peru with both Yaminawa (Río Sepahua dialect) and Nahua (Yora) speakers. The Río Sepahua variety of Yaminawa and Nahua are highly mutually intelligible and speakers report that the two ethnolinguistic groups lived in a loosely-organized cluster of villages with positive social relationships and a shared language and culture until the Rubber Boom around the turn of the 20th century. At this point, the communities became separated as they fled territorial invasions and violent attacks by rubber workers and other resource extractors. They lost all contact with each other. Around the 1940s, the Yaminawa, who at the time inhabited the headwaters of the Sepahua and Las Piedras rivers, report that they began to enter indirect contact with non-indigenous society through trade with the neighboring Amahuaca. In the 1960s, the Yaminawa were the victims of a genocidal massacre intended to force them into contact to prevent their interference with the lumber extraction industry. Some survivors moved north to the Purús river where they lived among Sharanahua communities, while others became integrated into the Amahuaca community at the Dominican mission in Sepahua. In the 1970s and 80s, several families that had moved to the Purús returned to Sepahua to work in the lumber industry. Up until the mid-1980s, the Nahua continued to live entirely uncontacted in the headwaters of the Mishahua and Manú rivers. In 1984, the Nahua entered contact via run-ins with loggers and Shell Oil workers. The Nahua subsequently suffered a series of devastating epidemics that killed around half of the population. During the epidemics many Yaminawa went to the Mishahua river to aid the Nahua. Though the two communities are politically distinct, they are connected by many close family and social ties resulting from adoptions and marriages between the two communities.
   • Scope and content: Audio recordings of traditional stories in Yaminawa and Yora (Nahua) from a wide variety of genres, including cosmological narratives and animal tales. Accompanied by time-aligned transcriptions and translations in .etf format.
   • Repository: Survey of California and Other Indian Languages
   • Suggested citation: María Luisa Garcerán Álvarez, Pascual Gómez Flores, María Miranda Llergo, José Ramírez Ríos, María Ramírez Ríos, Teresa Ramírez Saldaña, and Kelsey Neely. Materials of the Yaminawa Language Documentation Project, 2018-33, California Language Archive, Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, University of California, Berkeley, http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.7297/X2P84933.