Camsá people

The Camsá, or in their language Kamëntsá, are an indigenous people of Colombia. They primarily live in the Sibundoy Valley of the Putumayo Department in the south of Colombia.

Name
The name is rendered variously as Camsá, Camëntsëá, Coche, Kamemtxa, Kamsa, Kamse, Sibundoy, and Sibundoy-Gaché.

Language
The Camsá language is a language isolate, although linguists have tried to connect it to the Chibchan language family in the past. The language is written in the Latin script.

Culture
They are known for their carved wooden masks that are worn during ceremonies and festivals. They farm maize, beans, potatoes, and peas, and use a number of different entheogens, including ayahuasca (yagé), Brugmansia species, Iochroma fuchsioides and Desfontainia in their rituals. Kamëntsá shamans are noted for the number and variety of Brugmansia cultivars which they have propagated in their gardens of entheogenic plants, and which bear leaves in a wide variety of curiously misshapen forms. One of these cultivars - 'Culebra' ('snake' in Spanish) proved so aberrant that it was, for a time, actually removed from Brugmansia and accorded monotypic genus status as Methysticodendron (Greek : 'intoxicating tree'), the full Linnaean binomial of the plant becoming Methysticodendron amesianum before it was subsumed once more in Brugmansia.

Entheogenic plants of the Kamëntsá
"During the long period of relative isolation, a great variety of curious cultivated plants were brought into the [Sibundoy] Valley. Some are of scant importance today and may never have enjoyed a wide appreciation among the Valley’s inhabitants. Others, the predominant food, medicinal and narcotic plants, have come to assume very great importance in the economic and social life of the natives. Certain plants, known nowhere else, have evolved in the Valley under the influences of cultivation. Such has come to pass with the Tree Datura [=Brugmansia] drugs. Melvin L. Bristol 1969"

Debasement of Sibundoy Indian culture is a sad and logical result of national development and is a model for the erosion of traditional life throughout South America. Not long ago, the Valley of Sibundoy had some of the most interesting uses of psychoactive and medicinal plants in the world. Today, alcoholism is replacing the ceremonial use of safer drugs. Andrew Weil 1980

Notable Kamëntsá people

 * Hugo Jamioy Juagibioy, poet and indigenous rights activist