Nunkui

Nunkui is the earth-dwelling female power from whom the Achuar derive every cultivated plant. In the origin narrative a starving woman meets Nunkui, or a child of hers, and receives the first manioc, plantain and groundnut, together with the knowledge of how to sow, weed and harvest them; when the child is mistreated Nunkui withdraws and the abundance she had conjured shrinks back into the ground. She remains present beneath the garden, and Achuar women cultivate through a personal relationship with her, singing anent to her as to a kinswoman and secretly tending the reddish nantar stones understood as her offspring. She is likewise the patron of clay and of the potter's craft. Her sphere, the tamed and planted ground, is the female counterpart to the male labour of clearing the high forest presided over by Shakaim.

Domains

• horticulture
• manioc cultivation
• pottery

Powers

• makes cultivated plants swell and multiply
• taught women to plant and tend the garden
• taught women to shape and fire clay vessels

Epithets

• Nunkui Nua — the Nunkui-woman / earth womanSiro Pellizzaro, Nunkui (Mundo Shuar, 1978) (secondary)

Relations

• companion: ShakaimComplementary tutelaries of the swidden: Nunkui over the planted ground, Shakaim over the felling of the forest; some accounts also treat them as a married pair.Philippe Descola, The Spears of Twilight: Life and Death in the Amazon Jungle, trans. Janet Lloyd (The New Press, 1996) (secondary)

Sources

• Nunkui is the female earth spirit who created and governs the cultivated plants and taught women horticulture and pottery.: Philippe Descola, In the Society of Nature (Cambridge, 1994) (secondary); Michael J. Harner, The Jivaro: People of the Sacred Waterfalls (University of California Press, 1972) (secondary)
• Women address anent songs to Nunkui and keep nantar stones as her tokens for garden fertility.: Anne-Christine Taylor and Ernesto Chau, 'Jivaroan Magical Songs,' Amerindia 8 (1983) (secondary)