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406 Winfried Thielmann

won’t know the names of the hills or waterholes, the trees or the animals. They
won’t know the dreaming stories for their country.” (Deegan 1999: v).
For an indigenous society within a postcolonial environment there are three
principal paths of further development:
a) It survives intact, i.e. its members can survive in the traditional way.
b) Part of the tradition is lost, the rest is maintained. The truncated indigenous
society is supported as a resource (e.g. for tourism) by the postcolonial so-
ciety and/or by members who are also integrated in the postcolonial society.
c) The indigenous society is completely absorbed by the postcolonial society.

I shall now focus on a society that has taken a fourth, alternative route of lin-
guistic expansion (‘Sprachausbau’): the Shuar of the Ecuadorian Amazon. My
reflections are chiefly based on Kummer (1985).
After the Shuar had successfully resisted colonization attempts until the late
19th century, Salesian missionaries succeeded in establishing schools and ad-
ministration, which in turn brought more and more colonists to the Shuar terri-
tory. While the major part of the acephalous Shuar society retained its language
and traditional ways, a smaller part was integrated in the colonial society.
Further change occurred when the Ecuadorian government required land for
more colonists during the 1960s. The missionaries, whose contract with the
government was cancelled in 1966, ensured their institutional survival by assist-
ing the Shuar in setting up their own administration: the Federación de los Cen-
tros Shuar. The Shuar language, whose status had suffered during the first col-
onization period, became an important instrument to unify the Shuar against the
new colonists. It was also made a language of instruction in the Federation’s
bilingual school system. Missionaries and their former Shuar students designed
lessons in accordance with Ecuador’s curriculum. These lessons were then radio
broadcast to the remote Centros. There they were passed on to children by as-
sistant teachers. According to Almeida (2004), the Catholic influence has been
meanwhile reduced and the Bi-cultural Shuar Radio Education System (SER-
BISH) “provides education for about 7,500 children – out of a Shuar population
of 70,000 – in 297 schools teaching from primary to the end of the secondary
level”. During this process, the Shuar language had to be linguistically ex-
panded to render concepts of the modern, Spanish speaking postcolonial so-
ciety.
As can be seen from the brief example at the beginning of this section, first
attempts at the linguistic expansion of Shuara were made by missionaries – who
were also the first to write the language. “Holiness” and “virginity” were not
part of the Shuar’s cultural apparatus; thus santa was left as part of the name and
“virginity” was rendered via the neutral concept of intercourse, nijéit – for
which there does not seem to be a neutral term in Western languages (Kummer
1985: 127).