The Tsafiki Documentation Project is designed to document the Tsafiki (Barbacoan) language and the culture of the Tsachila, who live in the western foothills of Ecuador in the province of Santo Domingo de los Tsachila. The project began over thirty years ago when four Tsachi men, Ramón, Alfonso, Juan and Primitivo Aguavil, recognizing that their culture and language were rapidly changing, began to collect audio recordings of the Tsachila. These three men had been taught to read and write Tsafiki by the SIL linguist Bruce Moore. Working with Robert Mix of the Museo del Banco Central, Guayaquil, they collected, transcribed and translated some sixty hours of Tsafiki narrations. In the early days of this project, these four dedicated men, worked on their farms during the day and at night transcribed and translated these recordings by the light of a candle using a little ‘Walkman’ portable audio recorder.

In 1994 Ramón Aguavil and Robert Mix invited Dr. Connie Dickinson to join the project as a linguistic consultant. After completing her doctoral thesis Complex Predicates in Tsafiki in 2002, Dr. Dickinson and the Tsachila began serious documentation in 2003 with generous funding from Volkswagen Stiftung of Germany and have continued with funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment of the Humantities of the United States. The generous funding has allowed the collection, transcription and translation of over 200 hours of Tsafiki video recordings. While the Tsachila have actively collaborated with various research projects and always welcome serious investigators, the Tsachila have elected the majority of the material that has been  recorded and have conducted the bulk of the investigation. The processing of the materials has also been carried out almost entirely by Tsachi researchers.  (They have thrown out the candles and now use computers and other modern equipment). Some twenty-seven Tsachila from the Tsachi organization PIKITSA, under the direction of Alfonso Aguavil, have participated in this project as primary investigators and countless others have given us their time and shared their knowledge of the Tsachila culture.

The primary goal of the project is to collect a wide variety of video material on various aspects of the culture including but not limited to procedural texts, traditional stories, information about shamanism and traditional medicine as well as everyday practices. The collection covers a wide range of discourse contexts–from public speech to everyday conversations and  child interaction.  A large number of the texts, 80-90 hours, have been completely processed with Toolbox: parsed and glossed, translated into English and Spanish and combined with the media files in ELAN. The remaining texts have been transcribed and translated into Spanish in ELAN. In addition, an electronic, corpus-based  lexical database of almost 10,000 words has been created from these materials. This tri-lingual lexical database includes definitions, grammatical information, examples taken from the texts, photos, sounds and encyclopedic information.

Acknowlegements:

We have received funding and/or technical and administrative assistance from the following institutions:

Museo del Banco Central de Guayaquil (Ecuador)
Volkswagen Stiftung (Germany)
The National Science Foundation (US)
The National Endowment for the Humanities (US)
Language Endangerment Fund (US)
Fulbright Foundation (US)
FLACSO (Ecuador)
Universidad San Francisco de Quito (Ecuador)
University of Oregon (US)
The Max Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics (The Netherlands)

We would also like to thank these individuals:

First and foremost the Tsachila Community.

We give special thanks to José Jacinto Aguavil and the late Catalina Calazacón who over the years have always been willing to share their knowledge of the Tsachi culture–telling stories, demonstrating arts and crafts and other aspects of the culture–always with more  good humor and patience than we probably deserved.

Thank you to the Governors of the Tsachila Nation who have always given us their approval and support:

Sr. Gumercindo Aguavil, 2011-present
Sr. Hector Aguavil, 2006-2010
Sr. Nicanor Calazacón, 1994-2000, 2004-2006
Sr. Manuel Calazacón, 2000-2004

Also we would like to thank:

Robert Mix
Dr. Olaf Holmes–Museo del Banco Central Guayaquil

Fernando Avilés
Dr. Colette Grinevald– Université Lumière Lyon2, France
Dr. Montserrat Ventura de Oler, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
Dr. Patricia Bermúdez, FLACSO Ecuador
Dr. Sarah A. Radcliffe, University of Cambridge
Ana Lucia Flórez Páez, graduate student in visual anthropology FLACSO

We would also like to thank Grégory Deshoulliere for taking some wonderful pictures of insects for the dictionary and Dr. Marleen Haboud for editing some 25 pages of Spanish translations.

And finally we would like to thank Rosa Zaracay Aguavil , Berta Zaracay Aguavil and Rosa Veronica Aguavil Aguavil for keeping us fed during our long work days.

Thank you all!!!!