The race to extract an Indigenous language from its last lucid speaker
By Simeon Tegel
June 23, 2023 at 9:06 a.m. EDT
Nelita Campos, an Iskonawa woman in Ucayali, Peru, is the last lucid speaker of the Iskonawa language. (Florence Goupil for The Washington Post)
Listen
10 min
Share
Comment
Save
CALLERÍA, Peru — It’s a ritual that Roberto Zariquiey and Nelita Campos have engaged in for more than a decade.
The odd couple — Zariquiey, a university linguist conducting postdoctoral research at Harvard; Campos, the last lucid speaker of her Indigenous language — sit at the roughhewn kitchen table of her raised cabin, overlooking a muddy stream in the village of Callería, deep in the Peruvian Amazon.