The University of Arizona Press

May 12, 2025

Napo Kichwa communities in the Upper Ecuadorian Amazon find themselves doubly marginalized by settler colonialism and well-intentioned language revitalization projects. In Rainforest Radio: Language Reclamation and Community Media in the Ecuadorian Amazon, Georgia C. Ennis provides a comprehensive ethnographic exploration of Amazonian Kichwa community media, offering a unique look at how Indigenous broadcast and performance media facilitate linguistic and cultural reclamation in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

By Georgia Ennis

Rainforest Radio follows Amazonian Kichwa media through production, reception, and circulation to understand the role of media in language reclamation.

One of the main sites of my research was the radio program Mushuk Ñampi or A New Path. I followed its radio hosts across sites, from communities where they recorded interviews with local elders to glitzy beauty pageants and other public performances connected to the radio.

In this photo from 2016, Rita Tunay, co-host of Mushuk Ñampi, records a resident of the community of La Libertad for the radio’s community archive.

I appeared as a guest host on A New Path during the time I worked with them. Like in this photo with co-host James Yumbo, I spoke in Kichwa about my research and assisted in sending “shout outs” to local communities. Photo courtesy of the Munipalidad de Archidona, 2016.

This photo shows the program’s first wayusa upina broadcast, hosted by the Association of Kichwa Midwives of the Upper Napo in March 2016. A New Path based an innovative monthly radio program around thewayusa upina or the “drinking of guayusa tea.” These are the pre-dawn hours when Kichwa families get up to drink infusions of guayusa, share stories and dreams, and prepare for their day. These live broadcasts and their daily, studio-based counterparts created spaces for intergenerational interaction in both production and reception and extended verbal artistry like narrative, jokes, and laments to listeners.

I studied radio reception with a multi-generational household in the community of Chaupishungo. The family usually awoke by 4 a.m. to drink guayusa and listen to the radio, as you see in this photo. The gatherings recreated on the radio during live programs evoked these intimate morning hours.

Napo radio also addressed Kichwa speakers who were committed to their regional varieties. Language standardization has been a significant method for language revitalization in Ecuador, with the standard Unified Kichwa used widely in national politics and bilingual education. Unified Kichwa is a historical reconstruction, which is more like the dialects spoken in the Andean highlands than those of the Amazonian lowlands. Radio and other performance media created public space for these different varieties. I learned a great deal about the beliefs surrounding orality, writing, and language variation by recording and transcribing narratives with Kichwa colleagues for a multimodal storytelling project, as well as through interviews about the linguistic histories of Napo residents.

Environmental destruction in the Amazon provides an important background to the book. Through these media events, many activists seek to recall and recreate time periods and ways of living that are less possible today.  

I hope readers will consider how global consumption practices relate to local experiences of environmental and social disruption that drive linguistic and cultural shift. Gold mining, as seen here on the Jatunyacu River in 2023, is just one of the ways that extractive and settler colonialism have reshaped the environmental conditions of Napo Kichwa communities.

Against this background, the book focuses on the reclamation of women’s environmental knowledge through the production of a fiber called pita. In the final chapter, I trace pita production across sites— from face-to-face interactions to the radio to beauty pageants to a women’s cultural center—to understand how media production continues to circulate knowledge of the fiber among participants and audiences.

Elder Serafina Grefa processes pita fiber by hand in 2017. Photo by the author.

Radio host Rita Tunay leads a discussion with members of the community of Santa Rita about pita production during a live wayusa upina program. Photo courtesy of the Municipalidad de Archidona, 2016.

By examining media in their social contexts, the book provides an ethnographic confirmation of what activists have long suggested: the production and reception of Indigenous-language media can promote cultural and linguistic revalorization and reclamation. Crucially, it is not the media technologies that “save” a language or culture, but how such technologies are utilized by communities.

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Georgia C. Ennis is an assistant professor of anthropology in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Western Carolina University, where she coordinates the Multimodal Ethnographic Learning and Design (MELD) Lab, an ethnographic media center focused on applied ethnographic media production. Rainforest Radio is her first book. In 2017, she edited the collaborative trilingual community media project Ñukanchi sacha kawsaywa aylluchishkamanda/Relaciones con nuestra selva/Relating to our forest with the Association of Upper Napo Kichwa Midwives.