Inca Quechua dialect to be taught next year

The IU Center of Latin American and Caribbean Studies spread flyers this semester around campus that read, “The bututu is sounding! Calling you to learn Inga, the Quechua of Colombia.”

Next semester, CLACS instructor Francisco Tandioy is teaching an indigenous dialect of Inca Quechua language called Inga.

Even though other Quechua dialects are taught at other universities, IU is the only university in the world that offers Inga language and culture courses.

Quechua, the largest indigenous language spoken in Latin America, is the native language for more than 13 million people from southern Colombia, northern Argentina and Chile as well as Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador. Francisco Tandioy, a former Universidad de Nariño professor and a current Inga instructor, is a native speaker who advocates for the preservation of the Inga language and culture. 

“Right now, they don’t know how to read or write,” Tandioy said about the Inga people. “They just speak the oral language. So right now we need training.”

During the course a quarter of a century, Tandioy has worked on providing language pedagogy for the natives in the Inga village.

Tandioy was responsible for creating the world’s first Inga language instruction book — Inga Rimagapa Samuichi: Speaking the Quechua of Colombia — along with his longtime research colleague, Folklore and Ethnomusicology professor John McDowell and then-graduate student Juan Eduardo Wolf.

He also wrote an Inga-Spanish dictionary, as many people from the Inga villages are speaking more Spanish and less Inga, as well as a bilingual education book for children. Tandioy also wrote a photo and illustration book in collaboration with his mother called “Dreams and Omens” about his mother’s dreams of mystical healing and cures. Tandioy said in his community they share their dreams.

A native of Sibundoy Valley in Putumayo, Colombia, Tandioy received his Master’s degree in Linguistics and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at IU. He is currently a Ph.D. student in folklore and has been teaching Inga for years. Tandioy left IU in 1983 to go back to Colombia to teach at the Universidad de Nariño and co-founded an Inga political activist group called Musa Runakuna that works with the Inga elders to preserve the language and culture.

McDowell met Tandioy in Colombia as he collected and recorded stories to preserve Inga traditions.

“People kept telling me you have to meet Professor Tandioy because he can help you translate those stories,” McDowell said. “So I found him at the Universidad de Nariño. Sure enough, I explained what I was doing and he liked the idea and we started working together. I played back the materials on my tape recorder and he could understand the words on it and we would think about how to translate to English, well, first into Spanish and then we have to figure out what the ideas were in the stories."
 
McDowell said Tandioy is seen by people as a mentor and an ambassador of his culture.

“I think he thinks of himself as doing that kind of work — bringing the knowledge and beauty of his culture to faraway places, way up here in Bloomington, Indiana, “ McDowell said. “He’s a highly respected elder in his community.”