By the 1920s, rubber plantations in Southeast Asia had undermined the market for wild South American latex. The few hundred Zápara who had managed to hide during the rubber genocide stayed hidden. Some posed as Quichua, living among the enemies who now occupied their lands. Others escaped into Peru. Ecuador’s Zápara were officially considered extinct. Then, in 1999, after Peru and Ecuador resolved a long border dispute, a Peruvian Zápara shaman was found walking in the Ecuadoran jungle. He had come, he said, to finally meet his relatives.

The rediscovered Ecuadoran Zápara became an anthropological cause célèbre. The government recognized their territorial rights, albeit to only a shred of their ancestral land, and UNESCO bestowed a grant to revive their culture and save their language. By then, only four members of the tribe still spoke it, Ana María Santi among them. The forest they once knew was mostly gone: from the occupying Quichua they had learned to fell trees with steel machetes and burn the stumps to plant cassava. After a single harvest, each plot had to be fallowed for years; in every direction, the towering forest canopy had been replaced by spindly, second-growth shoots of laurel, magnolia, and copa palm. Cassava was now their mainstay, consumed all day in the form of chicha. The Zápara had survived into the 21st century, but they had entered it tipsy, and stayed that way.

They still hunted, but men now walked for days without finding tapirs or even quail. They had resorted to shooting spider monkeys, whose flesh was formerly taboo. Again, Ana María pushed away the bowl proffered by her granddaughters, which contained chocolate-colored meat with a tiny, thumbless paw jutting over its side. She raised her knotted chin toward the rejected boiled monkey.

“When we’re down to eating our ancestors,” she asked, “what is left?”