The Inga community possesses a full repertoire of expressive forms and genres that occur in all the expressive media, including the spoken word, musical performance, dance, and arts and crafts. One place where all of these elements come together is in the Inga carnival, kalusturinda, a period of celebration that brings young and old together to dance in their carnival costumes and renew the spirit of community life.
The Indiana University Inga Resource Center has focused most intently on the wonderful corpus of mythic narrative, stories told about the ancestors when animals could speak like people and the heavenly bodies interacted with the first ancestors of the modern people. Additional forms of spoken literature among the Inga include the sayings of the ancestors, proverb-like statements alerting people to signs and omens, and the ceremonial speeches, performed on those occasions when the community comes together to transact its business -- for example, during the installment of the new gobernadur in the cabildo each January.
We offer here a brief sampling of Inga expressive culture.
Perhaps the most famous mythic narrative among the Inga is the "Tale of the Shulupsi Bird."
This sketch by an Inga artist captures the key episode in the story, as the intended mother-in-law scolds the younger woman, thinking that she had not made the chicha, a maize beer, as instructed. The young woman then turns into a shulupsi bird, dips into the fresh chicha and flies away.
Click here to read a complete telling of this mythic narrative by Inga instructor Francisco Tandioy.