Asakiyume mita

I didn't set out to do anything other than catch up with housework today, but then on a morning run I stopped to pick up a walnut fruit, and then that got me thinking about the staining capabilities of walnut, and then that reminded me of the Magüta/Tikuna people, who use the huito fruit (Genipa americana) to dye skin black. For babies there's ceremony where they're washed with its juice for protection. The juice doesn't start out black, but it turns black in the air:

(Screenshots from a lovely 13-minute video from Peru on the ceremony: Buxe Arii Ẽxüῧnechiga – Tinta de Huito Tikuna)

Here, they're washing the baby with the juice. You can see it hasn't yet turned black


And in this screenshot, you can see how dark black it gets


A similar thing happens if you're light-skinned and you stain yourself with walnut juice:

My hand in the morning--you can see the color is kind of yellow-orange


My hand just now, in the night


The huito fruits look kind of like the walnut fruits too, though they're not related:

huito:


black walnut (from Flickr user BlueRidgeKitties):


... hmmm, maybe they don't look *that* similar.

After the video on the protective ceremony for the baby, there was a video on processing cassava to make the coarse fariña that I brought back, and I watched that one with great joy and happiness and took lots of screenshots. But I'll save those for another day.