To Weave and Sing: Art, Symbol, and Narrative in the South American Rainforest

2. The People

2 • THE PEOPLE Our first contact with the Spanish was a long time after their arrival in Venezuela. We met them when they came to find thefamous City of Gold, El Dorado. They thought this was in our land. A little whilelater, the Spanish tried to conquer us byforce. Then we Yekuana, togetherwithour neighbors, theMaco, Yabarana, and others, defended ourselves, and we overthrew theSpanish. That's why,for a long time,we called ourselves "The Unconquered" and "the ones who beatthe conquerors." — Raphael Fernandez Ye'kuana: Nos cuentan Los "Makiritares" "THE ONES OF THIS EARTH" If it is true that a name reflects an inner essence, then the many used to refer to the Yekuana offer a profile of the varied character of this highland jungle people. The earliest mention of the Yekuana occurs in the report of the Jesuit priest Manuel Roman, who in 1744 journeyed to the upper Orinoco to investigate rumors of Portuguese slave traders in the area. Somewhere in the vicinity of present-day LaEsmeralda, he was surprised by a group of these Portuguese insisting they were not in Spanish territory but on a tributary of the Amazon. To prove their assertion, they invited Roman to accompany them back along the route they had traveled, thus revealing for the first time that phenomenon known as the Casiquiare—a natural canal connecting the two great watersheds of South America via the Rio Negro. To aid in this journey, Roman enlisted the services of a Carib-speaking group of Indians living near the mouth of the Kunukunuma, a large river entering the Orinoco several miles below the Casiquiare. Roman refers to these 5 THE PEOPLE excellent navigators in his reports and maps as the "Makiritare," a name which was to dominate most written reference to them for the next two centuries. Like many ethnographic tribal denominations, Makiritare is not autogenous, but is borrowed from the neighboring group responsible for guiding the first whites to them. Names of places and tribes on Roman's map confirm his use of Arawak-speaking guides (de Barandiaran 1979:739); hence the term Makiritare, derived from the Arawak roots Makidi and ari, meaning "people of the rivers" or "water people." The terms used by ethnographers and explorers to identify the Yekuana usually indicate the direction of their approach. In 1838 the German naturalistRobert Schomburgk arrived among the Yekuanawith the aid of Carib-speaking Pemon and Makushi guides. It is therefore no surprise that in his Reisen in Britisch Guiana (1847) he uses the Pemon name, Maiongkong.1 It has been suggested that this name, translatable as "Round Heads," derives from the Yekuana's distinctive totuma cut that gives their hair the appearance of an inverted gourd. But another interpretation of this commonly heard name is that suggested by Armellada, who claims Maiongkong means "those who live inside their conucos" (Salazar 1970:12). Although the Yekuana do not actually live in their gardens, the coincidence of these two definitions is notable, as there is a close symbolic relation between body care and gardening, which will be further discussed at length. Another name mentioned by Cesareo de Armellada and others working with the neighboring Pemon tribes to the east is "Pawana" or "Pabanoton." Meaning "those who sell," it is almost a generic term among Carib speakers for traders from a distant tribe (Butt 1973:16). The fact that Pawana and Maiongkong are nearly synonymous among their Cariban neighbors is a clear indication of the importance that trade plays among this highly mobile tribe that one writer referred to as "the Phoenicians of the Amazon" (Gonzalez Ninon.d.:7). The first person to actually use the autochthonous term "Yekuana" was also the first ethnographer to spend a concentrated period of time among them. Approaching the Yekuana in a way that no other explorer ever has, Theodor Koch-Grunberg, on a three-year expedition sponsored by the Baessler Institute of Berlin, in 1912 climbed out of the Uraricoera basin of northern Brazil and, with the aid of Wapishana and Makushi guides, crossed the Pacaraima Mountains into the headwaters of the Orinoco. Once in Venezuela, his expedition quicklymade contact 6 THE PEOPLE with Yekuana villages along the Merevari and Canaracuni. Over the next several months he gathered the material that was to form the Yekuana section of his monumental three-volume work, Vom Roraima Zum Orinoco. Although throughout this seminal work Koch-Griinberg consistently uses the...