Made from Bone: Trickster Myths, Music, and History from the Amazon

1. The Arawakan Wakuenai of Venezuela

1 The Arawakan Wakuénai of Venezuela The Wakuénai, or Curripaco, live at the headwaters of the Río Negro, a region that is politically divided among the three countries of Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil. From a modern perspective, the Wakuénai appear to be located in a marginal area that is far removed from major centers of power and commerce. However, when seen in the long run of history, Wakuénai ancestral lands are anything but marginal. Rather, they occupy the riverine territories that connect the central Amazon floodplains in the south to the Orinoco basin, grasslands, and Caribbean Sea to the north. The Wakuénai language belongs to the Northern, or Maipuran, branch of the Arawak family. At the time of Columbus’s first encounters with the Taíno and other indigenous peoples living in the Caribbean basin, Arawak was the most widespread language family in the Americas, extending for three thousand miles from the Taíno in the north all the way to the Chané and Terena in southern Brazil and for twenty-four hundred miles from the Yanesha in the west to the Palikur (Pa’ikwené) near the mouth of the Amazon River (see map 1). Linguistic reconstruction (Key 1979) shows that Arawakspeaking peoples occupied lands along a continuous, flowing network of rivers spreading like a gigantic handprint across South America and the Caribbean , with “fingers” radiating up to the headwaters of the main southern, southwestern, and northwestern tributaries of the Amazon River; across the Orinoco basin and its tributaries in the western grasslands of Venezuela; along the northeastern coast of South America; and up into the Caribbean basin. The Wakuénai view of their lands as the center of the world and as the place from which the world opened up through their ancestors’ movements away from and back to the mythic center makes perfect sense when understood in this broader historical and geographic perspective. Five hundred years after Columbus’s first encounters with the Taíno, the vast, continuous pattern of Arawak language groups across South America and the Caribbean has transformed into discrete pockets and clusters at the headwaters of major rivers, including the Orinoco, Negro, Purus, Ucayali, Madeira, and Xingu (see map 2).1 Together with the lowlands of eastern Peru and westernmost Brazil, the upper Río Negro region of Venezuela, ColomMap 1. Location of Arawakan language groups, fifteenth century 2 MADE-FROM-BONE bia, and Brazil is one of the two areas where there is the greatest amount of linguistic, social, and cultural diversity among contemporary Arawak-speaking peoples.2 The Wakuénai are the largest surviving group in the Northern, or Maipuran, branch of the Arawak language family. The Wakuénai of Venezuela are located primarily in villages along the Guainía-Negro River from Victorino in the north to Cocuí in the south (see map 3). A smaller number of their villages are found along the lower Casiquiare River; the Río Atabapo and its tributaries, the Temi and Atacavi rivers; and neighborhoods and villages in and around Puerto Ayacucho. The number of Wakuénai speakers living in the Venezuelan Amazon has increased from 1,600 in the early 1980s (OCEI 1982 census) to 4,817 in 2002 (Programa Censal 2001).3 Archaeological, linguistic, historical, and ethnographic evidence indicates that the Isana-Guainía drainage area of Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil formed the core region of ancestral Wakuénai territories. Wakuénai mythic narratives describe the creation of humanity as a process in which the trickster-creator, Made-from-Bone, raised the mythic ancestors Map 2. Location of contemporary Arawak-speaking groups THE ARAWAKAN WAKUÉNAI OF VENEZUELA 3 of Wakuénai phratries and patrisibs from a hole beneath the rapids at Hípana , a village on the Aiarí River in Brazil. In this myth, Made-from-Bone brought these ancestors to life by blowing tobacco smoke and giving each of them powerful spirit names. The narratives about mythic past times outline a process in which Made-from-Bone gradually shapes a world of primordial beginnings in which there is only one place into an expanding world of named, culturally and geographically distinct peoples and places. The contemporary world of fully human social groups and history unfolded as an opening up of the world through a series of movements away from and back to the mythic center, or place of emergence, at Hípana, during...