CHANGING FORMS OF IDENTITY AND POLITICAL LEADERSHIP AMONG THE AKAWAIO KAPON

A Dissertation Submitted to

the Temple University Graduate Board

in Partial Fulfillmentof the Requirements for the Degree

of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

byChristopher Robert Carrico

January, 2007

©by

Christopher R. Carrico2007

All Rights Reserved

iii

ABSTRACTChanging Forms of Identity and Political Leadership Among the Akawaio Kapon

Christopher R. CarricoDoctor of Philosophy

Doctoral Advisory Committee Chair: Judith Goode

This dissertation examines forms of identity and political leadership as they

have developed among the Akawaio Kapon of the Upper Mazaruni from the

colonial era to the present. While a Kapon ethnic identity probably long predates

the colonial encounter, the violent process of colonialism, including involvement

in commodity production, warfare, slave raiding, and predatory banditry, warped

and distorted Akawaio social relations in ways that had long lasting and

debilitating consequences. During the latter half of the 19th century the Alleluia

religion emerged as a movement whose leaders sought to revitalize the ethics of

a kinship-based communal social formation, but during the same era, extractive

industries, missionaries, and the state were moving into Guyana’s interior and

setting into motion process which would once again have deleterious effects on

Akawaio social life. A new set of Amerindian elites have emerged whose power

derives from their connections with the missions, mining, and the state, and it is

this class of leaders who today are active in the political parties and the

indigenous rights organizations. The discourses of Amerindian identity which are

put forth by these leaders exist in a sometimes uneasy tension with the claims

about Amerindian identity that are made by the followers of the Alleluia religion.

Their discourses of indigenous rights and Amerindian political power also bring

these leaders into open conflict with non-Amerindian “coastlander” miners who

work in the Upper Mazaruni.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Michael Lijewski and Bill Friese, who taught me to call

what I was doing “anthropology,” Fran Rothstein and Barbara Leons, who taught

me that theory could be a weapon, and Tom Patterson, who taught me how to

sharpen that weapon. I would also like to thank my committee – Judy Goode,

Sue Hyatt, Tom Patterson and Kathy Walker – and Tony Ranere (the

department’s former chair), each of whom at various stages of my graduate

studies went above and beyond the call of duty, and became not only mentors

but also good friends. Judy Goode, especially, in the last stages of writing, also

became part psychotherapist part spiritual guide during this rite of passage.

I couldn’t have asked for a better cohort of students to have gone through

graduate school with. Hoa Tran, Rebecca Sobel, Samantha Longdin, Joseph

Gonzales, Bill McKinney, Gibran Medina, Lindsey Powell, Kimmika Williams,

Carey Million, Cate Leonard, Shari Kornelli, Michael Zukosky, Stephanie

Takaragawa, Kimberley Dukes, Kristi Brian, Sandhya Ganapati, Tim Messner,

Justin Garcia, Chelsea Voytek, Gianna Farrell, Anastasia Hudgins and Rob

O’Brien each helped me in ways that I will never be able to repay. Writing

sessions with Anastasia and Rob were a great turning point for me: they helped

me to see how my rambling thoughts on the page could be turned into a

dissertation. Conversations with Rob have meant the world to me, and I don’t

think I could have kept my sanity while writing without them.

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Adriana Boehm, Mary Stricker, Eva Swiddler, Eric McDuffy, Joe Corrado, and

Vincent Louis each need to be thanked for our productive conversations, and for

being comrades-in-arms. Ananth Aiyer and Jennifer Alvey, though both long

finished with coursework by the time I began at Temple, were inspirations to me

as I set out to do fieldwork. Larry Zeigler-Otero was also very helpful as I

prepared to enter the field. During my fieldwork, I benefited greatly from

conversations with Logan Hennessey and George Mentore. I also benefited from

reading Sue Staats’ dissertation and the work of Neil Whitehead.

My fieldwork itself was made possible by a grant from the Wenner-Gren

Foundation for Anthropological Research, and also, of course, by the

graciousness of my wife and her family, who took me under their wings and took

care of me during the two years that I lived in Guyana. I also need to thank my

big brother, Vidya Kissoon, and the rest of my wife’s friends who have adopted

my as an honorary Guyanese.

My research would also not have been possible without the support of the

University of Guyana’s Amerindian Research Unit, and Al Crieghton, who was

then its director. Nor would it have been possible without the approval of Carolyn

Rodrigues, Minister of Amerindian Affairs. Roderick and Fritz McLean, Fiesal Ali,

Clive Thomas, Rupert Roopnarine, Eusi Kwayana, Keith Scott, Jennifer Wishart,

Juliet Solomon, Sister Mary Menezes, Jean LaRose, Ivor Marslow, Michael

McKenzie, Dudley Kissore, Richard Olver, Sinikka Henry, Samuel Bremner, and

Janette Forte each helped me tremendously during my stay in Georgetown.

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Janette helped me more than she could possibly realize through her

unsurpassed writings on contemporary Guyanese Amerindians.

For their help during my stay in the Upper Mazaruni, I must thank Captains

Czar Henry, Norma Thomas, Van Mendeson, Lawrence Anslemo, and Andy

Hastings, as well as Dariel Kramer, Kelly Andries, Benson Thomas, Oswald

Henry, Sheila MacDonald, Ovid Williams, Taisa Hunter, Brenda Gomes,

Sookram and Cynthie, Noel and “Inka,” Ray and Dee Stegman, Ronny and Alice

Danny, Barrington and Rita Hunter, Harold Brown, the John family, Johnny Chin,

and above all, Father Winston Williams.

Finally, I would like to thank Mom and Tim for letting us stay with them for an

extended period of time upon our return from Guyana, and my whole family for

always offering support and keeping their “when are you going to finish?”

questions to a minimum. I am especially grateful to my wife, Romona, and my

daughter, Alexandria, for helping me to remember always the most important

things in life.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ABSTRACT........................................................................................................... iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS......................................................................................v

INTRODUCTION...................................................................................................1

Organization of the Dissertation................................................................11

CHAPTER

1: ETHNIC SOLDIERING, TRIBALIZATION AND SPANISH COLONIALISM.....15

Ethnic Soldiering and Tribalization in the Guianas...................................16

Critique of Ferguson and Whitehead’s Position........................................19

Spanish Trade and Slave Raiding............................................................27

2: THE DUTCH COLONIAL ERA........................................................................31

The Plantation Economy...........................................................................34

Capuchin Missions....................................................................................47......................................................................................................................

Brazil: Missionaries, Slavers and Ranchers..............................................52

3: THE BRITISH COLONIAL ERA.......................................................................57

Alleluia......................................................................................................62

Missionaries..............................................................................................66

Mining.......................................................................................................70

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Timber.......................................................................................................72

Ranching in the Rupununi.........................................................................74

Late Colonial Developments.....................................................................77

4: DECOLONIZATION AND POST-COLONIAL STATE BUILDING...................82

Economic Liberalization............................................................................93

Political Liberalization...............................................................................95

Electoral Politics.....................................................................................102

5: REPORT FROM THE VILLAGES..................................................................109

Kamarang...............................................................................................109

Jawalla....................................................................................................112

Philipai....................................................................................................115

Miners.....................................................................................................118

Political Leadership and Identity Politics.................................................123

6: CONCLUSION...............................................................................................126

BIBLIOGRAPHY................................................................................................132

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INTRODUCTION

When I came to Guyana in 2001, it was to examine the changing cultural and

political dimensions of Amerindian identity through fieldwork among the Akawaio

Kapon of the Upper Mazaruni. I intended to study the indigenous rights

movement and the Alleluia religion as sites of identity construction. Both of these

movements, I argued, were forms of resistance to the impact of non-Amerindian

political economy and culture, and both shaped the Akawaio Kapon

consciousness of themselves as a people. I wanted to understand the forces

that led to participation in Alleluia and indigenous activism, the impact that this

participation had on Akawaio social consciousness, and the effect these cultural

transformations have had on the relationship between the indigenous and non-

indigenous Guyanese.

As in many areas of the world, Amazonia has witnessed the emergence of

indigenous rights movements during the last several decades. These

movements are a response to the intensification of extractive industry in the

region, and have been shaped by the emergence internationally of new

discourses about indigenous rights – discourses which have had an influence in

international bodies such as the U.N., and on the thought of NGOs and

international human rights organizations. Guyana is a perfect example of these

processes at work. Since the mid-1980's, the Guyanese state has encouraged

the expansion of the mining and timber industries in its resource rich interior

forests and savannahs (Colchester 1997). Amerindians occupy the majority of

this land, and use it for horticulture, hunting and fishing. One way that they have

1

opposed encroachment on their lands is to form indigenous rights organizations

which demand cultural and territorial rights, and make alliances with international

ecological and human rights groups (La Rose and MacKay 1999).

In the Akawaio Kapon and Arekuna Pemon villages of the Upper Mazaruni,

small mining enterprises have encroached on Amerindian lands, poisoned

streams, and created conditions conducive to the spread of malaria (Butt Colson

1983). The sale of mining rights to multi-national corporations now threatens to

have a far greater impact on Amerindian life than that of small scale local mining

enterprises (Colchester 1997). In response, the Akawaio and Arekuna have

helped to form and lead national indigenous organizations. At the

encouragement of these organizations, the villages of the Upper Mazaruni have

petitioned the Guyanese government for a return of lands that were de-reserved

in the 1970s, and brought a lawsuit against the government when their petitions

were ignored (La Rose 1999).

The Upper Mazaruni has also seen a resurgence of the Alleluia religion in

recent decades. While the religion seemed to be disappearing when Audrey Butt

Colson did her fieldwork there in the 1950s, the Alleluia Church is today

flourishing, and Janette Forte (1996b: 37-60) has suggested that this resurgence

might serve as a form of resistance to the onslaught of coastal Guyanese culture.

Clearly, one of the roles it played historically was as a form of resistance against

the cultural effects of European colonialism. One of a number of millenarian

movements that began in the region during the late 19th century (Brown 1994;

Butt Colson 1985; Forte 1996b: 37-60; Hemming 1987; Wright and Hill 1986), the

2

Alleluia prophets warned that missionaries brought a false Bible, and offered the

message of the Amerindian Bible, received in the form of divinely inspired sacred

songs and dances (Butt 1960). Today, the headquarters of the Church is in

Amokokopai, a remote Akawaio village in the Upper Mazaruni. Its followers,

including Amerindians from Brazil and Venezuela and other regions of Guyana,

make pilgrimages to Amokokopai to participate in ceremonies such as Egijuku, a

festival dedicated to the young cassava crop (Forte 1996b: 37-60).

That Alleluia could still be invoked to mobilize resistance became apparent in

the 1970s, when the Guyanese government proposed the building of a hydro-

electric dam which would have flooded many of the villages of the Upper

Mazaruni, including Amokokopai. Alleluia believers were opposed to the dam,

which they related to the story of Noah and the great flood – a story of great

significance in the Alleluia worldview. Followers of the Alleluia religion said they

would refuse to relocate, and the Alleluia leaders told the people that as in

Noah’s time, the flood would destroy the sinful, but those who prayed and kept

the Alleluia faith would be saved from destruction (Bennett, et. al. 1978; Staats

1996).

I entered Guyana just before the elections of 2001, and I came at a time that I

believed could have been a transformational one for Amerindians in Guyana. In

addition to what appeared to be a vibrant attempt on the part of Akawaio and

Arekuna to assert their autonomy through the indigenous rights movement and

through the cultural nationalism of Alleluia, in the 2001 elections there was a new

political party which portrayed itself as representing Amerindians, and had mainly

3

an indigenous constituency – the Guyana Action Party. This party had

announced that it would join with Working People’s Alliance on a joint slate, with

the leader of GAP running as the presidential candidate and one of the key WPA

politicians running as the prime ministerial candidate.

Working People’s Alliance, which was the party of Walter Rodney, had been

the most progressive voice in Guyana politics since its formation in the 1980s.

Its very existence was based on the idea of breaking away from the racial politics

of the two major parties – the largely Indo-Guyanese People’s Progressive Party

and the largely Afro-Guyanese People’s National Congress (Marable1987). If

GAP sought to join forces with a party like WPA, I reasoned that this must be a

good sign, and that it was likely that this indigenous party had a vision that was

not based simply on a politics of racial representation as were the PPP and PNC.

Furthermore, WPA’s support of GAP seemed to indicate that it did not take the

view of some left parties that the indigenous movement was a form of cultural

nationalism that is divisive, and hinders the goals of a class-based politics (Kay

Warren 1998a, 1998b).

I arrived in Guyana just days before the elections, and the post-election

situation was incredibly chaotic. When the ruling People’s Progressive Party (in

power since 1992) was announced as the winner, there were allegations of

election fraud that were followed by political demonstrations, arsons, and looting.

Within days of my arrival I watched entire city blocks burn from the rooftop of my

rented room.

4

Meanwhile, the Minister of Amerindian Affairs denied my request to visit the

interior, saying that it would be irresponsible of him to allow me to travel in the

interior during the unsafe post-election times. So instead of visiting the quiet

villages of the Upper Mazaruni, I was in Georgetown, surrounded by chaos. I sat

in the capital, paid close attention to the post-election political developments, and

waited for things to calm down.

While in Georgetown I had the opportunity to interview some key members of

the WPA, including Rupert Roopnerine, who was the prime ministerial candidate.

It was clear already by the time I had finished these interviews, that the GAP-

WPA Alliance was based on opportunism rather than a shared ideology, and that

the alliance was likely to be an unstable one. First, the WPA’s democratic

socialist philosophy was completely at odds with the ideas of the GAP candidate,

who was a pro-market businessman who believed in privatization, free markets,

and attracting foreign investment. GAP’s real interest in WPA was that they were

an independent political party with a great deal of experience with coastal

politics. WPA’s interest in GAP was that they had done a great deal of

organizing in the interior, and they were likely to win a significant number of votes

in some of the areas of the country where there was an Amerindian majority.

WPA, on the other hand, no longer had any significant base of support, and

probably would not have even contested the 2001 elections if they had not been

approached by GAP. The obvious ideological differences and the tone of the

WPA leaders when I asked them about the GAP candidates were good clues to

me that the alliance may not have the potential that I had anticipated.

5

I also got the chance, while in Georgetown, to meet the people who worked in

the national office of the Amerindian People’s Association. These were all highly

educated Amerindians who were very much assimilated to Guyanese national

culture. The most helpful was an Arawak man whom I had had several

telephone conversations with before coming to Guyana. One of the observations

I made after a series of conversations with the people at APA, was that while

they were extremely sophisticated about making international alliances that

strengthened their cause, they seemed to have done very little to create alliances

at the national level with progressive Guyanese who might have been

sympathetic to the notion of indigenous rights.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the election, President Jagdeo used the beginning

of a new term in office as a chance to get rid of some of his cabinet members

who had been political appointees, and to replace them with people who were

better technically qualified to be administrators. One change was a new Minister

of Amerindian Affairs, who, unlike her predecessor, gave me permission to enter

the interior. I went first to Kamarang, the village that is home to the

administrative headquarters of Guyana’s Upper Mazaruni sub-district.

Kamarang is one of eight villages in the Upper Mazaruni that hold land titles.

The other titled villages are Kaikan, Paruima, Waramadong, Kako, Jawalla,

Pipilipai, and Chinowieng. The Upper Mazaruni district covers approximately

four thousand five hundred square miles and has a permanent Amerindian

population of around one person per square mile. All villages except for Paruima

are Akawaio Kapon villages, and Paruima is an Arekuna Pemon village. During

6

my trips to the Upper Mazaruni I visited Kamarang, Jawalla, and Pipilipai, as well

as several of their constituent settlements, all Akawaio villages.

My first experience with Akawaio villagers came on the evening of my arrival in

Kamarang, when scores of people came to the shop behind which I was staying,

ostensibly to watch movies, play pool, or drink rum, but also to find out who I was

and why I’d come. Reactions to my presence ran the gamut: from fear and

suspicion, to playful curiosity, to careful calculations as to how a relatively

privileged outsider might be taken advantage of. During my first two week visit,

people had already ceased to treat me as a spectacle, and by my second visit a

month later, I felt as if many were already treating like I was a long-time friend.

When I went to the Upper Mazaruni, it was still only a few weeks after the

elections, and people were still very much fired up about politics. Many

Amerindians in the district were quite excited about the Guyana Action Party’s

success in the regional elections. Previously, villages in the Upper Mazaruni

Sub-district had mainly supported the PNC or the PPP, but GAP won by a

landslide in the Upper Mazaruni, which came as a surprise to many. There were

a number of tensions which lurked beneath the surface which help to explain this

dramatic shift in the political affiliation of the Upper Mazaruni Sub-district. First,

the solidity of support in the PPP and PNC areas was not what party organizers

had assumed. Generally only a minority in each village solidly supported the

village’s dominant party, and many supported the parties that they did as choice

between the lesser of two evils. When presented with what seemed like a viable

alternative to the two major parties, they changed their affiliations. Furthermore,

7

many believed that a vote for GAP was a vote for their racial interests as

Amerindians, in the same way that Afro- and Indo- Guyanese had long perceived

their votes for PNC and PPP. GAP won a great deal of support simply based on

its representation of itself as the Amerindian party. While many Amerindians

were excited about the GAP victory in the Sub-district, there was hardly any

mention of the WPA component of the GAP-WPA alliance.

It was bitterly obvious to me during my first visit to the Upper Mazaruni that

while GAP had a strong presence in the area, it was perceived by Amerindians

and non-Amerindians alike to be a race-based Amerindian party. GAP’s alliance

with the WPA was a moot point among any of the Afro- and Indo-Guyanese small

miners who might have been potential WPA voters in different circumstances.

The consolidation of GAP’s power in this region was taken to be a threat to non-

Amerindian interests, and it was thought that the consolidation of the power of

these interests would mean the banning of non-Amerindians from these areas,

and/or a loss of their ability to earn a living in the Upper Mazaruni. Indeed, there

were several non-Amerindians who worked for the local government in lower

level positions who were replaced by Amerindians during the several months

after the election of GAP. A greater concern, however, was the widespread

agreement among Amerindians that it was not desirable to have non-Amerindian

miners working in the area. The rule of thumb when looking at who was

employed in the medium-scale mining operations was that only Amerindians

worked on Amerindian dredges, while both Amerindians and coastlanders were

allowed to work on the coastlander dredges, a situation which the coastlander

8

workers perceived as being a discriminatory practice. If the GAP-WPA alliance

appeared to be unstable from Georgetown, from the point of view of the Upper

Mazaruni it did not exist. Any potential alliance had been disrupted by racial

discourses which were being employed by Amerindians and non-Amerindians

alike.

If the GAP-WPA alliance had not produced the kind of progressive politics

which I had envisioned, the Alleluia religion and the indigenous rights movement

also did not have the relationship to one another which I had imagined. In spite

of the fact that several anthropologists had portrayed the Alleluia religion as

being, in part, a form of anti-colonial resistance, one of the things that I found

was that none of the indigenous rights leaders were active participants in the

Alleluia church, and none of the Alleluia leaders sought political positions such as

village captain, or seats on regional council.

My impressions about the divide between the Alleluia believers and the

political class, as well as my impressions that racial discourses were hindering

any kind of progressive alliances locally or nationally came to be reinforced

during the course of my fieldwork. During the course of the two years that I spent

in Guyana, I made several trips to the Upper Mazaruni, and stayed for periods

ranging from a few days to two months. I came to know all of the key players in

the indigenous rights organizations as well as the main political figures in the

Sub-district. I had conversations with all of them on the subjects of land rights,

mining, political parties, religion, race, village politics, and a range of other topics.

I also came to know a range of Amerindians, particularly in Jawalla and

9

Kamarang, who occupied a variety of different social positions. I spent time

among Amerindians and “coastlanders”, and in the social spaces where the two

groups interacted. I paid attention also to the interactions between Amerindians

of different villages. I watched the role of the presence of miners, and the effects

of missionization on inter-group relations. I also attended and participated in the

ceremonies of the Alleluia religion.

The majority of my time in the Upper Mazaruni was spent in Jawalla and

Kamarang-Warawatta, but I also made trips to Quebenang, Philipai and

Amokokopai. From Georgetown, I also took short trips to other regions of the

country in order to better understand Amerindian issues nationally. I visited the

Iwokrama Rainforest Reserve, which has sought to involve Makushi Pemon in

participatory development, as well as Kaiteur National Park, which the Patamona

Kapon have accused of encroaching on their land. I also went to the village of

Annai, in the North Rupununi District, in order to attend a meeting of the North

Rupununi District Development Board, a body organized by the Makushi villages.

In Georgetown I did work which included doing library research at the National

Library and the University of Guyana, observing national politics and national

levels of Amerindian organization, and searching for newspaper and other media

coverage of Amerindian issues. I attempted to broadly understand national

culture and political economy through participant observation and textual

research. My Georgetown research also included participant observation among

Georgetown’s middle class and elites, against whose hegemony, at the national

level, Amerindians must struggle. Finally, during the last four years while living in

10

the U.S. with my wife, I’ve spent a good amount of time with the Guyanese

immigrant community and done library research on the history, archaeology and

socio-cultural anthropology of the Guianas using Temple’s Paley Library.

Organization of the Dissertation

My field experiences led me to reformulate my research questions, and orient

them towards trying to understand the reasons for the divisions which I had

witnessed. First, I wanted to understand the history of racial formation in

Guyana. I wanted to understand not only how Amerindians had been constituted

as racial subjects and been the victims of racial oppression and marginalization, I

also wanted to understand how Amerindians had come to internalize a racial

worldview, and to hold racist views about other Guyanese – what Brackette

Williams (1991) referred to as the “subordinate appropriation of stereotyping.”

Next, I wanted to understand the histories of the development of different

forms of political leadership in Akawaio society, and how the social bases of

these forms of leadership had come to diverge. What was the history of the

emergence of the Alleluia leaders, and what social conditions was their

leadership a response to? How had the political class from which the indigenous

rights leaders came formed, and how had they emerged as a group that was so

clearly distinct from older forms of leaders such as Alleluia elders, settlement

captains, and shamans?

Finally, I wanted to understand how these divisions came to be reproduced

and perhaps exacerbated in the current era. If indeed the indigenous rights

11

movement was created in response to, and the Alleluia movement experienced a

revival as a result of the onslaught of neo-liberal economic policy in Guyana’s

interior, then why had people chosen these responses, and why did their choices

seem to exacerbate already existing differences between the groups?

Furthermore, if a party like GAP or an organization like APA had goals which

were understood to be giving voice to a persecuted racial minority, why were

their practical politics being expressed locally in ways which deepened existing

racial divides rather than fashioning progressive alliances between marginalized

and impoverished members of national society?

The dissertation which emerged out of this shift in focus is about the

development of forms of identity and political leadership in Akawaio society

during the colonial and post-colonial eras. Chapter One of the dissertation will

examine Neil Whitehead’s concepts of “tribalization” and “ethnic soldiering” –

which relate the emergence of modern Amerindian tribal/ethnic identities to the

impact of European colonialism. Chapter One will also examine the impact of the

Spanish during the 16th century on groups with whom the Akawaio were in

contact, and the precedents which the Spanish established that would be

followed by the Dutch in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Chapter Two of the dissertation will look at the Dutch colonial period, and the

relationship in the 17th and 18th centuries between the Akawaio and the imperial

projects of the Dutch, the Spanish and the Portuguese. It will examine Akawaio

warfare during this period, and the role that the Akawaio played in the colonial

economy as commodity producers, slave raiders, and “bush police.” Chapter

12

Two will also analyze the relationship between these processes and changes in

Akawaio identity and social organization.

Chapter Three will deal with the Akawaio during the British colonial era. It will

begin with a consideration of the condition of Akawaio society during the early

British era, and show how Alleluia emerged as a movement which addressed the

social problems caused by the violent impact of colonialism. Chapter Three will

also examines the spread of extractive industries such as mining and timber, the

spread of Christian missionization, and the spread of the presence of the state

and state administration during the late colonial era. The effect of each of these

processes on the Akawaio of the Upper Mazaruni will be considered.

Chapter Four will look at how Amerindian leaders were wrapped up in the

politics of decolonization and post-colonial nation building. It will describe the

way that Amerindians were tied to the conservative political party, United Force,

in the years leading up to Independence, and the way that Amerindian politics

was suppressed during the Presidency of Forbes Burnham. It will examine the

disproportionate impact that economic liberalization has had on Amerindians

since the 1980s, and the manner in which political liberalization has created the

space for the re-emergence of indigenous rights organizations, as well as a

political party with a largely Amerindian constituency.

Chapter Five will briefly describe the villages of the Upper Mazaruni in which I

did fieldwork, and analyze how these villages are positioned in the political

economy of the Sub-district. Attention will be paid to the relationship between

the various villages and subsistence horticulture and foraging, mining, a cash

13

economy, and the presence of the state. The chapter will also look at how

identity politics has developed differently among different classes of Amerindians

in the Upper Mazaruni.

Finally, Chapter Six will summarize, and attempt to reach some general

conclusions about the historical development of forms of identity and political

leadership among the Akawaio Kapon of the Upper Mazaruni, and make a few

comments about the likely trajectory of indigenous politics there in the near

future.

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CHAPTER 1

ETHNIC SOLDIERING, TRIBALIZATION AND SPANISH COLONIALISM

Anthropologists and other social scientists have long known that Guyana is a

particularly interesting place to study race and ethnicity. Most often, however,

Amerindians have been left out of these studies. Among the more notable

exceptions is Neil Whitehead’s work, which has conducted a critical ethnohistory

of the Guianas and adjacent areas. Of particular note has been his development

of the ideas of “tribalization” and “ethnic soldiering” in the context of colonization,

concepts which he first paired in the 1990 Ethnohistory article “Carib Ethnic

Soldiering in Venezuela, the Guianas, and the Antilles, 1492-1820.” Ethnic

soldiering meant that:

In many areas of the world, including America, the establishment and long-term survival of European colonial enclaves often depended on the military assistance of the native population against native groups themselves, rebellious slaves, or other colonial rivals. (357)

Ethnic soldiers were coerced or enticed (or some combination of the two) by a

variety of means, and the colonial states’ involvement with them ran the gamut

“from alliances with autonomous polities, to contracts with local leaders, to the

formal incorporation of a ‘martial tribe,’ as with the Gurkha in the British Army”

(357).

Ethnic soldiering was, in turn, the central factor in the reshaping of indigenous

identities in ways that lead to the crystallization of “tribes” first as “adversarial

identities” (360), a process he calls “tribalization.” Here, Whitehead was

15

obviously following Morton Fried (1975) and others (Helms 1975; Patterson

1987; Wolf 1982), who have claimed that the tribe has been solely, or mainly, the

result of kin-based societies’ contact with states, rather than a general stage in

the socio-cultural evolution of pre-state societies (Service 1962; Sahlins 1968).

More recently, Whitehead has said of “tribalization” that: it “essentially consisted

in the formation of increasingly closed and endogamous social groups and often

the development of hierarchical political authority expressing the emergence of

new ethnic divisions” (1999: 194). Alongside expanding states, distinctly new

tribal identities emerged, and indigenous societies in contact with states became

increasingly militarized and characterized by “an increase in armed collective

violence whose conduct, purposes, and technologies rapidly adapt to the threats

generated by state expansion” (Ferguson and Whitehead 1992: 3). Ferguson

and Whitehead refer to areas affected by the states, but not under state

administration – violent and militarized border areas, where tribes were most

likely to form – as the “Tribal Zone” (8-12).

Ethnic Soldiering and Tribalization in the Guianas

Whitehead has applied these concepts to an analysis of the Guianas (1990,

1992, 1993a, 1993b, 1994, 1998, 1999), the circum-Caribbean (1999), and

Northeastern Brazil (1993a, 1993b, 1994). For the Guianas, he believes that the

twin processes of tribalization and ethnic soldiering especially describe the

Caribs, whom he calls a “colonial tribe” that “emerged as a direct consequence of

the European presence” (1992: 134; 1999: 194-5). All modern Amerindian tribal

16

identities, in Whitehead’s opinion, are in some way an effect of European

colonialism. He believes that the pre-existing political formations of the Orinoco

river basin and the Guianas were destroyed as a result of early Spanish colonial

presence along the Orinoco and the Venezuelan coast. The destruction of pre-

colonial polities occurred either because of direct military campaigns against the

indigenous population, or indirectly because of the rapid spread of European

diseases in advance of actual European conquest and settlement (1994).

The newly emerged tribal identities that took shape during the colonial

encounter, according to Whitehead, fall into one of three categories. First, there

were groups that emerged as the direct consequence of European ethnic

soldiering, like the Caribs. Next were “aboriginally powerful” groups that either

“failed to negotiate the new conditions of initial European occupation and were

reduced to tribal status by direct military campaigns” (like the Warao), or “did

make such a successful transition but were nevertheless tribalized as a

consequence of this political and economic dependency on the Europeans

(Lokono, Kalinago, and Palikur)” (1992:134). Finally, there were those that “were

created as an indirect consequence of the European presence, but often without

any direct contact until the nineteenth century.” In this final category he puts

immigrants into the area, amalgamations like the Wai Wai, “self-marginalizing”

groups such as Taruma, Akuriyo, and Wayana, and “regional indigenous ethnic

networks such as the Soto and Pemon-Kapon that have had varying ‘tribal’

identities” (134).

17

Political authority in these three types of emerging societies operated in

distinct ways. In the groups that were aboriginally powerful, political authority

traditionally operated according to rigid rules of decent and genealogical position.

These rules became less rigid as these groups adapted to the colonial milieu. In

the tribes that emerged as a direct consequence of European colonialism,

political authority derived from competency in trade and war, with negotiable

genealogical boundaries. Finally, groups that emerged “as an indirect

consequence of European colonialism,” like the Pemon and Kapon, experienced

a form of political leadership where authority derived from trade, and tribalization

was indirect and tenuous. However, as a result of demographic collapse, the

predation of martial tribes, and immigration and amalgamation, such groups still

formed a part of the tribal zone, where all modern tribal identity was in a state of

flux in the wake of the European colonial presence (135).

In describing the phases of the European-Amerindian encounter, Whitehead

cites Bodley (1982), who postulated three main phases through which European

colonialism has passed in diverse situations. First was a phase of random,

violent impact. Next, came specific military campaigns designed to ensure the

security of the colonial enclave; and finally, came the extension of administrative

control by threat or persuasion (cited in Whitehead 1992: 136).

The goals of colonial endeavors varied, and aimed at anything from

commercial trade to the establishment of feudal estates. Given the small scale of

many of the Guianese endeavors, relative success in negotiating of Amerindian

alliances often determined the fate of the colonies in their initial years. This

18

became less the case as colonial states became more entrenched and

established. But the progress of colonial state building proceeded in a fitful

manner throughout the region, thus highlighting the contingency of state

formation, and dramatically illustrating to those in the “tribal zone” the limits of

state power in a way that continues to inform Amerindian political consciousness

to this day (136-7).

Whitehead suggests that we can further distinguish between the goals of

conquest and plunder and the goal of commerce and trade in Bodley’s phase 1,

between the goals of feudal appropriation of Amerindian labor in the encomienda

system and the use of Amerindians in the plantation system in phase 2, and

suggests that for much of northeastern South America, missionary activity played

the central role in phase 3 (137). In the European colonization of the Guianas,

Whitehead suggests that the first phase, which involved the creation of tribal

identities, lasted from 1492 until around 1680. The second phase, which

following the Spanish he refers to as “reduction to obedience,” occurred 1652-

1763. Finally, the extension of administrative control in the interior, the period he

calls “prelude to incorporation,” lasted from 1763 – 1820 (137-142).

Critique of Ferguson and Whitehead’s Position

The perspective that Whitehead (1990, 1992), and Ferguson and Whitehead

(1992), have outlined, is widely applicable in a variety of situations. Ethnic

soldiering, no doubt, has played a significant role in European colonial

expansion, and in state expansion of many kinds. In turn, there have been

19

certain widely experienced effects of ethnic soldiering – militarization, increased

hierarchy, stratification, and a hardening of tribal or ethnic boundaries – that can

usefully be grouped together as “tribalization.”

There can be little doubt that this perspective is an improvement over

primordialist views that portray tribal and ethnic identities as timeless and

unchanging, and explain tribal warfare and ethnic conflict by claiming that there is

a natural tendency towards conflict between groups that are culturally or

physically different. Furthermore, the “tribal zone” perspective is also clearly an

improvement over the Social Darwinist and Hobbesian views of Chagnon and

others that explain warfare as a natural outcome of human beings’ innate

aggressive and competitive nature, and describes pre-state societies as prone to

perpetual warfare. While a number of these critics have accused Ferguson and

Whitehead of perpetuating the myth of the noble savage, they argue that:

we never suggested that war among nonstate peoples was nonexistent or benign until the arrival of the state – or of Western states in particular – but rather proposed that indigenous warfare was generally transformed, frequently intensified, and sometimes generated in the cauldron of contact. (Ferguson and Whitehead 1999: xii)

An examination of the contributions to War in the Tribal Zone, and a few of the

publications of anthropologists and archaeologists who have been influenced by

the “tribal zone” perspective proves that there are a wide variety of

circumstances in which the concepts summarized above can be employed. The

edited volume includes contributions on situations as diverse as Roman North

Africa, third century BC Sri Lanka, and post-Independence civil conflict in Papua

20

New Guinea. Subsequent ethnographic applications of the concepts include

studies in Amazonia , Melanesia, Southeast Asia, and East Africa (Ferguson and

Whitehead 1999: xiii). Archaeologists, particularly Americanists, have also found

ethnic soldiering, tribalization, and the tribal zone to be useful ideas (Ferguson

and Whitehead 1999: xv).

In some sense, however, as much as those who have talked about the socio-

historical flexibility of the notion of ethnicity have added to the richness and

complexity of our understanding of these ideas, the manner in which Whitehead

originally stated his case suffers from a critical weakness. Like much of the

similar literature on the effects of European colonialism on identity, Whitehead

portrays indigenous identity either as a tabula rasa on which European

colonialism acted, or else argues that forms of indigenous social organization

were completely destroyed and reconstructed from scratch during the early

colonial era.

Whitehead moves too quickly from the point of view that indigenous identities

were affected and shaped by the colonial encounter to the position that they were

created by them. When Audrey Butt Colson did her fieldwork in the 1950’s, she

discovered that some Akawaio in the Guyanese interior had not internalized the

identity of “Akawaio”, but she did discover a range of identities that were based

on notions that had probably been in existence since pre-Colombian times. She

noted identities based on ethnicity (like Kapon and Pemon), geography (river

groups: -gok), and shared descent (domba) that all seem to be rooted in cultural

understandings that pre-date the European colonial encounter (Butt Colson

21

1983-4). It seems likely to me that even those who did not yet self-identify as

Akawaio still shared the collective identity of Kapon since long before the colonial

era.

In many cases in the Guianas, some notion of identity surrounding geography,

language and culture probably exhibited a greater amount of pre- and post-

Columbian continuity than models such as Whitehead’s allow. There also often

seems to be continuity as well in the identification of groups based on the role in

the local division of labor as well as in local patterns of exchange. So, for

example, the Warao peoples of coastal Guiana and the Orinoco Delta are today

still distinguished as a people by virtue of a particular position in the regional

division of labor. Unlike their horticultural neighbors, they have a mode of

production based on the exploitation of marine resources and other foraging

activities. They also have a language genetically unrelated to Cariban and

Arawakan languages in the area. They build boats as a specialized form of craft

production, and are known throughout Guyana for this skill. Their religious ritual

and mythology distinguishes them from surrounding peoples as well. None of

these characteristics can in any way be said to be the creation of the European

colonial era, and probably have been developing in dynamic relation to

surrounding peoples since the earliest Waroan occupation of this area in circa

5200 B.C.E. (Williams 2003).

The most obvious archaeological evidence of the presence of the ancestors of

the modern Warao is the large shell middens that were formed out of the several

millennia of their refuse. They subsisted by gathering plant materials, such as

22

the Ite palm, and by exploiting marine resources such as oysters, conch, lucines,

mussels, netirites, crabs and snails (Williams 2003: 86). After around 3300

B.C.E. they began making canoes, and a wide variety of stone tools that were

used in canoe manufacturing (130-148). There was also a division of labor

between communities, as the skills and resources were unevenly distributed

between Waroan groups. Canoes most likely lead to an increase in the

productive capacity of fishermen and collectors of marine resources, and there

was a resulting increase in population density (145).

The fact that these cultural characteristics exhibit such continuity with the

present, despite not only a European invasion but also earlier Cariban and

Arawakan invasions, seems to indicate that to say of the Warao, as Whitehead

suggests, that their tribal identity is a creation of the European colonial era might

be an overstatement of European agency, and an understatement of indigenous

agency and autonomy.

A similar case might be made for Guyana’s Lokono Arawaks as well as some

of its Cariban speakers such as the Pemon and Kapon peoples. Sometime

around 1600 B.C.E., the peoples inhabiting the mouths of the Orinoco and

Amazon Rivers developed horticulture. According to Jennifer Wishart (1995), the

first farmers to move into Guyana were the ancestors of modern-day Lokono

Arawaks, who settled the coast around 1550 B.C.E. Denis Williams (1995)

elaborates on this notion, attributing environmentally determined causes to the

rise of horticulture:

23

Around 3550 years ago, all of the factors that were necessary for the transition to horticulture existed in Guyana several varieties of wild manioc, adequate flour-processing expertise and its associated implements, sedentary populations and the indispensable technology of pottery-making. The only thing needed to precipitate the change to horticulture was a major subsistence crisis. At this time, comprehensive drying out of the swamps over several generations provided that crisis. Neo-Indian culture based on horticulture was the result.

According to Irving Rouse (1985), around 2000 B.C.E. Proto-Maipuran

Arawaks set out from a homeland somewhere in the Upper Rio Negro area, and

colonized in a “double pincer” movement down the length of the Orinoco and

Amazon rivers by around 1600 B.C.E. When the Orinocan or Proto-Northern

branch reached the mouth of the Orinoco, they moved northward into the

Caribbean Islands and southward along the Western Guiana coast. When the

Amazonian or Proto-Eastern branch reached the mouth of the Amazon they

moved northward along the Eastern Guiana coast. The two groups met

somewhere along Guiana Coastal Plain sometime around the beginning of the

Common Era (Durbin 1977).

Meanwhile, sometime around 2500 B.C.E., Proto-Caribs, horticulturalists from

an unknown homeland somewhere in the Guianas, began to spread throughout

the Guiana landmass, as well as into northern Venezuela, Colombia, and

northern Brazil. Historical linguistics postulates a separation of various Carib

languages into northern and southern subgroups by 2000 B.C.E., a differentiation

of Proto-Northern Carib into Western Guiana and Coastal Carib by 1500 B.C.E.,

and the emergence of Coastal Eastern Carib (Galibi) by 1000 B.C.E. The

24

Central Carib languages, including Akawaio Kapon, crystallized around the time

of the start of the Common Era (Durbin 1977; Rouse 1985).

The mode of production that the Proto-Arawak and Proto-Carib peoples

practiced was based on horticultural production with cassava (manioc) as the

staple crop. Cassava subsistence production is a labor intensive activity

involving under brushing, the felling of trees, burning and clearing of logs,

planting and harvesting; as well as labor intensive food preparation involving

squeezing, grating, boiling, straining, baking, etc. Every stage of this process is

communally organized along kinship lines. This mode of production relies on the

activities of part-time specializations in basketry, ceramics and stonework. It also

relied on the expansion of the stone axe making industry especially in order to

continually supply firewood for food preparation. Furthermore, these new

horticultural societies developed exchange relations of mutual dependence with

each other, and with the still thriving Warao people of the Orinoco delta and the

Guyanese North West (Williams 2003).

As noted above, the Kapon language crystallized around the end of the first

millennium B.C.E., at approximately the same time that there was the beginning

of the emergence of more complex horticultural systems in the Orinoco and

Amazonian River basins, and at the same time that there was the spread of

swidden horticulture through the interior of the Guianas. Denis Williams claims

Akawaio Kapon emerged as a distinct identity around this time, and spread

through the Guianas. He characterizes Akawaio as the propagators of swidden

horticulture in the interior, and as the long distance traders “par excellence” of the

25

area. He writes that Akawaio expansion began in their original homeland in

North West Guyana and by 80 B.C.E., they had peopled the Mazaruni at least as

far as Quartz Island, on the Middle Mazaruni, near what is today Issano. He

continues:

By around the time of Christ, the languages of the Central Guiana subfamily (Trio, Pemon, Kapon, Pauxiana, Wayana, etc.) had crystallized. If, as the archaeological evidence now seems to suggest, the ceramics of the Waiwaru Complex represent the situation on the Western Guiana Littoral before this crystallization occurred, then the emergence of Kapon ought to be identifiable archaeologically and to date no earlier than around this time. On the basis of their hinterland location and surviving ceramic practice, the Akawaio, today mainly distributed on the lower and upper Mazaruni river but once the dominant group in the Guiana hinterland, are unequivocally identifiable with the ceramics of the Koriabo phase, defined on the Western Guiana Littoral by Evans and Meggars. Koriabo phase ceramics are produced on the Upper Mazaruni to the present day (1995).

Williams associated the Koriabo phase ceramics with the Central Guiana

subfamily of the Carib language family, and shows that their occurrence

archaeologically roughly corresponds to the present day occupation area of

these same Carib-speaking groups. Williams sees the Akawaio as seminal in the

transmission of this pottery style to the interior rainforest, and attributes to them a

central role in trade that linked the Orinoco and Amazon watersheds for around

2000 years (1995, 2003).

Whatever we can say about ethnicity and tribal identity in the pre-colonial era

will undoubtedly be speculative at this point, but I want to suggest here that we

need to be cautious of any theoretical perspective that seems to put the entire

weight, or even the dominant weight, on the effects of colonialism during the

26

period C.E. 1500 – C.E. 1650 and beyond, as it takes away any kind of

indigenous autonomy, which would certainly would have been central during an

era when, in Whiteheads’ own words, the indigenous political economy remained

dominant.

We simply lack the archaeological evidence to state with any amount of

certainty what social relations looked like in the Guiana Highlands or along the

Guiana Coastal Plains. We also cannot say with any precision where the present

day Akawaio must have fit into this order of things, except that it is highly doubtful

that Akawaio Kapon as a distinct identity is only an effect of the European

colonial era. Similarly, the Akawaio as a group with shifting strategic positions

vis-à-vis Arawaks, Waraos, and other Cariban-speakers is also probably not a

phenomenon that emerged only during the colonial era.

Spanish Trade and Slave Raiding

There is no European historical mention of the Akawaio during the first

hundred years after 1492. From 1499, with the exploration of the expeditions of

Vespucci, Hojeda, Yañez Pinzon and Diego de Lepe – a part of the so-called

“Adalusian Voyages” – the Guiana coast was known about by Europeans

(Vigneras 1976). For the next several decades, the Portuguese and French

would engage in trade in the south of what is today Brazil, and focus on bartering

for dyes and brazilwood (Hemming 1987). These operations were minor in

comparison to Portuguese activities in Asia, as well as in comparison to Spain’s

27

massive empire-building in the Americas, first in the Greater Antilles, then in

Mexico, Central America, and Peru.

After Columbus’s 1498 landing on the South American mainland, Spanish

expeditions visited the Venezuelan coast, and the nearby islands of Trinidad,

Margarita, Cubagua, and Coche. Some slave raiding was engaged in for

transport to Hispaniola, though soon a trade in pearls developed in Margarita and

Cubagua, and the Spanish Crown ordered a stop to the slave trade. The reason

for this ruling is probably that the settlers on Margarita and Cubagua were

dependent on the Amerindian population for a supply of food and water, and it

was feared that slave raiding would turn the local population against the Spanish

and/or cause the supply of food to the islands to be cut off. Pearls were acquired

first through Amerindian barter, and later, after 1512, through the direct Spanish

exploitation of the pearl beds (Alexander 1958: 121; Whitehead 1988: 73).

A subsequent decision of the Spanish courts in 1519 declared slave-raiding

illegal on Margarita and Cubagua, but left the entire Venezuelan coast and

Trinidad open for slaving by declaring the indigenous peoples of these areas to

be “Caribs” and cannibals. Las Casas claimed the following of these activities:

Of the Shore of Pearls, of Paria, and the Island of Trinity; from the Shore of Paria, to the Bay of Venezuela, which takes up above two hundred miles in length, the Spaniards committed most wonderful depopulations: for they gave themselves wholly to their wanton robberies, enslaving also infinite numbers of men, on purpose to sell them for money, against all faith and pledges which they had given them for security (Las Casas, quoted in Whitehead 1988: 75).

As slave raids during the 16th century took place mainly along the Venezuelan

coast, not only did they not directly affect the Akawaio who resided some 450

28

miles to the southeast of the center of slaving activity, slave raids generally did

not have the dramatic effect on the peoples with which the Akawaio were in

regular contact that it had on the peoples of Venezuela’s Caribbean coast.

However, during the 1530s and 1560s there were several slaving expeditions

along the lower Orinoco which did involve Warao, Caribs, and Arawaks with

whom Akawaio would have been in regular contact (Whitehead 1988). It is my

impression that these were irregular violent episodes which those in the Akawaio

heartland might have heard about as disturbing news about events in foreign

lands, but would have not significantly affected their domestic affairs.

Most likely a far more significant phenomenon that took place because of the

Spanish presence was the special relationship that they had with the Lokono

Arawak of Trinidad, the Orinoco Delta and the Essequibo Coast. The Arawak

provided provisions, mainly the in the form of cassava in exchange for a

privileged access to European trade goods. Ojer and Boomert propose that the

Arawak of Aruacy, Trinidad had regional political dominance, but Anna Benjamin

(1987) suggests that privileged trading access was not accompanied by political

authority, and that political authority did not extend beyond the level of the village

or the settlement. However, the privileged access of some Arawaks to trade

might have meant that already existing rank and lineage distinctions were

reinforced within Lokono Arawak settlements. The Spanish also introduced a

pattern of awarding slaves to the Arawaks who then subsequently helped in the

productions of provisions (Benjamin 1987). These unfree laborers were perhaps

understood using the idiom of kinsip, like the Carib poito (a term for son-in-law).

29

As in Africa, these forms of unfree labor should be understood as a continuum:

with chattel slavery at one end, and kinship obligations at the other.

Groups other than the Arawak likely positioned themselves in a variety of

ways in relation to the privileged Arawak traders, and some European goods

probably made their way into many of the areas which Akawaio populated. It is

unclear to what degree this trade affected the groups of the interior, but its

presence must have shifted the balance of power in indigenous exchange

networks for a period of time. By the 1590s the Spanish trade had already lost

the significance it had during an earlier era (Benjamin 1987). For interior groups

such as the Akawaio, the significance of this early period of Spanish dominance

was not that it caused lasting changes in indigenous society; rather, it was mainly

important because of the precedents it set which the Dutch would follow in their

more direct dealings with the Akawaio during the 17th and 18th centuries.

30

CHAPTER 2

THE DUTCH COLONIAL ERA

During the later half of the 16th century, a number of interloping traders

(English and Irish, French, Dutch and Scandinavian) began to exchange with

Amerindians in the lower Amazon, along the Guiana coast, and in Trinidad and

the Lesser Antilles. They worked in territory claimed by the Spanish and

Portuguese, and began first at the peripheries of Spanish and Portuguese trading

zones. By early in the 17th century, they had significantly extended the area that

came under the influence of European trade, and begun to colonize the Guianas.

Their presence would affect all of Guyana’s Amerindians in profound ways that

went far beyond Spain’s effects during the 16th century.

Walter Raleigh voyaged to the Orinoco in 1595, and his writing about the

venture was a tract intended to promote colonization in the region. Like Francis

Drake in Panama, Raleigh is said to have rallied Amerindians behind the idea of

an anti-Spanish alliance. While Raleigh dreamed of a vast English empire in

South America which could rival the Spanish empire there, the main activity

which the English engaged in was a contraband tobacco trade in Trinidad and

Guiana which peaked during the 1590s and the first two decades of the 17th

century but was soon abandoned in favor of Virginia (Lorimer 1978). It is one

year after Raleigh’s initial visit that we have the first historical reference to the

Akawaio, from Keymis, who mentions them living along the banks of the

Supenaam River (Keymis 1904: 496).

31

The British, the French, and the Dutch would all enter into the contest for the

area, but it was the Dutch who would establish permanent settlements, and

effectively control Guyana for all of the 17th and 18th centuries, with only a few

brief interruptions. After a failed attempt at a colony in Berbice in 1613, by 1616

the Dutch had erected a fort, Kyk-over-al, at the confluence of the Cuyuni and

Mazaruni rivers, and began trading with Amerindians. In 1627, around 65—85

men also settled in Berbice. Just as the Spanish had before them, the settlers

initially relied heavily upon the Amerindian provision of food, and Anna Benjamin

suggests that it is only Amerindian assistance which prevented the Europeans

from starving in the early years of settlement. The provision trade would remain

important for some time, but would eventually become less significant once

plantation production was well established (Benjamin 1992).

For both colonies, trade with Amerindians in order to obtain export

commodities would dominate colonial life well into the 18th century (McGowen

1998). In 1621, the United Provinces granted the Dutch West India Company

exclusive trading rights in the Essequibo, while rights were given to the Van Pere

family in Berbice. The Dutch traded knives, axes, cutlasses, beads, razors,

mirrors and guns for a number of tropical forest products. The Amerindian

products they sought were tobacco, indigo, cotton, timber, resins and dyes. The

most important export commodity during this early period came to be annatto

seeds from which dyes could be made that varied in shade from yellow-orange to

dark red. It was used as food coloring, particularly to dye butter and cheeses, as

well as for fabric dye. From the beginning, the Akawaio were one of the largest

32

producers of annatto, rivaled only by the Caribs (Benjamin 1992; Thompson

1987; United States 1897).

In order to better assert their right to remain in the colony, the Dutch

commander in Essequibo married into a locally powerful Carib family. Like

slaves had been among the Spanish Arawak, the trading relationship with the

Dutch was also probably first understood using the idiom of kinship. For the

Dutch, marriage alliances secured access to indigenous kin-mediated systems of

exchange. Business was conducted with those who did not come to the Dutch

forts by way of interior traders – uitleggers – mainly Creole Blacks of both slave

and free status who traveled far and wide in the Guyanese interior. They were a

small, closed group, whose skills were passed on from one generation to the

next, who were fluent in Amerindian languages such as Carib and Akawaio, and

who sometimes also secured Amerindian alliances through marriage and kinship

relations. They were important middlemen between Amerindians and the Dutch

companies, and also sometimes played important diplomatic functions in

negotiations with Amerindians. Their mixed Creole—Amerindian offspring would

be known as bovianders, and would remain important players in the Guyanese

interior into the 20th century. The traders themselves, however, would only

remain important to the Dutch through the mid-18th century, when the annatto

trade would decline in significance and be replaced by the demands of the

plantation economy. In Berbice, traders would be mainly Dutch, and would never

achieve the significance that they had in the Essequibo. Berbice post holders

33

apparently most often dealt directly with Amerindians rather than working through

the traders as middlemen (Benjamin 1992; United States 1897).

Other important roles that Amerindians played in the early days of the

colonies included, for the Warau, provision of canoes for the colonists, a trade

which continued to be important throughout the Dutch colonial era. Amerindians

also worked as occasional laborers in a variety of capacities: as domestic

servants, as droughers, and as rowers; and they were especially indispensable

as guides. It was illegal to take Amerindians from neighboring nations as slaves

for fear of alienating groups on whom the settlers were dependent, and

Amerindian slavery was never as significant a source of labor as African slaves.

However, once plantation settlement was under way, Amerindians were also

enslaved by the Dutch, and worked as domestic slaves as well as field workers

on the plantations (Benjamin 1992; Thompson 1987).

The Plantation Economy

Dutch interests in the New World plantation economy really began in earnest

when they handled sugar exports from Brazil in the years 1609 – 1621 during a

12 year truce between the Dutch Republic and the united crowns of Spain and

Portugal (Boxer 1957). In 1630, after the truce had broken down, the Dutch

seized control of the north of Brazil as part of their more general take-over of

large parts of the Portuguese seaborne empire (Boxer 1965). The Dutch West

India Company, which was chartered in 1621 mainly with the purpose of

engaging in piracy against Spanish and Portuguese vessels, found after its take-

34

over of sugar producing areas of Brazil that far greater profits were to be made

by engaging in the slave trade, and in the trade in slave-produced commodities

like sugar (Goslinga 1971; Postma 1990). Apparently, alliances with

Amerindians and with maroons were important in the Dutch military strategy to

acquire Brazil, but when the Dutch finally lost the control of the colony, it was

mainly because of alliances that the Portuguese made with disgruntled slaves,

maroons, and Amerindians, who were unhappy with their intensified exploitation

under Dutch rule. As a result of their rebellions during the years 1645 – 54, the

Dutch had lost control of much of their Brazilian possessions (Boxer 1957). It

was mainly after their defeat in Brazil that the Dutch attempted to establish

plantation slavery based on the Brazilian model in the Guiana colonies.

In the Essequibo, there was little in the way of plantation development for the

first few decades of the colony, but after 1650 the economy of the colonies began

to move away from an exclusive focus on trade. Essequibo was opened up to

free colonists unassociated with the Dutch West India Company. Planters

introduced provisions, and some of the region’s export commodities such as

sugar, coffee and cotton into the area, and they came increasingly to rely on

African slaves as a source of labor. The plantation economy, however, did not

surpass the significance of Amerindian commodities until the mid – 18th century

(McGowan 1998; Thompson 1987). In Berbice plantation development got off to

a later start – it was without private plantations until the 1720s – but then grew

much more rapidly than the Essequibo in its early years (Benjamin 1992).

35

It is mainly from the time that plantation settlement becomes one of the goals

of the new colonies that there are indications of serious conflict between Dutch

settlers and Amerindians, and between Amerindian groups. Among the first of

these conflicts was the Akawaio – Carib War of the 1670s and 1680s. The

beginnings of the conflict are obscure, but it seems to have been an inter-

Amerindian conflict first, most likely over territory. It also seems likely, however,

that once the conflict was under way some Mazaruni planters sided with the

Caribs (who may have been affinal kin) in the hopes of acquiring land (and

perhaps slaves) as a result of the conflict (United States 1897).

It does not seem likely that the conflict was primarily over access to European

trade goods, because those involved were willing to pursue warfare that

disrupted trade for all parties. In fact, from the point of view of the Dutch

authorities, the warfare was a nuisance because it interfered with the raison

d’etre of the colonies: trade in annatto and other commodities. This warfare also

seems to have sometimes threatened the provision of staples for the colonists,

as in 1683 when conflict on the Cuyuni was apparently disrupting wild boar

hunting which was important to the Dutch (United States 1897).

The Dutch West India Company received reports from the Essequibo

Governor on Akawaio – Carib conflict on several occasions during the 1670s and

1680s and again in the 1750s and 1760s (Gravesande 1967; United States

1897). Mention of this warfare in the colonial records is always accompanied by

complaints that it was interrupting trade with Amerindians, and attempts were

36

made to appease warring parties with trade goods. Late in 1679, Abraham

Beekman, Commander in Essequibo wrote to the West India Company that:

The trade in hammocks and letter-wood has this year not had that desired success, on account of the war between those of Cuyuni, Essequibo, and Mazaruni and the Accoways who live in the country above; and we have repeatedly, with many but fruitless arguments, tried to persuade the highest chief to make peace with the aforesaid nation, to that end offering axes and other wares. They even threatened, if we would not let them continue the war, to depart in great numbers to Barima and elsewhere. These being the most important traders in dye, I was, to my sorrow, compelled to desist; and hereby the river Cuynuni, our provision chamber, is closed (United States 1897: 149-150).

In fact, the Cuyuni Akawaios went as far as poisoning a company trader

who worked among them, perhaps because of some connection between

the trader and the Caribs (United States 1897). This does not seem to be

a strategy that would have been pursued by people whose first interest in

the conflict was access to European goods.

Even less likely than access to European trade goods is the causal

explanation offered by Whitehead (1988: 166) when he suggests that the

Spanish encouraged Akawaios to attack the Caribs during the course of

Capuchin entradas into the Sierra Imataca. While there seems to

evidence that suggests that Capuchin missionaries did in fact fuel the

conflict in the 1750s and 1760s (Gravesande 1967), this was unlikely the

case in the 1670s and 1680s when there were no missionaries in the area,

and the Spanish presence was restricted to one very small settlement on

the Orinoco – quite distant from the Cuyuni.

37

As plantation production came to dominate the colonies of Essequibo,

Demerara and Berbice, there was a shift in European settlement from the near

hinterland (the Lower Mazaruni, Cuyuni and Essequibo) to the coast. This period

also saw significant immigration of non-Dutch planters: the most numerous being

the English who were migrating from the British West Indies. As the focus of the

colonies shifted to production based on slavery, some Amerindians began to be

involved in slave raiding: to provide slaves for Essequibo and Berbice, and also

to provide slaves for Suriname. The Caribs would be the group which was

recognized to be most involved in the slave trade, though the evidence suggests

that Akawaio were significant perpetrators of slave raiding, as well as sometimes

its victims (Benjamin 1992; Thompson 1987).

Little is known from the historical record about the extent to which slave raiding

went on in what is today Guyana. Part of the problem is that these were often

clandestine activities which were unknown or ignored by the colonial authorities.

It is clear that so-called “red slaves” were not uncommon in Berbice and

Essequibo, though planters were prohibited from taking slaves from neighboring

groups on whom the Dutch were dependent. Much of the slave raiding that took

place in Guyana probably was for slaves that were ultimately destined for sale in

Suriname, whose plantation economy was significantly larger scale during this

time. By all accounts, the Caribs were the most significant participants in the

slave trade, and raided groups far and wide. In theory, they were banned from

raiding among the Akawaio, Warau and Arawak in both Essequibo and Berbice,

but it is probable that this rule was sometimes ignored. The main targets of slave

38

raiding were probably groups further in the interior, such as the Arekuna, the

Patamona, the Wapishana, the Makushi, and the Atorads, who were not linked to

the plantation economy and were therefore considered “fair game” by colonial

authorities in slave raiding expeditions.

The Akawaio could be enslaved in Suriname, and apparently were kidnapped

by planters and by Caribs in Guyana for sale in Suriname. Some Akawaios were

also clearly engaged in slave raiding among groups further in the interior. By the

early British Era, William Hilhouse (1978) would describe Akawaio as involved in

widespread expeditions of raiding and trading throughout the Guiana Highlands

(see Chapter 3 below).

In addition to activities as slave raiders, some Amerindians (particularly the

Caribs) were used as “bush police” to prevent the runaway of slaves and to

subdue Maroon communities.  A few also formed part of the militia that put down

the slave rebellions of 1763 and 1823. Much has been made of the supposed

formation in this period of a Black – Amerindian racial antipathy which is said to

continue to inform Amerindian racial politics until the present. These kinds of

claims are not improbable, but their existence cannot be assumed a priori, as in

the primordialist view. There can be little doubt that the development of a racial

worldview was well underway during the Dutch colonial period amongst planters

and other European colonists. What is less apparent, however, is why

Amerindians should have necessarily adopted these ideologies as a result of

their involvement in various ways in the plantation economy.

39

What I would like to suggest here is that while some Amerindians did play

racialized roles during this period, racialization was uneven and incomplete, and

was only fully formed among a small group of Amerindians with close ties to the

planters. Most Amerindians, including the great majority of Akawaios, were

unlikely to have internalized any kind of racial identity during this era. There are

examples of Akawaios being recruited to assist in putting down slave rebellions,

but there are also indications that Akawaio communities harbored maroons, and

made alliances with slaves against the planters (Benjamin 1992; Whitehead

1988).

The Akawaio were involved in complex and shifting patterns of alliance and

conflict with enslaved Africans and Amerindians, as well as with the European

colonists. Akawaio often entered into distinctly different patterns of relations with

traders, planters and the colonial state. Among the most textured of the

accounts of the Dutch colonial era were those of Storm van’s Gravesande

(1967), the Commandeur of Essequibo, who sought in his dispatches to explain

the complexities of colonial life to the Dutch merchant investors to whom he

answered.

In 1750, Akawaio from the Post Arinda area on the Essequibo River

complained to Gravesande that their villages had been attacked by a Dutch

trader who led a group of Orinoco Caribs on a slaving expedition, and

Gravesande indicates in his report that many of the planters of the Essequibo

had become nervous that an organized Akawaio attack was eminent. These

comments suggest that the Akawaio understood well that the actions of the

40

traders were ultimately connected to planter interests, and the actions of each

probably fostered anti-Dutch sentiment.

Yet it is clear that there had not yet emerged Akawaio leaders who could

command the Akawaio as a tribe, and that Akawaio Kapon groups who were not

tightly connected by kinship and geography would not necessarily mobilize on

the basis of tribal solidarity. Solidarity with those who suffered at the hands of

Dutch planters and traders are certainly not reflected in the actions of Berbice

Akawaios two years later, who were assisting planters there in the return of

runaway slaves. On the other hand, the Akawaio of the Mazaruni and of

Demerara may well have known about conditions in the Post Arinda area, and

have connected these in their minds with the general pattern of abuse which they

were also experiencing at the hands of the Dutch. In 1755 Mazaruni Akawaio

responded to Dutch abuse by launching an attack:

The tribe of Acuways, which is very strong in the interior, and some of whose villages both in the Essequibo and in Massaruni and Demerara are situated next to our plantations, commenced by attacking the dwellings of some free Creoles belonging to the plantation Oosterbeek, and massacring those they found there. Thereupon they spread themselves and caused terror everywhere. Most of the planters living in Massaruni retired to an island with their slaves and their most valuable goods, and none of them dared stay at night on their plantations. A few days after that the aforesaid Acuways attacked the plantations of a certain Pieter Marchal (who, according to general report, is the chief cause of this revolt) at half-past five in the morning, killing two of his people and wounding five (most of whom have since died), but were subsequently driven back by the resistance of the aforesaid Marchal after they had wounded over the eye with an arrow Philip Plantijn, a soldier in Your Honour’s service, who chanced to be there and who died the third day after (340-341).

41

Shortly thereafter, Akawaio attacked another plantation in Demerara. Finding

no one there, they plundered and carried off everything. Gravesande

complained of the shortage of arms and supplies to protect the colony, and

reported that he was setting about refortifying the colony’s capital, Fort Kyk-

overal. A number of the colonists requested that the Caribs be armed for attack

against the Akawaios, but Gravesande did not think that this was wise – in part

because he recognized that the incident was caused by the abuse of Akawaios

by planters and their Carib allies:

no plantation has been attacked except those whose owners, according to common report, are accused of having grossly ill-treated that nation, and who were the cause of several Acuways being killed by the Caribs. …I am gradually becoming more aware that there is more behind this than we know, and it is possible that if we proceeded too quickly that the old proverb might be realized: ‘Little Thieves are hanged, but the big ones are let off (342).

The Arawaks were asked to act as intermediaries between the Akawaio and

the Caribs, but they refused. Gravesande ordered that the offending Akawaios

be brought to him by force or by persuasion so that he might speak to them in

order to make peace. If this was not possible, he threatened that he may arm the

Caribs after all (343). When the matter was investigated further, a Carib testified

that he had killed Mazaruni Akawaios, and brought four slaves to planter Pieter

Marchal. While Gravesande believed the Carib man’s testimony, it was custom

not to allow “savages” to testify against Christians, “a custom,” according to

Gravesande “which stands on good grounds, because most of them are not to be

trusted, and many of them can be made to say whatever one wishes for drink, or

other considerations” (347). The planter was declared innocent, but upon

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returning to his plantation he was met with a group of Akawaios who forced him

to leave his plantation by threatening his life. Gravesande wrote, “I should by no

means advise him to think of returning to his place, because whether guilty or not

guilty, the Acuways will certainly kill him” (347).

For the Demerara Akawaios, life seemed to return to normal, and they

continued their trade with the Dutch as they had before. An uneasy peace came

as well to the Mazaruni and Essequibo, though a garrison of soldiers was left at

Kyk-over-al just in case. While Pieter Marchal may have learned his lesson, it is

clear that patterns of planter abuse continued elsewhere on the Mazaruni,

perhaps as far upriver as the Upper Mazaruni:

The colonist, D. Couvreur, who has just come from the Upper Mazaruni, where he lives, has given me information… that between two and three days journey above his plantation, which is equal to about twelve or, at most, fifteen hours of travel, there live some whites, who have there a great house and more than 200 Indians with them, whom they make believe a lot of things, and are able to keep under absolute command (349-50).

Dutch slave raiding apparently continued in the interior past the limits of what

is today Guyana. Catalan Capuchins who were attempting to missionize

Akawaio between the Cuyuni and the Caroni assert in 1758 that they had lost

their Akawaio mission as the Akawaios had abandoned it to pursue war with

Caribs, who had killed one of their leaders. Furthermore, the Akawaios in the

vicinity of the missions of the Yuruary, to the north:

frequently demand to be allowed to avenge the murder of their people… the murderers were some Caribs who… had rebelled in the settlement of Tupuquen …said aggressors were living in the interior on the River Cuyuni and the mouth of the River Corumo… they were living with some Dutchmen from the Colony of

43

Essequibo, engaged in Slave Traffic for the said Colony, and that the principle reason for their murdering the said Captain was because he was founding a settlement in the neighborhood of Avechica, and thereby was… hindering them from passing without being discovered… these very same Caribs are still living at the mouth of the River Corumo, buying Indian slaves (Whitehead 1988: 123) .

Once again, however, knowledge of Akawaio abuse and enslavement

at the hands of the Dutch and the Caribs did not prevent Berbice

Akawaios from fighting side by side with planters in putting down the

Berbice slave rebellion of 1763. Indeed, Essequibo Caribs, who were

clearly enemies of the Akawaio in that colony, traveled to Berbice and

fought side-by-side with Akawaios there to aid in putting down the

rebellion (Gravesande: 438). Meanwhile, the Caribs were also not acting

as a united tribe, and we have reports of Berbice Caribs fighting on the

opposite side in the conflict, alongside the rebel slaves (Benjamin 1992).

For the Akawaios of the Essequibo colony, providing military assistance to

the planters was rare. Gravesande would later express surprise when

they came to the assistance of a planter in Demerara:

I have never seen Acuways come to our assistance with arms. They are good friends, but nothing further. Last week, however, five of them came down and went to van der Heyde, saying that their tribe would come down the Demerary to aid us (665).

By the mid-1760s, conflict between Akawaios and Caribs in the Mazaruni and

Cuyuni escalated into all out war. On August 13, 1765, Gravesande (485)

received word “from the Upper Massaruni that the Carib nation was at war with

that of the Acuways, and that the latter had massacred all of the women and

44

children in a Carib village on the Massaruni.” This time, again, the Commanduer

(486) suspected that the colonists had fueled the conflict, “some itinerant traders

and avaricious settlers… without taking heed of the consequences, allow

themselves to be drawn into these quarrels upon the slightest inducement of

profit.” He feared that these behaviors were a great danger to the colony (486).

Additionally, Gravesande received reports from the postholder of the Pomeroon

that Catalan Capuchins from missions to the west of the Cuyuni were supplying

Akawaios with arms in this conflict:

He reports that there are swarms of Akuways at that Mission, situated about four hours from Cuyuni on the west, and that the missionaries are the cause of war between the Caribs and that tribe, the natives being incited and provided with arms by them. (488-9; cf. Whitehead 128-9).

In January 1766, Gravesande reports a group of “Spanish” Caribs in the

Upper Mazaruni:

…they had come at the request of a Carib Owl of Massaruni, who, having an old grudge against the Acuway tribe, had urged the others of his nation living under his jurisdiction to help him fight the Acuways, which they had, however, refused to do…. He had then called these Spanish Indians to his assistance, but the Acuways, warned by the other Caribs, were on their guard….

… I sent word to the Owl of Massaruni that in case he did such a thing again I would send him to North America in an English ship. He had promised me to obey this order. I have treated him in a much more lenient manner than I should otherwise have done, because he is one of those who behaved so well at the time of the troubles in Berbice (496-7).

In 1767 and 1768, the war continued with renewed vigor, and by June

of 1768, Gravesande is writing that: “We are at present in very precarious

circumstances, the Acuways and the Caribs now in open war, which will

45

probably bring about a great massacre shortly (583).” It was reported that

Caribs and a Creole trader had massacred Akawaios, and brought their

severed hands to the authorities, claiming that they had killed runaway

slaves. The conflict by this time had finally spread to Akawaios and

Caribs in Berbice, and the postholder of the Corentyne was providing guns

to Caribs for the purpose of encouraging them to take Akawaio slaves that

could be sold to Surinam. The Caribs, however, were defeated by the

Akawaio in Berbice, and retreated to Demerara and Essequibo. The

Creole in the Essequibo who was allegedly involved in the massacre of

Akawaios was arrested, and reportedly committed suicide while in custody

(585).

While the Akawaio came to the assistance of planters in Berbice, and

in Demerara on at least one occasion, the more common pattern in the

Essequibo colony was that not only did they not assist in putting down

rebellions and returning runaway slaves, but they most likely had frequent

peaceful contact with maroons and runaways who they sometimes

sheltered or gave assistance. Neil Whitehead notes that:

By 1790, it was reported to the Council of the Indies that there were possibly up to 10,000 of these fugitives (runaway slaves) in the interior of Essequibo, Demerara, Berbice and Surinam. The Spanish were keen to make contact with these ‘bush negroes’ for they could certainly be used as a military force to eject the Dutch if it were possible to organize them to do so. Spanish plans had centred on making contact with Macusis and Guayacas (i.e. Akawaio) on the upper Essequibo, who it was said, had extensive contact with these rebel blacks (156).

46

The Spanish would not be successful in reaching these areas; though knowledge

of the Spanish desire for such an alliance informed runaways who fled to the

Spanish occupied Orinoco to seek refuge from the Dutch slave raiders.

Capuchin Missions

The Spanish first settled on the Orinoco at Santo Thomé in 1592, but it was

not until the second half of the 18th century that they were successful in trying to

settle the area to the south and east of the Orinoco. When this settlement came,

it was the result of the missionary activities of Capuchin Franciscans from

Catalonia, who were given permission to work in the area after the Jesuit

expulsion in 1682. Catalan Capuchins began missionary activities in the

immediate vicinity of Santo Thomé in 1724, and had begun establishing missions

in the western Sierra Imataca by 1762 (Strickland 1896). According to de Pons

(1970a), the missions of Spanish Guayana during this era thrived as a result of

cattle herding, and together the missions of the region owned as many as

150,000 head of cattle (357).

Jesuit historian Joseph Strickland (1896) described their evangelization as

follows: they chose sites, moved families of trusted Indians from other missions

to the new village:

Then the President of the new Mission with a guard of soldiers and some trusted indians set out towards the woods, or up to the course of the numerous rivers, in search of the Indians who had no fixed habitation and either invited them, or gently forced them, to follow him to the new village, where every one was provided with a

47

home and with food, till the fields began to yield a sufficient crop for their sustenance…

Contemporary observers of missionary entradas in the area should lead us to be

skeptical at how “gentle” the force was that was used to reduce Amerindians to

the mission settlements. Alexander von Humboldt’s (1995) observations in

Cumana, north of the Orinoco, indicate that the missionaries encouraged

Amerindians to engage in kidnapping and raiding that was nearly as brutal as the

contemporary slaving activities of the Dutch and their Carib allies:

They found a Guahiba mother with three children in a hut, two of whom were not yet adults. They were busy preparing cassava flour. Resistance was impossible; their father had gone out fishing, so the mother tried to run off with her children. She had just reached the savannah when the Indians, who hunt people the way whites hunt blacks in Africa, caught her. The mother and children were tied up and brought to the river bank. The monks were waiting for this expedition to end, without suffering any of the dangers. Had the mother resisted the Indians would have killed her; anything is allowed in this hunting of souls (conquista espiritual), and it is especially children that are captured and treated as poitos or slaves in the Christian missions (223).

When this same woman later attempted to flee the mission with her

children, the missionaries severely punished her and separated her from

her children. She was taken to another mission, but during the course of

the journey upriver:

She managed to break her bonds and jumped into the water and swam to the river bank. The current pushed her to the bank of rock, which is named after her today. She climbed up and walked into the jungle. But the head of the mission ordered his Indians to follow and capture her. She was again caught by the evening. She was stretched out on the rock (the Piedra de la Madre) where she was beaten with manatee whips. Her hands tied up behind her back with the strong cords of the mavacure, she was then dragged

48

to the Javita mission and thrown into one of the inns called casas del rey. (223-4)

Amerindians were forced into the missionary villages, and then tribute was

exacted from the villagers. According to de Pons, another contemporary

observer, “Indian Tribute” was imposed on all “civilized Indians, from eighteen to

fifty years of age”. The tax was then applied to the funds that paid the salaries of

the missionaries, with the surplus or the deficit made up by the Spanish Crown

(1970b: 121).

According to Stickland (1896), the Capuchin missionization along what is

today the Guyana – Venezuela border was effective but slow moving. Only a

small area of Spanish Guayana was effectively possessed at the time of the

English take over of the Essequibo. The Capuchins had extended missions in

two directions: along the banks of the Yuruary and along the banks of the

Paragua, an affluent of the Caroni. Strickland argues that the missions of the

Paragua were an attempt on the part of the Spanish to “get behind the Dutch at

the sources of the Mazaruni and the Essequibo.” The Spanish were

unsuccessful at this attempt, and were repeatedly repelled by Amerindians whom

the Dutch had supplied with firearms. Strickland claimed that “it is more probable

that the Dutch had reached the source of the Mazaruni” long before there was

any Spanish presence in the area. For the Spanish, the area between the

Paragua and the Lower Cuyuni was marked as “tierras desiertas.” At the time of

the British take over of the Essequibo, the Capuchin missions southeast of the

Orinoco were limited to north of the Cuyuni or west of the Caroni.

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Enlightenment writers such as von Humboldt and de Pons, who visited the

Spanish territories during this time, wrote of the absolute authority of the

missionaries over the Amerindians in these villages who, according to de Pons:

(didn’t) blush to abuse their religious influence; to employ alternately menaces and promises; and thus to obtain from the timid and credulous Indian labour beyond his strength, without allowing him any share of the profits arising form it.

It is no rare occurance to see… Indians arrive at Caraccas to complain before the bishop and captain general against the oppression of the missionaries; to request their recall, or at least the suppression of their abuses. It is equally customary to see missionaries sent for by the royal audience of Caraccas to answer charges in which they are accused of great excesses. There are also some missionaries who openly engage in commerce, or rather in smuggling and monopoly... – in defiance of their rules (not to) accumulate wealth. (354-5)

Humboldt describes the organization of production at his first visit to a mission

in Cumana, in this case a mission of Chaima Carib Indians:

The houses, or rather shacks, of the Chaima Indians, are scattered about, and are without vegetable gardens…. Each family cultivates the conuco de la comunidad, which is outside the village, as are their own individual vegetable plots. Adults of both sexes work there an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening. In the missions near the coast, the communal garden is nearly always planted with sugar cane or indigo and run by the missions. Their product, if the law is strictly followed, can be used only for the upkeep of the church and for the purchase of what the priests may need.” (85).

Humboldt further describes one Capuchin mission where cotton was grown.

In this particular mission, profits from cotton sales were first spent building the

missionary house, which, in this case, stood in stark contrast with the state of the

Amerindians:

50

The spacious padre’s house had just been finished and we noted with surprise that the terraced roof was decorated with a great number of chimineys that looked like turrets. Our host told us that this was done to remind him of his Aragonese winters, despite the tropical heat. The Guanaguana (mission) Indians grow cotton for themselves, the church and the missionary. The produce is supposed to belong to the community; it is with this communal money that the needs of the priest and altar are looked after (97).

Humboldt suggested that the focus was on cotton production at the expense

of food production, and there were frequent failures of the maize crops, which led

to famine. At this time, many of the Indians would abandon the missions and

spend extended periods:

al monte, that is, wandering about in the neighboring jungle and living off juicy plants, palm cabbages, fern roots and wild fruit. They do not speak of this nomadic state as one of deprivation. Only the missionary lost out because his village was left completely abandoned, and the community members, when they return from the woods, appeared to be less docile than before. (97-8)

The annatto dye held great interest for the Capuchin missionaries just as it

had for the Dutch traders. We meet the same expert preparers of dyes in the

Spanish areas as well as the in Dutch. Humboldt wrote of the annatto as follows:

The common decoration of the Caribs, Otomacs and Yaruros is annatto, which the Spanish call achiote. It is the coloring matter extracted from the pulp of Bixa orellana. To prepare this annatto Indian women throw the seeds of the plant into a tub filled with water. They beat this for an hour and then leave the mixture to deposit the coloring fecula, which is an intense brick-red. After pouring off the water they take out the fecula, dry it in their hands and mix it with turtle oil, after which it is shaped into rounded cakes (195).

According to Humboldt, the missionaries also made a profit of the sale of annatto

dyes to Amerindians, who used the dyes for body decoration (195). He also

51

reported a small trade between the missionaries and the coast in tropical forest

products and in live animals, traded in exchange for cloth, nails, axes, hooks and

needles (196). The Indians then bought the commodities coming from the coast

from the missionaries at high prices with the money they had derived from

activities such as the turtle egg harvest along the Orinoco.

Clearly, bleak views of missionary activity informed not only European

ideologues of the Enlightenment, but also Bolivarian Liberals and their

Amerindian allies who would later massacre the missionaries during the

Venezuelan War of Independence. In the areas that were adjacent to the Dutch

colony, missionization would mainly affect Caribs, who would become bitter

enemies of the missionaries and would be the chief anti-clerical agents in the

area during the Revolution. As noted above, some attempt was made on the

part of the Capuchins to missionize Akawaios during this time – though they were

unable to make inroads into Akawaio territory as they had into Carib territory in

the Sierra Imataca.

Brazil: Missionaries, Slavers and Ranchers

At the same time that the Spanish were attempting to get to the upper reaches

of the Mazaruni and Essequibo, the Portuguese were attempting to occupy the

areas north of the Middle Amazon. From as early as 1639, Cristobal de Acuna

related that the Indians of the Middle Amazon valley traded with the Dutch to the

north for hatchets, machetes, and knives. After the establishment of a Dutch

presence in the Essequibo, traders were sent into the far interior, and the

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influence of indirect trade with the Dutch reached to the Amazon, and became a

matter of concern for the Portuguese who claimed the area as their own.

Portuguese slave raiders began to ply the Rio Branco and Rio Negro from

around 1710. Shortly thereafter Carmelite missionaries entered the area. In

1714, the Dutch had sent an expedition up the Essequibo led by Pieter van der

Heyden. In 1723, the Manao attempted to trade directly with the Dutch, but the

Dutch were led to believe by the Caribs that an attack was at hand and pre-

emptively went to war with the Manao (Gravesande 1967: 414-5, 464; Hemming

1987: 640). In 1723 the Portuguese slave raiders attacked the Manaos and vice

versa. Settlers at Para wrote to the King of Portugal complaining that the Manao

were armed and allied with the Dutch. In 1728, the Portuguese sacked and

defeated the Manaos and brought their warriors in shackles downriver to the

plantations. The Manao chief tried to kill the Portuguese soldier and with some

of his compatriots drowned himself rather than submit to this fate (Hemming

1987: 303). The next several decades, the Manaos were the subject of slave

raids on the part of both the Portuguese and the Dutch (303-7). By the end of

the 18th century, the Spanish Capuchins would also enter what is today Brazil,

setting out on entradas from their settlements on the Caroni river. These

expeditions were repelled by the Paravilhana tribe, who apparently had been

armed by Dutch traders for the purposes of slave raiding, and who the

Portuguese claimed sold the Dutch slaves in exchange for guns, clothes, and

tools (309).

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Spanish authorities soon sent several military expeditions from Angostura up

the Caroni toward the Gran Sabana and the Pacaraima Mountains. One

expedition founded two settlements near the headwaters of the Paragua,

tributary of the Caroni. From there, an expedition from the Paragua to the

Uraricaa founded the settlement of Santa Rosa, and later near the confluence of

the Uraricaa and Uraricoera founded San Juan Bautista. A further attempt to

continue up the Tacutu was stopped by the Paravilhana (310). The Portuguese

became alarmed by these developments, sent a military expedition to expel the

Spanish from the area, and began actively settling the area themselves

thereafter (311-3).

The Amerindians of the Roraima State region were to subject to the

“Directorate” system that ruled Brazil’s Amerindian policy in the wake of the

Jesuit expulsion of the 1760s. John Hemming writes:

To lure them into the new villages, the Portuguese authorities had been generous with the manufactured goods that the Indians so greatly appreciated. But the system ‘proposed for them’ was the iniquitous directorate, a regime imposed throughout Brazilian Amazonia after the expulsion of the Jesuits and the limitations placed on the missionary orders from 1760 on. In this system, Indians were congregated in villages easily accessible on the banks of the main rivers. Each village was under the control of a layman director, usually a soldier. This director was expected to supply Indian laborers to work on government projects such as paddling canoes on expeditions; building forts and other public structures; shipbuilding; making cloth, tiles, or rope in factories; or exploiting the fish and turtles of the Amazon rivers. The director was allowed to take a hefty share of any produce of his Indians, generally the result of expeditions to gather marketable forest fruits, resins, and plants. The directorate system was a recipe for exploitation – directors had no interest in the welfare of their charges; they tended to become petty tyrants intent on extracting the maximum personal gain from the years they spent in the isolated villages (315).

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During the course of resettlement, and the system of forced labor that

followed, many died, while others deserted (316). The decent to the villages

included, at least in name, an attempt to convert the Indians to Christianity. The

attempt at conversion was combined with a more general attempt to “civilize” the

savage ways of the Indian. An official at Fort Sao Jaoquim wrote:

We try, gently enough, to forbid the abominable customs they have always practiced – such as burning the bodies of the dead in the houses in which they died, or each man having as many wives as he pleases…. They are also very astonished to be forbidden to anoint themselves with urucum [red annatto] body paint, and to be forbidden many other perverse and abusive customs which they are loathe to abandon (quoted in Hemming 316).

The abuse and discomfort which the Amerindian suffered under this system,

and ease of escape on their own terrain, made it difficult for the Portuguese to

keep people in the villages. By 1780 there was a rebellion and the widespread

abandonment of the villages (316-8). After 1784, the Portuguese crown

pardoned those involved in the rebellion and renewed attempts at entering the

area. By 1789, there were over a thousand Amerindians living in these

Portuguese villages, mainly Wapishana and Paravilhana, along with a few

Makushi. Contemporary reports also refer to a handful of Waika, which may

have referred to Yanomami or Xiriana as Hemming suggests (319), or may have

just as likely, given their location, referred to Akawaio. Regardless of whether, in

this period of the early European settlement, any Akawaio were forced into the

Brazilian villages, the Akawaio would have mainly been affected by the dramatic

effect that this pattern of settlement had on the social relations of neighboring

groups. Following famine and disease in the late 1780s and unrest in 1790,

55

many Indians from the Rio Branco were forcibly relocated to other areas of Brazil

in the hopes that relocation would decrease the chances of rebellion (320-1). A

rebellion in 1798 was violently suppressed. By the early decades of the 19th

century, the area had been greatly depopulated from the cumulative effects of

warfare, disease, and northward retreat into what is today Guyana. (322).

Attempts at missionization were abandoned, but Portuguese ranchers had begun

introducing cattle into the area in the late 1780s and 1790s and it is this industry

which continues to dominate this region to this day (322-4).

While it was the impact of the Dutch which affected Akawaio society most

dramatically, by the late 18th century, they would have been increasingly boxed

in from all sides, and would have lived in a world where disease, famine, and the

slave raiding activities of three major empires would have warped and distorted

their own social worlds and those of their neighbors in ways that would have long

lasting and debilitating consequences.

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CHAPTER 3

THE BRITISH COLONIAL ERA

In 1796, as a part of wider European conflicts, Great Britain seized control of

the Dutch colonies of Essequibo and Berbice. Their main interest in the colony

was expanding the sugar production in Demerara and Berbice – already home to

many British planters who had migrated there from the British West Indies. The

colonies were formally ceded to the British in a treaty in 1814, and in 1831, the

colonies merged under a single colonial state, British Guiana, which was divided

into three counties: Demerara, Essequibo and Berbice (Daly 1975: 109-117). In

regards to the Amerindians, official British policy began as a continuance of the

Dutch pattern of gift giving as a way of obtaining allies whose help could be

enlisted to protect the colony from Spanish or Portuguese invasion, to act as

bush police, or to put down slave rebellions (Menezes 1973). However, it’s clear

that the British colonial government did not place as great a value on these

relations with the Amerindians as the Dutch had; nor did they put many

resources towards maintaining them (Hillhouse 1825). The main reason for this

difference is that British merchants had little interest in the trade in Amerindian

commodities, whose value was negligible compared to the profits being made in

sugar and other coastal plantation crops. On the other hand, an enormous

amount of capital was being invested in sugar production, especially in

Demerara, whose sugar output increased from 9 million pounds in 1810, to 35

million in 1824 (Daly 1975: 115). Already by the time of the Demerara Rebellion

57

of 1823, the Amerindians would play a much smaller role in the suppression of

this slave uprising than they had in the 1763 Berbice Rebellion or the 1793

Coromantyn Rebellion (Hillhouse 1978:76; Menezes 1977: 59). Once slavery

was abolished in 1834, Amerindian significance to the economy and society of

British Guiana would become quite marginal.

The writings of William Hilhouse, appointed as Quarter-Master General of

Indians in 1823, in the wake of the Demerara uprising, give us many clues about

the racial ideology of the British colonials during the last days before

emancipation. While Menezes’s 1978 introduction to Indian Notices emphasizes

the conflict between Hilhouse and the colonial government, what she does not

note is the great similarity in the racial ideologies of Hilhouse and the coastal

planter class. While he displayed a great deal more sensitivity to Amerindian

culture, and to differences between Amerindian groups than did coastal people

for whom the interior was filled with ignorant “bucks,” he still sets about

elaborating a hierarchical racial typology. He assumed that some were civilized

(Englishmen, Scots, the Dutch), others were not civilized but with the right

guidance could become so (Amerindians), and others still were uncivilizable

(slaves and free blacks). His hopes for the interior lie in the civilizing influence of

whites and in the offspring of white – Amerindian unions.

Hilhouse carried with him the assumptions of English civilization, and believed

that the civilization of the Amerindian depended on involvement in commodity

production as well as exposure to the Christian religion. He devoted a fair

portion of Indian Notices to “Capacity for Labour.” It is here we see clearest his

58

assumptions about the ranking of races. The least industrious Guyanese,

according to Hilhouse, was the Free Negro. The Amerindian and the Mulatto

were ranked just above the Free Negro, but the most industrious by far, in

Hilhouse’s estimation, were the Europeans. Hilhouse’s recommendation to the

government in 1825 was that missionaries must be sent among the Amerindians,

but that it was prudent to teach by example first by settling the hinterland with

industrious whites.

Similar to the patterns of alliance which were established by Dutch, Hillhouse

was himself married to an Akawaio woman, and used his kinship connections to

secure his position in the interior. His writings also offer us some of the most

vivid ethnographic descriptions which exist for the early British era. He reported

that there were around 700 Akawaio who lived on the Demerara, as well as 1500

on the Mazaruni. They could be recognized by the lumps of annatto which they

stuck in their hair and used to paint themselves red “both to strike terror, and as a

defense from the bite of insects”. He described them as “quarrelsome and

warlike, and capable of enduring considerable fatigue and hardship.”

“Determined republicans in principle,” their chiefs had little authority outside that

which they held through their “family connections”. As soldiers they were

“capable of performing the most desperate enterprises,” but they would not follow

a commander who wasn’t recognized to have great skill as a military leader (20).

The Akawaios were “dreaded by all other tribes; and, wherever they settle,

they soon make a clear neighborhood.” In addition to being warriors, they were

also known as long distance traders and carriers of news and information. With

59

greater numbers than other groups in the interior, Hilhouse asserted that the

Akawaio would soon have dominated all other tribes, except for the fact that

there was not anything like unity or submission to a single authority among them.

Instead, they were said to be constantly at war not only with others but also

amongst themselves. Their constant warfare also limited the increase in their

numbers (21).

Constantly in motion across the whole of the interior, from the Orinoco to

French Guiana and Brazil, wherever Akawaio traveled, “they trade and fight –

and the traveling kit is as well calculated to drive a bargain as to sack a village.”

The “sudden and frequent visits” in the villages of traveling Akawaios meant that

a constant supply of extra provisions had to be on hand in order to keep visitors

fed, and so, according to Hilhouse, their cultivation had to be twice that of other

tribes (21-22).

If there was any time of general peace, it was during the dry season, which

was dedicated to the preparation of cassava fields.

But no sooner have they provided a supply for all goers and comers during the ensuing year, than they set to work manufacturing warlike implements of all kinds; and if, by sale of a few articles, they can muster a cargo of European goods, and a few fire arms, they set off to the Spanish or Portuguese frontier, to barter them for dogs, hammocks, &c (22).

Akawaio expeditions consisted of several families, well stocked with cassava

bread, who would “march for three days, then halt for two, during which they hunt

and barbacot their game.” These expeditions could easily last for two or three

months without running low on provisions. Upon approaching the village of any

60

tribe, they would prepare to attack. They would trade with villages that were

found well defended. Villages that were weak or off guard would be attacked and

their inhabitants massacred or enslaved. Hilhouse writes that “If a party can

muster eight or ten stand of fire-arms, it will fight its way through all the mountain

tribes, though at open war with them; and, by the rapidity of their marches, and

nightly enterprises, which they call Kanaima, they conceal the weakness of their

numbers, and carry terror before them.” And upon return from successful

expeditions, they would celebrate with great drinking parties that would last for

several days (22-23).

Even after the British abolition of the slave trade, predatory banditry continued

among the Akawaio throughout the 19th century. It is quite likely that some

Akawaios, like the Caribs, continued to participate in the slave trade with the

Brazilians, raiding groups such as the Makushi in collaboration with the

descimientos who brought enslaved Amerindians down river to the labor markets

of Manaus and Belém on the Amazon (Whitehead 2002: 271-272; Schomburgk

1922; Rivière 1995). Furthermore, a culture of violence had been created which

proved much more difficult to end than to begin. There were raids against non-

Akawaio, as well as inter-village warfare between Akawaio. There were

generations-long feuds between kin groups, revenge killings, and real or

suspected kanaimà killings. Combined with the military raids which Hilhouse

describes, kanaimà sorcery seems to have been widespread among the

Akawaio, and to have originally been a kind of shamanic warfare which was

linked to slave raiding and banditry. Whitehead argues that once regional scale

61

warfare declined in significance, kanaimà “more and more served local political

interests” (Whitehead 2002: 130-141). Once a form of spiritual warfare which

the Akawaio had used to terrorize neighboring groups, during the late 19th and

early 20th century Akawaio would increasingly use kanaimà to terrorize each

other.

Alleluia

According to the narrative that was given to Audrey Butt Colson in the 1950s,

Alleluia began in the Kanuku Mountains of the Rupununi region where it was

received by a Makushi prophet named Bichiwung (Butt 1960: 69). Bichiwung is

said to have traveled to England, where he overheard an English pastor tell his

family that it was his intention to deceive the Amerindians, and to hide the word

of God from them. Subsequently, Bichiwung sought to meet God himself to

make sure that he was being told the true word. He took the trail to God’s house

and told him why he had come. God invited him into heaven and showed him

around. Bichiwung learned that indeed the white men with their books intended

to deceive the Amerindians, and he received gifts from God – a bottle of perfume

and a parchment – and learned Alleluia songs (the true bible) directly from God

(69-76).

Upon returning to Guyana, Bichiwung traded blowpipes, baskets and other

Amerindian goods in Georgetown, and returned to the Kanuku Mountains with

great wealth and many European produced goods and began to preach Alleluia.

He taught his nuclear family and then extended kin the songs, prayers and

62

dances he had learned from God. He continued to have visions and dreams

during which he would visit God, who revealed the Alleluia religion to him (75-6).

Word of Bichiwung’s teachings spread, and his reputation grew. He acquired

disciples, and people from other tribes traveled to learn from him, and give him

gifts for his teachings. Within a few years, people were traveling from as far as

Brazil, the Upper Mazaruni, and Venezuela in order to learn Alleluia and to

“catch” the Alleluia songs. During this time, Bichiwung’s worldly prosperity also

grew. He received gifts from heaven, and his family gardens flourished. He

gave great feasts to which people from far and wide came. His fruitful gardens,

his wealth, and his generous hospitality were all, according to his followers, the

result of his devoted practice of Alleluia. His wealth and influence, however, also

caused great jealousy and envy among some, and kanaimà killed him one day

on the way home from his garden. Though his wife had magical healing oil that

had been received as a gift from God that could have revived him, the kanaimà

had hacked his body into many small pieces and scattered his remains to

prevent this from happening. Bichiwung’s disciples continued to practice and

preach Alleluia after his death, but some teachings were lost, and none of his

disciples had the same direct connection with God that Bichiwung was said to

have had (76-7).

Alleluia followers in the Upper Mazaruni report that during Bichiwung’s lifetime,

some Akawaio of the Cotinga River (just across the border in Brazil) heard of

Alleluia, and went to the Kanuku Mountains to learn. During their first trip they

could not catch Alleluia, but during their second trip they brought many gifts –

63

such as fish hooks, knives, and axes – and were able to learn Alleluia and bring it

back to the Akawaio. Some of the Cotinga people came to settle near Pipilipai in

Amokokupai and Pötökwai, and to practice and preach Alleluia there. While the

Pötökwai villagers would drink too much, quarrel, lose Alleluia, and eventually

disperse, the person who is recognized as the founder of Akawaio Alleluia, Abel,

would turn the village of Amokokupai into the religious center of Alleluia in the

circum-Roraima area (77-80).

Another probable route of entry for Alleluia into the Upper Mazaruni is through

a Makushi who visited Chinawieng before the time of Abel, and taught Alleluia

songs to an Akawaio man there named Cragik (95). However, all Akawaio

Alleluia believers recognize Abel as the true establisher of Alleluia in the area.

Before his conversion to Alleluia, Abel is said to have been a shaman, a sorcerer,

and a murderer. Like many shamans, he conversed with spirits on the

mountaintops and his spirit went into flight during trances, but he had not seen

God. He originally heard about Alleluia at a church in Pötökwai, and at first

laughed at the teachings. Something of the religion must have gotten to him,

though, because he began to pray to see God and to speak to him directly. He

gave up sorcery and evil, prayed constantly, and was able to approach nearer to

God. He built a church at Amokokupai upon God’s command, and preached

from there. Like Bichiwung, he was able to converse directly with God and learn

new Alleuia prayers, dances and songs. Unlike the church at Pötökwai, Abel’s

church prospered and grew. Akawaio from all the river settlements came to learn

Alleluia, as did people from the neighboring Arekuna villages (80-84).

64

Abel’s knowledge came from dreams and visions wherein his spirit took flight

just as a shaman’s spirit does. On his first spirit flight in search of the source of

Alleluia, he discovered a path along which were jaguar, howler monkeys, and

other animals sometimes encountered by shamans on their spirit flights. On a

second flight, he discovered a wide sea, which he crossed. He encountered

imawali (nature spirits) who had their own Alleluia songs and riga riga (musical

instruments). In another flight, he saw a big river, Igök, and a big village beside

it. There he found Noah, who had a big boat with many animals in it. In yet

another dream, he walked along a trail and came across many people dancing

Alleluia, whom he joined. A gourd that wasn’t being carried by anyone came to

the people and they drank from it. Abel wanted to drink too, but he was

distracted when the gourd came and it passed him by. Finally, he dreamt that he

came to the door to heaven, which closed to only a crack before him. He was

able to push his head through the door, and someone he could not see spoke to

him. It was God, who asked him to pray. He was allowed to enter heaven, and

shown all of its richness. He did not want to re-enter the world after seeing

heaven, but was told by God that he must return and spread the Alleluia

teachings (80-84).

The Alleluia religion emerged at the end of a long period wherein indigenous

social relations had been warped and distorted by the violent process of

colonialism. Slave raiding, inter- and intra- communal violence, excessive

individualism and the breakdown of communal social relations, and drunken

sprees had become a part of Akawaio life. Even after warfare declined in

65

significance, mutual suspicions between various groups, poisonings, sorcery and

sorcery accusations continued apace, and threatened the very fabric of Akawaio

society. Alleluia emerged as a critique of existing social relations, and was a call

for people to return to an ethic of sharing, mutual co-operation, moderation and

temperance, as well as a return to primary production in horticulture and hunting

and gathering.

Missionaries

While emancipation largely meant an abandonment of the interior by the

colonial government, for coastal planters emancipation represented, above all,

an enormous labor crisis. Unfree labor was continued for the first four years after

the abolition of slavery under an “apprenticeship” program (Daly 1975: 169-170).

After 1838, the planters and the colonial government sought to suppress the

wages of the newly freed workforce, and to limit their access to land by setting

high land prices and large minimum land holding requirements. They also

adopted labor-saving equipment and brought indentured workers to the colony as

ways of reducing their dependence on the labor of free Afro-Guyanese workers

(173). Most significantly from the point of view of the interior, attempts were

made to limit the access to sources of employment outside of the plantation

sector (173). This meant that access to the interior was restricted in an attempt

to prevent the coastal labor force from seeking a living in small mining or other

extractive industries.

66

The choice to bring indentured laborers to the colony was one that would

dramatically affect the colony’s subsequent history. From 1835 until 1917,

indentured laborers were brought from Europe, the West Indies, Africa and Asia.

Guyana’s contemporary Portuguese and Chinese populations are descended

from these immigrants, as are some Afro-Guyanese. Above all, however, the

coastal labor situation was dealt with by bringing indentured workers from India.

Some 239,000 indentured laborers were brought from India to British Guiana

during these years (Daly 1975: 183), and Indo-Guyanese have outnumbered

Afro-Guyanese in every census since 1911 (Braithwaite 1998).

While the colonial government focused its attention and resources on the

plantation areas of the coast, for much of the 19th century it was scarcely

involved in the interior. Instead, colonial governance was often invested de facto

in the hands of missionaries – and later in the hands of ranchers, and the owners

of mine and timber operations. The state sought to spread its control by proxy

especially by encouraging the missionary activities of the Anglican and Roman

Catholic Churches. Little attempt had been made by the Dutch to send

missionaries among the Amerindians, and in the Venezuelan War of

Independence in 1817, the Capuchin missions to the west of Essequibo were

destroyed (Butt Colson 1998: 9). In 1831, the Anglican Church established its

first Amerindian mission at Bartica (not far from the site of the old Dutch fort Kyk-

over-al). In 1833, Bartica’s first missionary traveled up the Essequibo to explore

the possibility of doing work among the Makushi villages, and in 1838 Thomas

Youd established the Rupununi Mission at the Makushi village of Pirara. He was

67

soon expelled by the Brazilian military, however, and there would be no

permanent missionary presence in the Rupununi until after the settlement of the

Brazil—British Guiana border dispute in 1904. In the intervening years, traveling

missionaries would periodically visit the area and work from the village of

Kwaimatta as a base (9-10).

In 1837, a Roman Catholic priest was sent to Santa Rosa, along the Moruca

River, where a group of Amerindians (known to this day in Guyana as the

“Spanish Arawaks”) had located after fleeing from the Venezuelan Revolution

(Menezes 1977: 223-231). Roman Catholic presence among Amerindians in

British Guiana would be limited to the North West until the early 20th century,

when they began to evangelize the Rupununi (Butt Colson 1998: 18-23). In the

1840s, the Anglican and Presbyterian Churches also established missions in the

North West. Of particular note was the work of Anglican minister W.H. Brett,

whose bases of operations were in the Pomeroon and Moruca. He would spend

some forty years evangelizing Guyanese Amerindians, and would come to be

known as the “Apostle to the Indians” (Butt Colson 1998: 10-13; Menezes 1977:

231-237).

According to Audrey Butt Colson (1998: 11), Akawaio attended Brett’s

missions, as well as the Presbyterian mission on the Supenaam. From 1861,

Brett had begun distributing illustrated tracts with the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostles

Creed, and the Ten Commandments translated into Akawaio. In the mid-1860s

Akawaios traveled to Brett’s missions from the Cuyuni and the Upper Barama

and Waini, and mixed parties of Akawaio and Arekuna traveled from the Upper

68

Cuyuni and the Caroni. In the late 1860s, additional Anglican missions were

founded by Rev. Thomas Farrar in the area surrounding Bartica, and these

initially mainly focused on making Akawaio converts. Missions were also

established in the 1860s and 1870s along the Demerara River, where they

ministered to Akawaio, Arekuna, Makushi, and Patamona who came to work on

the Demerara logging concessions (11-14). Undoubtedly, there were Akawaio

from the Upper Mazaruni, particularly young men, who would have made the

journey to Demerara to work on the timber camps. Upper Mazaruni Akawaio

were also tightly linked through kinship and trade to the Akawaio settlements that

were adjacent to the Bartica area missions: on the Essequibo, and on the lower

Cuyuni and Mazaruni.

By the late 1870s, the Anglicans had also established mission stations along

the Potaro River to the south of Akawaio territory, and via these stations were in

contact not only with the Patamona, but also with Makushi and Arekuna who

lived in what is today Brazil (11-14). From the first decade of the 20th century,

Brazilian Benedictine monks were also actively working among Makushi and

Arekuna in this area (18). In 1910 American Pastor O.E. Davis of the Seventh

Day Adventist Church began missionary work among the Arekuna in Brazil and

Venezuela. He established a mission among them but died a month later. In the

mid-1920s another American couple, Rev. and Mrs. Cott, continued Davis’s work

among the Arekuna of Venezuela until they were expelled by the Venezuelan

government in 1929—1930 on the advice of the Capuchins – who in 1922 were

given permission by Venezuela to evangelize the area once again after an

69

absence of more than a century following the War of Independence. The Cotts

then moved their mission to the Upper Mazaruni on the Guyanese side of the

border: to the Arekuna settlement of Paruima (Forte and Mellville 1989: 219-

220). From Paruima they began to evangelize the Akawaio of the Kamarang and

Kako Rivers, whose villages remain Adventist to this day. American Adventist

missionaries would maintain a continuous presence in Paruima until 1978, when

foreign missionaries were expelled from Guyana in the wake of the Jonestown

Massacre.

Mining

In spite of the attempts of the state to limit the access of the coastal labor force

to the interior, timber and mining grew as industries in the mid- to late 19th

century. Small pit mining began in the Upper Cuyuni in the 1840s, using panning

techniques developed during the North American gold rush of the time.  Local

syndicates first began mining in the Lower and Middle Mazaruni in 1863-4, but it

was the decade of the 1880s when the gold industry really took off, with reported

production increasing from 40 ounces in 1882 to 11,906 in 1887. The North

West was demarcated as a district and opened to mining in 1887.  Gold

production peaked around 1893, with 138,000 ounces being produced, and

diamonds in 1923, with 214,000 carats (Colchester 1997: 62; Daly 1975: 276).

  The North West was the main mining area until the 1930s, but small miners

(known as “pork-knockers”) made their way through the interior from the

beginning of the mining industry in the country.  Diamonds were found in the

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Mazaruni in 1887, and in the Upper Cotingo (just beyond the Upper Mazaruni

across the Brazilian border) in 1912.  Mining spread up the Cuyuni and the

Potaro by the 1890s, up the Demerara in the 1900s and into the Middle Mazaruni

by 1920.  In the 1930s, the Middle Mazaruni, inhabited primarily by Akawaio, was

changed from Crown Lands reserved for Amerindians to a mining district – a

precursor to the 1959 expropriation which took lands away in the Upper Mazaruni

(Colchester 1997: 64-5).

The medium and large-scale operations mainly brought whites as owners of

operations, and Afro-Guyanese as laborers, but by the 1890s there were also

some 6,000 mainly Afro-Guyanese independent “pork-knockers” working the

interior (Daly 1975: 276), where they have been a constant presence ever since.

Amerindians were also employed as laborers in the industry as mine workers,

droughers, rowers, and guides, and the Upper Mazaruni Akawaio were among

those who periodically went to work for wages on the Middle and Lower Mazaruni

and Cuyuni, and along the Essequibo. While certainly some miners, especially

owners of larger operations, amassed wealth from the industry, from the

beginning it seems to have been merchants who made the greatest profits in the

mining sector. They bought gold and diamonds from the miners cheap, and sold

them at higher prices for export, or as jewelry in Georgetown. They also sold

provisions, equipment, and other goods (including copious amounts of rum) to

the miners, and invested in larger mining operations, and later in air transport.

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Timber

British regulation of the interior through much of the nineteenth century also

sought to limit the degree to which non-Amerindians could cut timber on Crown

Lands. In practice, however, these regulations were either unenforceable, or

could be subverted by a variety of means. As early as 1815, Amerindians were

complaining to the authorities of encroachment on their lands by woodcutters.

The unrestricted rights which Amerindians had to woodcutting on state lands for

much of the nineteenth century meant that it was often possible for loggers to

gain access to these lands by bribing or otherwise working with local

Amerindians (Menezes 1979: xxi-xxii). Beginning in 1839, licenses were issued

which granted colonists legal access to some areas. These licenses were five

year permits to log on tracts of up to 1,000 acres, for the cost of only £1 per acre.

By the 1840s and 1850s, the timber trade was thriving, especially along the

Demerara River (Forte 1996: 54). Selective harvesting methods were used, with

greenheart (Ocotea rodiae) being the most prized species. Guyana is one of the

few places in the world where greenheart is common, and it is highly valued

because of its strength, and because it can be exposed to water for many years

without rotting. Consequently, greenheart is used to making piers and other

marine constructions, and was exported from Guyana to the UK and the US.

Other hard woods such as Mora were harvested for overseas export, and more

common timbers were harvested for domestic use or for sale to Suriname. By

the mid-20th century, some 11 million cubic feet of timber were being cut

72

annually, while the industry was being regulated by a small, under-funded

Forestry Department (Colchester 1997: 97).

It was mainly Amerindians who labored in the timber camps, and by all

accounts they were a quite productive labor force – highly skilled and industrious.

Work in the timber camps was seasonal, and took place mainly during the rainy

season, when high water levels meant that logs could be more easily floated

downriver to the saw mills. Logging mainly took place on the lower reaches of

rivers, with Amerindians traveling from upriver or from the interior to work

seasonally for wages or trade goods (Colchester 1997: 96-97; Forte 1996: 54).

The labor conditions in the timber camps were highly exploitative, and Janette

Forte (1996: 54-55) describes them as follows:

the system became quickly transformed into a form of debt peonage, a pattern of exploitation that still exists. Amerindians were often fleeced by their employers and demoralized by rum. The practice of paying wages entirely in rum was not uncommon on these rivers.

Timber never made it far up the Mazaruni, but it was common for young men

from the Upper Mazaruni to travel to the Bartica region, as well as to the

Demerara to work in timber. This pattern was still common when Audrey Butt

Colson did her fieldwork in the Upper Mazaruni in the 1950s (Butt Colson 1977).

Another important adjunct to the timber industry was balata bleeding. Balata

is the latex of the bulletwood tree (Mimusops globosa), and was one of the main

raw materials for the manufacture of rubber products during the late 19th and

early 20th centuries. While it never achieved the scale in British Guiana which it

73

had in Brazil, production was still quite high by the early 20th century. Balata

exports peaked in 1917 at 1.6 million pounds, and most of this was produced by

Amerindian labor (Forte 1996: 55-56; 1989: 209-210). Rubber “tapping” is done

by using a machete to make grooves of around an inch and a half width around

ten inches apart in a feather-stitch pattern on one side of the tree trunk. Grooves

are cut from the base of the tree to the first forking of the trunk – usually around a

height of 50 to 75 feet – with leg spurs being used to climb the tree (Forte 1989:

209-210). The tree then “bleeds” its latex sap, which was collected by

Amerindian laborers, who sold the balata to merchant middlemen. Balata

bleeding was most significant as an industry in the Rupununi; it was collected on

a small scale in the Upper Mazaruni after the advent of air transport to the area in

1938, but by that time the demand for balata had nearly disappeared because of

the invention of synthetic rubber substitutes.

Ranching in the Rupununi

The area that encompasses the Rupununi first experienced colonization from

the late 18th century, with the Portuguese settlement of Roraima State beginning

in 1773, and the establishment of ranching as an industry by the end of the

century. By 1840, Schomburgk reported that there were over three thousand

head of cattle in the area.  By the end of the 19th century, Roraima’s industry

numbered around fifty-five thousand.  The Guyanese side of the border (formally

agreed upon in 1903) was missionized in the 1830s at Pirara and the first small

herd was introduced in 1860.  In the 1890s, H.P.C. Melville, a Scottish rancher

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who married two daughters of an Atorad chief, settled in the Rupununi.

Traditional patterns of kin organized labor came to be reshaped as the ranching

industry developed. A stratified, manorial system of mutual obligations emerged,

with the mixed descendants of whites who moved into the area forming the local

elites (Myers 1993).

Production on the ranches was both for subsistence and for market. Initially,

the market was mainly Brazil, but with the building of the cattle trail and the

advent of interior air transportation, Georgetown has been equally significant. 

The big ranchers in the Rupununi, who hold long-term leases from the state, tend

to be of mixed white/Amerindian decent. Those who work for them are

predominately Amerindian, and their work often straddles the line between kin-

and wage- based labor. There are some Amerindians involved in smaller scale

ranching; they tend to be Arawaks originally from outside the Rupununi, and not

the region’s Wapishana or Makushi. There are also civil servants (coastal and

Amerindian), small merchants and miners (predominately coastal) in the area.

Finally, and most numerous, the area is also home to the Wapishana and

Makushi, most of whom are engaged in kin-based horticultural subsistence

production. According to Iris Myers, when she did her fieldwork in the Rupununi

in the 1940’s, there was considerable tension between ranchers and

horticulturalists:

The rancher as a rule seeks to interfere as little as possible with Amerindian freedom of action and movement, except for not wishing his cattle to be stolen, or his waterholes and streams poisoned with fish-poisons.  The Makushi point of view, however, is that they are his own ancestral savannahs, ponds and streams, to

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do as he likes with, and that cattle are a destructive nuisance, which often, by destroying his fields and breaking down fences they make necessary, cause him severe privation.  He naturally feels no compunction in recouping himself by occasionally slaughtering one of the rancher’s animals.   

Much of this underlying conflict is still present today. Then, as now,

horticulturalists also engaged in ranching and domestic service. Balata no longer

provides a source of income in these areas, but today mining is a far more

significant form of wage labor. The Wai Wai of the forests of the deep south,

however, have a communal mode of hunting and cassava production and have

only infrequent contact with the central ranching areas of the region or with

Guyanese national society.

For the most part, those involved in horticultural production have remained

outside of the political process, except where they are involved in patron-client

relations with the Rupununi elites. It is through these networks that votes for the

United Force were mobilized in the late colonial and early post-colonial eras.

Today some of these same alliances have been mobilized by GAP. Unlike in the

Upper Mazaruni, the Guyana Action Party has met some success in mobilizing

Afro- and Indo- Guyanese in the region. There is no direct effect of the ranching

industry or other economic activities of the Rupununi on the people of the Upper

Mazaruni, but some developments in this region, such as the 1969 Rupununi

Uprising, have meant that its politics have had a tremendous impact on

Amerindian issues at the national level, and hence have had an impact on all

Amerindians in post-colonial Guyana.

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Late Colonial Developments

In the early decades of the 20th century, only a very few non-Amerindians

lived in the Upper Mazaruni. Amerindians in Kamarang remember Frederick

Kenswell, a Creole shop owner who also spent time working for the missionaries

and later for the government administration. He married a local Amerindian

woman, and I interviewed one of his daughters and one of his granddaughters in

Kamarang – they live in Waramadong and Kamarang respectively. Kenswell is

said to have been killed by kanaimà who envied his wealth. Butt Colson reports

that local people also recall an Afro-Guyanese miner named Roderick Forbes

who lived on the Kamarang River (Butt Colson 1998).

By the 1930s and 1940s, the presence of the American missionaries at

Paruima was also making an impact on local culture. They set up mission

schools in Paruima and Waramadong, which gave instruction in English and

religion, and taught trades, and “manners and etiquette”. They began to provide

some basic medical services to the Arekuna and Akawaio of the Adventist

villages. They also encouraged dietary changes: as Adventists keep Old

Testament dietary restrictions, Amerindians were discouraged from eating certain

species which were important to them traditionally, such as tapir and peccary.

Traditional alcoholic drinks, such as cassack, were forbidden, as were traditional

dances, such as the parishara dance, which was a magical dance believed to

bring success at hunting. Above all, they opposed the Alleluia dances, the

practice of Alleluia in general, and the practices of the piamen, all of which they

took to be Devil-inspired. Finally, they introduced new agricultural techniques

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and new crops, and as miners and government officials moved into the area,

they encouraged some commodity production for sale to outsiders.

Late British colonial policy towards the Amerindian was based on the securing

of the conditions for capital investment, and on the gradual implementation of

some of the suggestions of Mr. P. Storer Peberdy, Field Officer of Amerindian

Affairs, whose post was an outgrowth of the recommendations of the Moyne

Commission (Roth 1952: 13) – conducted subsequent to the general labor unrest

in the British West Indies during the 1930s. Peberdy traveled throughout the

interior from 1943—1947 to study Amerindian conditions. He spent much of

1944 and 1945 traveling in the Upper Mazaruni and surrounding areas (Peberdy

1947: 7-8). His recommendations are exemplary of the liberal paternalism that

sometimes characterized British policy. He suggested that the North-West,

Potaro-Mazaruni, and Rupununi Districts be demarcated and declared

Amerindian Districts, yet the Amerindians living in these districts were to remain

“Wards of the State” with the same lack of legal rights and responsibilities as

children and the mentally ill. Coastal and interior Amerindians who did not live in

these areas were to either be relocated, or they would lose their legal status as

Amerindians. They would no longer be Wards of the State but they would also

have no claim to collective Amerindian property (44-46).

In the Amerindian districts themselves, Peberdy argued for the development of

co-operative industry. He had two specific recommendations: the purchase of all

assets of the Rupununi Development Corporation and of the Barama Mouth

Sawmill in the NW district. Purchase of these industries was meant to be made

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possible through an interest free loan advanced to the Department responsible

for Amerindian Affairs, with the current management of the industry kept intact,

and the profits from the ventures to be lodged with an Amerindian trust fund

dedicated “to be utilized for the social, health, welfare and cultural progress of the

Amerindian communities residing within the proscribed Amerindian Districts”.

The current management would “train Amerindians in the practices of

management and in the effective operation of business”. Peberdy

recommended, as well, that Amerindians should be encouraged as owners of

mining operations and that in the balata industry, that the Amerindian should be

the producer and seller without the intermediary of the “industrialist-adventurer-

capitalist” (44-46).

The report recommended Central Tribal Councils be set up and supported by

Amerindian Village Councils, that the Rupununi Development Corporation’s

Georgetown office be transformed into a Central Marketing Depot for products

from the Amerindian districts, and that craft schools be established in central

locations in each of the districts. Also, the possibility of an international

Amerindian district in co-operation with Brazil and Venezuela was to be

investigated (44-46).

The goals of capital investment, and the implementation of the

recommendations of the Peberdy reports were ultimately incompatible, and it

was the state’s interest in capital investment that prevailed in late colonial policy.

The lands demarcated were far more restricted than Peberdy’s

recommendations, and none of his recommendations regarding co-operative

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industry or trusts for Amerindian development were adopted. Furthermore, the

suggestion of an international Amerindian district in co-operation with British

Guiana’s neighbors was either utopianism or naiveté on Peberdy’s part.

The Upper Mazaruni, following Peberdy’s recommendations, was turned into an

Amerindian reservation in 1947 (Seggar 1952: 43-5). An administrative

headquarters was built at Imbaimadai, with William Seggar appointed as District

Officer. A health dispensary was built, Anglican missionary Father John Dorman

moved to the district, malaria and tuberculosis eradication programs were

initiated, and commodity production was encouraged (45-51). In 1959,

Amerindian title to the Upper Mazaruni was reduced by one third – just after a

major diamond find at Imbaimadai the area around the headwaters of the

Mazaruni were de-reserved and the area was opened to mining.

A government station was built at Imbaimadai in 1946, and the state

appointed local leaders of its choosing to be the “chiefs” of various villages. In

1949 the government station was moved to Kamarung, and Amerindians were

encouraged to relocate nearer to the good agricultural land there. In 1959, the

system of government appointed chiefs was replaced with Captains, Vice-

Captains, and Village Councils that were elected by secret ballot (Seegar 1959-

1960b). The tendency from early on was for these positions to be filled by young

literate men with connections to the missionaries or the government, rather by

elders whose authority came from their position in kin networks (Butt Colson

1983).

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New forms of hierarchy emerged in Amerindian villages during the British Era.

As during the Dutch era, access to European trade goods was likely a source of

power for some. Authority was also sometimes administered through systems of

appointed captains, though this does not seem to have existed in the Upper

Mazaruni until after 1959. Access to wages also allowed some to purchase

European goods, though wage work seems to generally have been engaged in

by young men, who were seeking life experience, and cash to acquire prestige

goods and tools, before returning home to marry and to cut a farm.

Though not significant in the Upper Mazaruni, in other areas the timber

industry increased the power of some Amerindians, who collected royalties from

lands they had legal title to. In the Rupununi, a new elite also emerged among

those who had kinship connections with the ranchers who began to move into the

area. Finally, by the end of the colonial era, the colonial state had instituted a

system of “Captains” who were invested with some powers of local

administration. Originally appointed by the government, by the late colonial era,

the captains of villages in some areas were transitioning to democratic elections.

The captains tended to be young men who had been educated in the mission

schools, and these men were beginning to form a new set of Amerindian elites by

the late colonial era.

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CHAPTER 4

DECOLONIZATION AND POST-COLONIAL STATE BUILDING

During the late colonial era, the state, missionaries, and private enterprise

entered into areas of the deep interior where they had not been a presence

previously. Whites actively sought to promote their own enterprises in the Upper

Mazaruni, while attempting to prevent the small mining activities of Afro-

Guyanese “pork knockers” who also were beginning to enter the area. In the

name of protecting the Amerindians, white missionaries, miners, and state

agents promoted racist ideas among Amerindians to enlist their aid in excluding

blacks from the area. As in earlier eras, the internalization of these ideas was

uneven, and incomplete, but it made significantly greater inroads than in an

earlier period. These are the immediate historical antecedents of the

contemporary racial conflict between Amerindians and “coastlanders” in the

Upper Mazaruni. It was most developed among those Amerindians who had

closest connections with the whites, and it is today held most strongly by the

Amerindian elites whose power is derived from its connections with the state.

During decolonization, the pro-colonial political activists took advantage of

these nascent racial identities to promote the idea that Amerindians should be

fearful of independence, as the replacement of white rule with Indo- or Afro-

Guyanese rule would most likely mean the confiscation of Amerindian lands by a

state that represented “coastlander” interests. This claim appeared likely to

come true, when, under a PPP administration in 1959, the government de-

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reserved major areas of the Upper Mazaruni, and declared it a mining district.

The PPP was acting in the interests of national capital, and perhaps also to help

alleviate the problem of coastal unemployment by opening up economic

opportunities for miners in the interior (Jagan 1997). It is not clear that a British

controlled government would have acted differently, but it is true that this was the

first experience that Amerindians of the Upper Mazaruni had of the

consequences of a decision of a non-white government. William Seegar, and

other British administrative authorities on the ground supported the governments’

decision, and helped to carry out its orders (Hennessey 2005). In the end,

Independence agreements were signed without Amerindian land rights ever

being resolved, and the seeds of doubt and discontent sowed by whites leading

up to independence led to conflict between Amerindians and the post-colonial

PNC government (Sanders 1987).

For “coastlanders,” the 1950s and 1960s saw the crest of a wave of agitation

and struggle against the British colonial elites that had been building since the

1920s. The majority of people of the two major ethnic groups, Africans and East

Indians, supported political parties that were anti-colonial, and socialist-oriented.

It was a time of great optimism for the coast that once Guyanese independence

had been won, a nation could be built that would benefit all Guyanese, who

would rise together instead of working only to enrich European planters (Jagan

1997).

However, the anxieties which Amerindians felt about independence were

expressed in a 1962 petition to the British Crown written by Amerindian captains:

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Our people have lived peacefully in their villages in the forests and savannahs of British Guiana and have enjoyed the protection of Your Majesty’s Government for over 182 years.

Your Petitioners have heard that there is a possibility of Independence being granted soon and they are afraid of what will happen after Independence when your Majesty’s protection will be withdrawn.

Your Petitioners especially fear that their rights will then be abrogated and ignored and the lands on which the Amerindians have lived for thousands of years will be expropriated (quoted in Pierre 1993).

In the context of an international scene that included the Cold War and

struggles for national liberation in Asia and Africa, and a domestic scene that

included radical trade unionism and an embryonic West Indian nationalism,

British Guiana held its first elections based on universal adult suffrage in 1953. 

The People’s Progressive Party, with the overwhelming support of the working

class majority, won 18 of Parliament’s 24 seats, becoming the British Empire’s

first Marxist party elected to office (Thomas 1983), with party leader Cheddi

Jagan as President.  Alarmed at what it saw as the radical rhetoric of the Jagan

administration, the British dissolved the government and suspended the

constitution only 133 days after the elections, and occupied the country with

armed troops (Jagan 1997; Thomas 1983).

     Subsequent events are matters that remain a subject of much controversy

within the country.  By 1955, the People’s Progressive Party was divided into two

main groupings, those that supported Cheddi Jagan (the PPP – Jaganites), and

those that supported Forbes Burnham (the PPP – Burnhamites).  Many, including

Clive Thomas (1998), attribute this split to “a colonial policy of divide-and-rule.” 

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What is clear is that Forbes Burnham’s personal desire for power seemed to the

British and the Americans to be useful in promoting their international anti-

communist agenda through the support of moderate left alternatives to the

international communist movement.  In 1957, Burnham split from the PPP and

founded the People’s National Congress, a party whose rhetoric, while still

socialist oriented, was at the time more conservative than that of the PPP. 

Initially, the split in the party leadership as well as in a significant portion of its

mass base was based on ideological rather than racial considerations. Elections

were held again in 1957, with the new PPP as winner, and Cheddi Jagan once

again as president.  It was during Jagan’s first administration that the support for

the two parties came to clearly break down along racial lines: with Indo-

Guyanese supporting the PPP and Afro-Guyanese supporting the PNC. The

PPP blames the racial division on the opportunism of the PNC, who “played the

race card” when ideology and class politics were the real issues. Supporters of

the PNC, on the other hand, see Jagan’s expulsion of “ultra-left” elements from

the PPP and his rejection of the idea of a West Indian Federation as decisive

moments. All of those whom the PPP expelled were Afro-Guyanese, and the

question of the West Indian Federation, it was believed, was rejected because in

such a federation the Afro-Caribbean population would significantly outnumber

the Indo-Caribbean population (Jagan 1997; Thomas 1983; Marable 1987).

During this time, Indians in the country talked about an apunjat or “support

your own” politics. While Jagan tried retrospectively to give a class-based

interpretation to this idea, it is clear that for many Indians apunjat meant simply

85

that they should vote along racial lines. Jagan also asserted that these racial

ideas were never promoted by the party leadership, but were promoted by

conservative elements in the Indian population (Eusi Kwayana, personal

communication; Jagan 1997). While the PPP leadership has consistently

claimed that it did nothing to promote racial bloc voting, since the 1960s it has

been (with a few notable exceptions) de facto an Indian party and it is commonly

perceived by Afro-Guyanese to be racist. It is also during this time of the

intensification of a racialized politics on the coast that the now Indian dominated

PPP decided to de-reserve one third of the Upper Mazaruni, which gave

credence to some that the party behaved in ways that were racist against

Amerindians as well as against blacks.

During this same period of time, the United States and Great Britain backed

PNC and trade union attempts to destabilize the Jagan government. The record

is now clear, after the release of documents under the U.S. Freedom of

Information Act, that the CIA funded the public sector strikes against the Jagan

government in 1962-1964, and tried to encourage sugar workers to join the

American style reform oriented trade union Manpower Citizen’s Association,

rather than support the dominant revolutionary union closely tied to the PPP: the

Guyana Agricultural Workers’ Union (GAWU) (Rabe 2005).

The most significant third party during the late colonial and early post-colonial

period was the United Force (UF). Started by Portuguese Guyanese

businessman Peter D’Aguiar, who admired the far right politics of Portuguese

President Salazar, the UF was conservative and pro-colonial. Largely through

86

the influence of the Catholic Church missions, and of industrialists who worked in

the interior, the United Force was able to win the support of the majority of

Amerindians in the country. The first Amerindian parliamentarian, Stephen

Campbell, an Arawak from the North West, became a member of the United

Force steering committee in 1960 (Pierre 1993).

     Six Amerindians living and working in Georgetown (including Stephen

Campbell, UF Parliamentarian, and one PNC Parliamentarian) founded The

Amerindian Association of Guyana.  Their stated aim was the unity of Amerindian

tribes, and the integration of Amerindians into national society with the same

rights and privileges as other Guyanese.  During 1965, they canvassed the

country with the slogan “No independence before the Amerindian land question

is resolved.”  While Amerindians started the organization for Amerindians, it was

linked in the minds of many people with the United Force.  The organization

experienced fragmentation in its leadership.  In 1965, Stephen Campbell was

deposed as President.  The executive stated the reasons for his removal were

his inactivity and dictatorial nature, but perhaps also significant was his desire to

tie AAG to UF politics.  Continuous internal conflict occurred because of attempts

by members of one or another of the political parties to dominate the AAG.  In the

wake of the Rupununi Rebellion, and under Burnham’s authoritarian regime,

Amerindian organizations would lie dormant for over two decades (Pierre 1993;

Sanders 1987; Farage 2003).  

In Amerindian areas, the UF campaigned by promoting the idea that

Amerindian land would not be secure in an independent Guyana. UF was a

87

major player in the 1966 independence negotiations, and they demanded an

agreement on the part of the Government of Guyana to recognize approximately

forty-three thousand square miles as Amerindian land. In 1966, the British

changed the election laws to allow for proportional representation and overseas

voting, and PNC and United Force formed a coalition which won the elections. In

May 1966, Guyana achieved independence from Great Britain, with a

commitment in its Independence agreements to recognize Amerindian land title

(Jagan 1997; Sanders 1987).

The post-colonial government inherited all of the contradictions of the colonial

state. During the late 1960s and the 1970s Amerindians came to be wrapped up

in the politics of the newly independent state mainly through their participation in

and support of the United Force. However, it quickly became apparent that the

after independence, the PNC would hold all of the power in the supposed

coalition government. Furthermore, in 1969 an event came that would have

tragic and long-lasting consequences for the Amerindian population. In the

Rupununi savannah, a group of ranchers attempted to secede from the country

through armed struggle. The Rupununi Uprising was lead by locally powerful

ranching families: the Harts and the Melvilles. A number of Amerindians who

worked on the ranches and were closely tied to the ranching families joined in

this insurrection. The leaders expected that Venezuela, who had competing

claims on the area, would deliver arms and support to them. No such support

materialized and the rebellion was quickly put down. The ranchers who were

involved in the incident fled to Brazil, while the Amerindians who participated

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were jailed, and the Amerindian communities suffered from repression in the

rebellion’s aftermath (Farage 2003).

After the Rupununi Rebellion, only a tiny fraction of the lands agreed at

Independence were granted, and land titles included many conditions unheard of

for other groups within the population. The government held all subsurface

mineral rights. Land could be taken away if communities did not take loyalty

oaths to the Guyanese government, or at any other time deemed necessary.

The government also increased its military presence in the interior, especially in

Amerindian villages near the national borders. Many Amerindians deeply

resented the army’s presence, military-community relations were often not good,

and most Amerindians allege that abuse at the hands of soldiers was common as

was the rape of Amerindian girls.

At the national level, the country was deeply divided under the rule of the PNC

and its leader, Forbes Burnham. Nearly all working class Indians in the country

describe the PNC era as “a dictatorship.” Most independent observers believe

that the elections were rigged throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Most Indians

also assert that there was widespread discrimination against all Indians (except

for the handful of PNC party members, who were widely viewed by the Indian

public as “race traitors”).

In 1970, the country was declared a “Cooperative Republic.” In Burnham’s

concept of “Cooperative Socialism,” there were supposed to be three sectors of

the economy, the private, the state, and the co-operative, and the co-operative

sector was supposed to lead the economy. The working population was

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supposed to form “People’s Co-operative Units.” Often, in reality, the co-

operative sector was controlled by the state, including the real co-operative

sector that had arisen independently in the villages during the colonial era (Eusi

Kwayana, personal communication).

Political economist Clive Thomas refers to Forbes Burnham’s PNC regime as

"State Capitalism".  Thomas argues that in the capitalist metropole, the

consolidation of the economic power of the bourgeoisie preceded its control of

the state.  In Guyana, however, as occurred elsewhere in the capitalist periphery,

the seizure of state power was the means by which a new ruling class began to

emerge.  The PNC used socialist rhetoric in an attempt to transform itself into a

national capitalist class.  By the late 1970s it had nationalized the sugar and

bauxite industries and many other enterprises, and claimed to control 80 percent

of the national economy. State run firms were purchased by the government on

terms made possible by foreign loans that included conditions of repayment that

actually increased structural constraints to the transformation of relations of

production that were the legacy of colonialism. In the largest of the state owned

enterprises, GUYSUCO – the Guyana Sugar Corporation, the main trade union,

GAWU, was tightly tied to the opposition PPP, and had an antagonistic

relationship with the PNC-controlled state which was often about more than just

wages and working conditions. Sugar, along with most other state owned

enterprises in 1970s and 1980s, experienced heavy losses, which decreased

Guyana’s ability to repay the debts which were incurred in its purchase. The

relatively small "co-operative" sector was run as a state capitalist enterprise

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benefiting a small group of bureaucrats, and party "vanguardism" was been used

to justify bureaucratization, militarization and state control of civil society and

precluded the possibility of a participatory socialism (Thomas 1983).

The PNC’s strategy for interior development was to create the conditions for

state capital accumulation, as well as the accumulation of national capitalists

loyal to the PNC. This was done at the expense of Amerindian autonomy over

the development of their own areas. An example of these processes at work can

be seen in the villages of the Upper Mazaruni. In 1977, all of the rivers in the

Upper Mazaruni were opened to mining, and in 1978 the entire Upper Mazaruni,

formerly an Amerindian reservation, was declared a mining area. The miners

who entered into the area were national capitalists, and small miners, who sold to

the state, or to black market merchants with party connections. In the late 1970s

following its commitment to the development of a co-operative sector, the

Burnham government created the Upper Mazaruni Development Authority. This

was a state-controlled operation, which purchased a series of dredges that were

supposed to be owned and run by the Amerindian villages. The allegations

about these dredges are that they were never really community owned, they

were used for the private accumulation of individuals from the ruling party,

Amerindians were not trained to run the dredges, and Amerindian neglect was

then blamed whenever the dredges were not kept in working order. Whatever

else we can say about them, they do not seem to have been a model of socialist

production, and racism against the Amerindian remained a factor in the

organization of production.

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An example of PNC’s notion of Amerindian integration can also be found in

the Upper Mazaruni in the case of the Hydroelectric Project. The intention of the

project was to build a Hydroelectric Dam that would generate electricity for the

coast. All of the villages of the Upper Mazaruni were to be flooded, including

Amokokopai – a sacred site and the headquarters of the Alleluia Church, and all

Amerindians living in the area were to be relocated. The building of the dam was

ultimately cancelled due to lack of funds. The World Bank cited the Guyana-

Venezuela border dispute as its ultimate reason for canceling further loans, but it

is probable that the ultimate reason for the cancellation was pressure from the

Reagan administration to cancel the loan because it was for a state run projects

undertaken by a socialist government (Bartilow 1997; Hennessey 2005).

  The PNC broke with the colonial state in a number of ways. It nationalized

sugar and bauxite, and favored national over international capital investment. It

played a prominent role in the Non-Aligned Movement and the movement for

Caribbean integration, and it aggressively pursued import substitution policies. In

the late 1970s, it declared the state sector to be in control of the commanding

heights of the economy. In spite of these changes, the national economy still

operated according to market principles, the rule of value still governed through

prices and wages, and most importantly, proletarians, peasants and indigenous

peoples did not have direct control over the state. Furthermore, even though

many whites were expelled from the country, production itself remained racially

ordered. Guyanese nationals now took the place of white managers and owners,

but production was still racially segmented, and racialist assumptions about the

92

suitability of various races for various kinds of labor remained an unchallenged

part of Guyanese society. Furthermore, in the interior, production still operated

according to a racial hierarchy, with Amerindians at the bottom of that hierarchy.

Economic Liberalization

The end of the nominally socialist-oriented Burnham regime was, no doubt, a

positive development in Guyanese history. However, some of the broader

processes that caused the end of Burnhamism have left a legacy that is mixed at

best. Even before Burnham’s death, he had signed on to a series of agreements

with the IMF and World Bank to institute structural adjustment in Guyana. It was

under Burnham’s successor, Desmond Hoyte, that the main policies of

adjustment were implemented. In the late 1980s, import substitution programs

were discontinued, Guyana’s currency was devalued, and the state began its

attempts to restructure property-relations in a struggle to create conditions

conducive to the private accumulation of capital (Bartilow 1997).

One aspect of the attempts to restructure property-relations was the

privatization of capital that had previously been held by the state and by the co-

operative sector. The process caused a bubble in capital investment in the late

1980s and early 1990s as the state divested public assets, and eliminated

restrictions on foreign ownership. One major exception to the privatization of

state-owned industry has been GUYSUCO (Egoumé-Bossogo, et. al. 2003).

Because sugar workers form the backbone of support for the PPP, who returned

to power in 1992, privatization of sugar is recognized as politically untenable. In

93

spite of the bubble in capital investment in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there

has been relatively little additional investment in coastal enterprises since. On

the other hand, extractive industry in the interior has been flourishing over the

past few decades, and the Guyanese state has looked to the interior as the

national space where the possibilities for capitalist development are the greatest.

In this turn, it has been Guyana’s Amerindian population that has been most

impacted.

By far, the sector of the interior economy that has been most dynamic since

the mid-1980s has been the mining sector, gold mining in particular. Just as it

had been in the colonial era, gold mining has been characterized by cycles of

boom and bust. The most recent boom in gold mining took place during the

period of economic liberalization after the mid-1980s and has continued into the

2000s. Tax incentives have been offered to Canadian, American and South

African firms to mine in Guyana; and these firms have been granted exploratory

rights to large expanses of the Western half of Guyana including in many areas

that are officially titled Amerindian lands. During the first half of the 1990s,

domestic production more than tripled, and total production including production

by foreign mining companies increased by 1996 to over 28 times 1980 levels of

production. One year after the introduction of a major gold mining operation at

Omai, this company became the single largest earner of foreign exchange in the

country (Thomas 1998).

The problems that mining poses for the Amerindian communities are many.

Some communities have been entirely displaced by the presence of miners. In

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some areas, the traditional subsistence base is seriously threatened by the

environmental damage that is caused by mining. Mining brings with it a cash

economy that puts strains on the traditional non-monetary economic relations,

and as many Amerindians, especially young men, opt to work for wages in the

mining sector, these practices draw a critical source of labor away from farming,

hunting and fishing. The lifestyle of the mining camps has involved young

Amerindian women in prostitution, and wages and easy availability of liquor and

drugs have resulted in serious substance abuse problems. These conditions

have also helped to facilitate the spread of HIV/AIDS infection. Rates of infection

are already quite high in Guyana generally (as elsewhere in the Greater

Caribbean) and most likely even higher in the mining areas (Forte 1998).

Political Liberalization

The agents of neoliberalism would like us to believe that the political

liberalization that Guyana has experienced has been a result of the policies of

economic liberalization. The truth is that political liberalization was mainly the

result of the agitation on the part of opponents of the PNC regime. Discontent

with the PNC reached its peak in the mid-1980s as the economy was in a

shambles, and the state used increasingly authoritarian means to maintain

control. While the great majority of Indo-Guyanese has always opposed the

PNC, by the mid-1980s there was also increasingly widespread discontent

among the Afro-Guyanese working class, many of whom shifted their support to

the Working People’s Alliance during the late Burnham years.

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The Working Peoples’ Alliance was the party of Walter Rodney, and was

founded in the late 1970s to oppose the excesses of the Burnham regime. They

have a bi-racial leadership, and they were brilliant grassroots organizers. They

were particularly successful in mobilizing working-class Afro-Guyanese who had

become disillusioned with Burnhamism, and “intellectuals” (a fluid category that

in status terms ran the gamut from university professors to homeless street

poets). They strategically avoided intensive organizing in working-class Indo-

Guyanese communities in a tacit agreement with the PPP for unity in the fight

against Burnham. The party’s great organic intellectual and grass roots

organizer, Walter Rodney, was assassinated by Burnham loyalists, and WPA has

never regained the strength that it had during Rodney’s lifetime. On the part of

some members of WPA, there hope that a PPP-WPA coalition government could

be formed: a hope that was quickly dashed once PPP was elected in 1992.

With the return of the Indian dominated PPP to power, many of the working

class Afro-Guyanese who had supported the WPA returned to the PNC fold, and

the WPA increasingly became the party of only a small number of intellectuals.

Their political analyses are often brilliant, and their leaders and former leaders

are among the few moral voices left in the coastal political scene. However,

since Rodney’s death they have achieved little in the way of mounting an

electoral challenge to the hegemonies of the two major parties. They became a

party of great insider political savvy, but with no popular base. The WPA was so

diminished in terms of organizing power that it probably would never have

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decided to contest the 2001 elections if it had not been approached by GAP, the

Guyana Action Party.

However, in the late 1980s and early 1990s the WPA was still a significant

political force, and it was the combined efforts of the PPP, the WPA, and civil

society that effectively removed the PNC from power. Even before the removal

of the PNC, the agitation of the PPP and the WPA had forced the PNC towards

political reform that allowed for a more democratized public space with less fear

of political repression than during the Burnham era. These changes also

positively affected the Amerindian population in that the Amerindian movement,

which was suppressed in the wake of the Rupununi Uprising, re-coalesced, and

a new movement inspired by the strength of the international indigenous rights

movement was born. In the past 15 years, a revived Amerindian movement has

grown in the country, with the APA being the most vocal, rejecting the idea of

gradual and limited reforms proposed by the government and its supporters.

      The Amerindian People’s Association was founded in 1991, upon the

encouragement of the Guyana Human Rights Association, who believed that

there should be a national level organization for the protection of Indigenous

Rights as Human Rights (interview with Father Williams).  It is supported by its

dues paying Amerindian membership, as well as by contributions from

international organizations like Survival International.  APA is the most vocal of

Guyana’s national Amerindian organizations.  It does not miss the opportunity to

make public statements regarding a variety of public policy issues that affect the

Amerindian community.

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Its constitutional structure is one in which its General Assembly elects an

Executive Committee with one member representing each region.  An elected

Programs Administrator and Coordinator maintain an office in Georgetown, with

the rest of its Executive Committee residing in the interior.  APA units are

established in some 46 communities throughout the interior, and each unit sends

two members annually to the General Assembly (Colchester 1997).  Local units

have as many people as are interested.  A local unit has 12 committee members,

a Chairman, Vice-Chairman, Treasurer and Secretary, and holds quarterly

meetings.  The Units discuss issues of local, regional and national interest, and

pass proposals on to Village Councils, District Councils, or APA’s executive

committee as appropriate.  The representativeness of the Units in terms of their

expression of the opinions of the Amerindian communities as a whole varies.  In

some areas, like the Upper Mazaruni where I conducted my fieldwork, there is

widespread support for the goals (if not always of the strategies) of the APA.  All

of the captains of the Upper Mazaruni are members of the APA, and they are the

plaintiffs of the APA initiated lawsuit with regard to land rights.  In the Mazaruni

villages, on can find APA supporters among partisans of the PPP, PNC and

GAP.  In other areas the matter is less straightforward.  In some areas, many

village leaders have rejected APA as the legitimate representative of their

voices.  The differences are usually not over the end goal of Amerindian self-

determination, but rather about strategy, and sometimes about local power

struggles regarding who is to be the Amerindian spokesperson.  Sometimes the

differences have to do with the perception that the APA is “anti-government”. 

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Some believe that such a position is counter-productive to the interests of the

community because a village whose leaders are “anti-government” will not

benefit from development programs for the communities.  The government, it is

believed, simply will not build schools and health posts as quickly in villages

whose leaders support the APA.

     APA has made statements on issues such as Constitutional Reform, the

impact of mining, logging, and the road to Brazil, government sponsored forums

designed to address Amerindian issues, intellectual property rights issues, the

Iwokrama rain forest reserve, the national park system, etc.  By far, however, the

most contentious issue for the APA has been the land rights issue.  Some 75

villages in Guyana do not hold legal title to their land.  Meanwhile the government

is granting mining and logging concessions on much of the untitled land that was

traditionally used by Amerindians.  The PPP government has promised to

address this issue, but after ten years in power, has made little progress in this

direction.  Furthermore, with Amerindian population everywhere in the country

growing, the land that many of the villages do have is not though to be enough to

provide for future generations.  The most significant action to date taken by the

APA was the filing, in 1998, of a lawsuit against the Government of Guyana

demanding the return of lands taken from them during the Burnham era.  They

want the return of all lands that were recognized by the 1959 Amerindian Lands

Commission.          

Part of the problem with people questioning whether the APA represents their

interests also comes from the fact that many criticize the organization for not

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being as participatory as they portray themselves. In theory, they are organized

down to the village level, with the active input and participation of villagers in

organizing, strategizing, and carrying out the goals of the organization. In reality,

it seems to be an organization monopolized by a few individuals, who are always

traveling to Georgetown and to international conferences using APA funds. They

are accused of neither reporting widely to the villagers, not often asking the input

of a wide range of villagers. They are supported mostly by donations from

international groups such as Forest People’s Program, and Survival International,

and portray themselves as more participatory to international donors than their

critics believe they are in reality.

By far the most important campaign that has been pursued by the APA has

been suing the Government of Guyana in High Court for a return of village lands

to their 1959 boundaries is their sole project of any substance. This law suit was

filed in 1998 and has not yet been heard by the High Court. As the Government

stalls in hearing the lawsuit, it helps to spread doubt about the goals of APA, and

is trying to buy off villages where APA support does not seem as solid by

constructing new buildings such as schools and health centers. The questions

that remain open are: is any Guyana High Court likely to rule in the favor of these

villages? If not, what then? Alternatively, if a Guyana High Court does rule in

favor of the villages, the new lands given to the villages still would not include the

rivers, which according to national law all belong to the state. With most of the

mining taking place along the rivers, the Government of Guyana could use this

reason to undermine the spirit of such a High Court decision, which it would

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undoubtedly do little to enforce in any case. Meanwhile, the strategy which the

APA pursues in the present is entirely legalistic. It has put all of its energy and

resources into the law suit at the expense of building a mass movement, and has

not pursued other tactics such as civil disobedience or land occupations –

strategies which other social movements have employed alongside law suits

which have proven more effective than law suits alone.

Another difficulty which arises from the nature of the movement which the

APA has created along the NGO-model of social advocacy is that it is a

movement that seems to be entirely in the hands of Amerindian elites. The

problem that this presents with regard to the question of land rights is that the

elites are the ones who would control the benefits which the villages would derive

from a land rights victory. Leaders of groups like the APA, for instance, who

come from the same political class as Village Captains and other local politicians,

would be among those best positioned to benefit from the payment of mining

royalties to the villages, for instance. This raises the serious question of whether

the political class would place the environmental health of the community over

the interest of their own ability to profit from mining. Even if the opportunism of

individual Captains does not triumph, what is the likelihood that communities will

be able to resist the pressures of their locally powerful members whose

economic power is connected to mining? These questions would be resolved by

each village in individual ways according to local forces, but generally the current

alignments do not look encouraging. The APA makes sure to highlight the

environmental impact of mining, and the health consequences of mining activities

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for the Amerindian communities when writing for an international audience, and

when appealing to the international community for support. However, the APA

President himself, and several other local leaders who support APA, have said to

me very clearly and directly that, “We don’t want to stop this mining. We just

want to get the royalties that we are due.”

The movement is a movement today almost entirely of Amerindian elites, who

do not seem to be moving in directions that could be successful, or if successful,

even capable of addressing the real problems. Meanwhile they pursue a politics

which on the ground pits the interests of Amerindians against the interests of

non-Amerindians in a race-based opposition to one another, instead of other

interests such as those of the working class or of community health which cut

across racial lines. The form that the indigenous rights movement has taken in

this context is a “racial politics machine” in a manner similar to that which Tom

Biolsi (2001) has noted in the context of US Indian law.

Electoral Politics

After the political liberalization of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the PNC

was unable to hold onto power. In 1992, for the first time since independence,

Guyana had elections that could formally be considered democratic, but the

PPP-led coalition that came to power as a result of this election quickly

abandoned any idea of working with the democratic socialist elements that had

coalesced around the WPA, and instead allied itself with a faction of national

capital organized under the CIVIC party. There had been talk of a Cheddi Jagan

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Presidency, with Clive Thomas, internationally renowned Marxist economist and

WPA politician, as Prime Minister. This slate was rejected as “too left,” and

instead PPP allied itself with the pro-business CIVIC party, and ran CIVIC’s

Samuel Hinds as its Prime Ministerial candidate. Meanwhile, the PPP toned

down its socialist rhetoric and replaced it with less confrontational language

about “human centered development.” The PPP retained a commitment to the

state-ownership of the majority of the country’s sugar industry, as well as to a

state whose power is highly centralized, but in most other ways attempted to

pursue market friendly and pro-business policies that had begun under the Hoyte

administration in the late 1980s with the implementation of structural adjustment

policies.

When I went to the Upper Mazaruni just weeks after the 2001 elections,

people were still very much fired up about politics, and excited about the Guyana

Action Party’s success in the regional elections. During the course of the 2001

election campaigns, many long time supporters and local representative of the

two major parties switched party loyalties and affiliations overnight simply based

on Paul Hardy’s campaign rhetoric of GAP as an Amerindian party. Unlike any

other area in the country outside of the Rupununi, GAP swept the regional

elections winning 6 of the 9 seats allotted to the Upper Mazaruni sub-district, the

other 3 seats going to PPP (2 seats) and PNC (1 seat). For the whole of the

Cuyuni-Mazaruni Region, GAP would be positioned as a tiebreaker between

PPP and PNC in Regional Council. A GAP representative was elected as Vice

Chairman for the Region, and a PNC representative as Chairman.

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Previously, some villages in the Upper Mazaruni had supported PNC, and

some villages had supported the PPP. The villages of the Kamarung River, and

the villages that had been missionized first by the Adventist Church seemed to

be predominately PNC. These were the villages that were easiest to access

from the government headquarters in Kamarung, and had received the most

development attention under the PNC government. The party members in this

area were also the ones most likely to have benefited materially from the

presence of the dredges that were supposed to have been owned and operated

by the Amerindian communities. Finally, these villages were also the villages

where the Alleluia religion had been most actively suppressed.

Alleluia had provided a major basis for opposition to the Hydropower project

under PNC. The Alleluia Church, the Anglican Church, and Survival International

– which Audrey Butt Colson was a founding member of – were all united in their

opposition to Hydropower, and it was partially on the recommendation of Survival

International and the Anglican Church that the Amerindian People’s Association

was founded. It was over the issue of Hydropower that anti-PNC sentiments

became most heated, and many anti-PNC villagers supported PPP as the only

anti-PNC party that seemed viable and had the ability to organize effectively in

the area. Since PPP returned to power in 1992, its refusal to resolve the land

rights issue, or to restrict access of coastal miners in the sub-region, has done

the most to damage its strength in the villages. Its position as the ruling party,

however, also means that it is in a better position to use projects like the

improvement of school and health clinic facilities to garner support. In the years

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since the election of PPP the leadership of the APA has shifted from the PPP to

the PNC villages, perhaps in part because of the ambivalence in the PPP villages

over supporting an organization that is widely perceived as being anti-

government.

The 2001 GAP majority in the Upper Mazaruni came as a surprise to many,

but it indicated a number of tensions that had lurked beneath the surface. First,

the solidity of support in the PPP and PNC areas was not what party organizers

had assumed. Perhaps as few as a third of the people in any one area

supported the dominant party, and many supported the parties that they did as

choice between the lesser of two evils. When presented with what seemed like a

viable alternative to the two major parties, they broke with the parties that they

had previously supported. Furthermore, many believed that GAP represented a

consolidation of the racial-ethnic basis of voting for the Amerindian in a way that

had long existed for Afro- and Indo-Guyanese. These factors combined also

tended to draw in many supporters in the villages that had previously been

uninterested in participation in the political process. Finally, the fact that some

key indigenous intellectuals had become GAP supporters in the 2001 campaign

swayed many voters.

Where GAP did not have support was among the non-Amerindian voters in

the Upper Mazaruni and in the Mazaruni District as a whole. The small miners,

most of whom were Afro-Guyanese and among the most marginalized members

of the countries’ working class, did not support GAP-WPA in spite of the fact that

they would seem to be logical constituents for a party like WPA. The reason for

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this was that the perception of GAP was that it would represent the interests of

Amerindians in the area in a way that would interfere with coastlanders’

continued ability to pursue a living in and around Amerindian areas. My

observations in the months to come led me to believe that this was not a wholly

unjustified concern on their part.

Other problems with GAP only started to become clear in the months after the

elections. First, whatever their national party affiliations, the local bases of power

had not completely been changed through party organizing at the local level.

Therefore, some who were now GAP representatives continued to work closely

with the same PPP and PNC party members that they had worked with before

their party conversion. Secondly, the Guyana Action Party did not devote time

and resources towards maintaining and solidifying links between its leadership in

Georgetown and its base of supporters outside of the Rupununi. Finally, and

most damningly, the Guyana Action Party as a national party and as a Rupununi

regional party turned out to be ambivalent at best in its commitment to

indigenous rights.

Paul Hardy, who was GAP presidential candidate and party leader, clearly has

a very business and market oriented idea of development. The party seems to

only represent the interests of Rupununi elites, and its aims, if successful, would

do little to help the majority of Amerindians in the Rupununi or in the country as a

whole. GAP and PPP elected officials in the Rupununi seem to be working

closely together to promote a development model in that shows little sensitivity to

the needs of non-elites. Key members of GAP became some of the central

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figures in negotiating the contract for the improved road to Brazil: a move that

might benefit local ranchers and miners, but will probably bring many troubles for

the majority of Amerindians in the region. With the increase of access to a

market in Brazil, the presence of Brazilian small miners, many of whom would

probably come illegally, would be increased in the area. This would bring with it

problems of the environmental destruction caused by mining, and the problems

of conflict between miners and Amerindian communities. In Brazil, clashes

between Amerindians and miners have often turned violent, and the murder of

Amerindians by miners and vice versa is common. Other social problems

associated with the mining complex are noted in the next chapter.

The road to Brazil will also likely bring an increase in commodity production by

Amerindians. Undoubtedly this will benefit some, but will also increase

stratification within the Amerindian communities, and draw labor away from kin

based communal production. Further integration into a market based economy

will have its winners and losers, and those in the Amerindian village who are

most marginalized to begin with are the least likely to derive benefit and most

likely to pay the social costs. Finally, the real economic strength of Brazil in

comparison to Guyana carries the real threat that the Rupununi and Brazil’s

Roraima State will be involved in patterns of unequal exchange which lead to the

subordination of the Rupununi as a whole to the interests of Roraima’s elites.

Whatever small miners and Amerindians in the Upper Mazaruni believe about

the Guyana Action Party, it is far from a foregone conclusion that if they ever did

come to have influence on national policy, that they would ever pursue policies

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that benefited Amerindians in the villages at the expense of the mining industry.

If anything, the pattern of their behavior in the Rupununi would seem to suggest

that precisely the opposite might be the case.

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CHAPTER 5

REPORT FROM THE VILLAGES

This chapter will examine the villages of the Upper Mazaruni in which I

conducted fieldwork, and analyze the manner in which these villages are

differently situated within the political economy of the Sub-district. It will note the

degree to which each village participates in kin-based horticultural production

and foraging, wage work of various kinds (particularly mining), and a cash or

commodity exchange economy. It will also describe the linkages between the

villages and institutions such as the state, the churches, the indigenous rights

organizations, and the political parties, and try to arrive at some conclusions

about the reasons for the differences in the relationships which each village has

with these institutions. I will begin with the village of Kamarang, home to the

Sub-district’s government Administrative center, and the village of the Upper

Mazaruni which is most connected to the mining and cash economies, and least

connected to kin-based production.

Kamarang

After the construction of the government compound at the confluence of the

Kamarang and Mazaruni rivers in 1949, an airstrip was built, which today forms

Kamarang’s “main street.” Along the airstrip, around seven shops are located,

where a variety of goods are available. Rice, salt, soap, batteries and flashlights

are available at all of the shops. Hammocks, cutlasses, mining equipment,

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clothing, and kitchenware can be bought in Kamarang, as can soft drinks,

snacks, meats imported from Georgetown, and wild meats and fish that hunters

have sold to the shops. At least four shops sell alcohol, and for three of these

shops the sale of alcohol makes up the majority of their revenue. Several shops

also sell gasoline – at prices around eight times the price of gasoline in

Georgetown. This gasoline is used in the outboard motors used by some, in the

generators mainly used by the shopkeepers, and in the engines which power the

mining dredges. Kamarang is the central location at which many goods are sold

wholesale which then are resold at more inflated prices in the various outlying

villages. Most of the goods in Kamarang are sold at prices several times what

would be paid in Georgetown. A portion of this mark up goes to cover the high

cost of shipping to the interior, and a portion lines the pockets of the merchants.

Merchants are involved in a variety of other economic activities, the most

important of which are direct investment in mining, and small money lending.

Kamarang is also home to the administrative center that oversees the Upper

Mazaruni Sub-district. The Admin Center contains the offices of the Assistant

Regional Executive Officer (AREO, the REO resides in Bartica), the District

Education Officer, the Regional Vice-Chairman, and the Kamarang Village

Captain. The Admin Center also houses the area’s main post office, and a radio

that is used to communicate with the other villages and with Georgetown.

Kamarang is also home to a privately run guesthouse, a government rest house,

a Primary School, a hospital staffed by Community Health Workers (but no

doctor) that oversee healthcare for the Sub-district, a small library, and the Upper

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Mazaruni’s main police station. All of the government facilities are modest

operations, understaffed and underfunded. There is also an Anglican and an

Adventist Church in Kamarang. The Anglican Church was, for years, the main

Anglican Church in the area, where missionary Father John Dorman resided.

Kamarang consists of both the government administrative district as well as a

titled Amerindian village. The largest settlement that falls under Kamarang’s

jurisdiction is the village of Warawatta, which was directly across the Mazaruni

from Kamarang. Warawatta is the Amerindian settlement in the Upper Mazaruni

which has been most affected by the presence of the state, mining, and a cash

economy. Because of opportunities for wage labor (in mining or in the

administrative compound) the amount of labor dedicated to subsistence in

Warawatta is relatively low when compared to the other villages. Cassava

production seems to be the only subsistence activity of importance, and even this

activity is not carried on extensively. People from other villages consistently

referred to Warawattans as lazy. One man said to me “what these people call a

farm the rest of us would call a garden.” This characterization is certainly not

true of many Warawattans, who devote more time and energy to wage labor than

subsistence farmers devote to non-wage labor. For a few, though, the

impression of being “lazy” is exacerbated by problems related to alcohol

addictions which periodically keep them from being able to function well enough

to work. The amount of co-operative labor at the settlement level is small in

Warawatta in comparison to other villages. As one villager described it to me,

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“when it is time to drink up and sport up I have plenty of friends, when it is time to

cut farm nobody comes around.”

Kamarang is both the merchant center for the Upper Mazaruni as well as the

political center of the sub-district. Its residents are a combination of Amerindians

and coastlanders. The shop owners are predominately Indo-Guyanese, and the

miners are predominately Afro-Guyanese. Some of these “coastlanders” have

entered into relationships with or married Amerindians – a matter of much

contention among some Amerindians, especially when these relationships

involve Amerindian women and non-Amerindians men. The schoolteachers and

the librarian in Kamarang are today Amerindian, as are local priests and all of the

local administrative officials except for the AREO, who is Afro-Guyanese. The

police officers are predominately Afro-Guyanese, but there are now a few

Amerindian policemen. The Amerindians who work for government salaries form

one kind of elite in the area, and they come from several villages, not just

Kamarang. These elites have been most heavily recruited from the villages of

Kamarang, Kako, Waramadong, and Paruima, and were mainly educated in the

Adventist schools which were taken over by the government during the Burnham

era. Other local elites include those who have profited from mining, and the shop

owners.

Jawalla

The village of Jawalla seems a relaxed and sleepy village in comparison to the

frontier-town raucous of Kamarang, but it is a village still very much affected by

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the mining economy. The settlement of Jawalla is located at the confluence of

the Kukui and Mazaruni rivers, but the titled village of Jawalla also includes

jurisdiction over a number of outlying settlements. In Jawalla there is an

Anglican Church and an Alleluia Church, a primary school and a student hostel,

the captain’s office and the village owned shop, and a mission house that was

originally built as the residence of Father John Dorman. The mission house –

where Sunday school is held for the Anglican Church and where visitors are

sometimes housed – is where I stayed while in Jawalla. Directly across the

Mazaruni is a privately owned shop, whose owner was, while I was in Jawalla,

also the Vice-Captain of the village. Most of the commodities that were available

in Kamarang were also available at the shops in Jawalla. This included alcohol,

though not as abundantly as in Kamarang. Just as in Kamarang, there was a

kind of elite strata, consisting of the Captain and Vice-Captain, and Church

leaders, but in this case they were not drawn from several villages, and they

were clearly more enmeshed in the kin relations of the surrounding villagers. In

Jawalla there is also an American couple who are Bible translators for the

Summer Institute of Linguistics. They have built a house in Jawalla, and

maintain full time residence there with their two children.

Jawallans, like Warawattans, devote a fair amount of time to mining. This has

somewhat of a deleterious effect on the traditional subsistence base, but not to

the extent to which this occurs in Kamarang-Warawatta. Traditional subsistence

activities play a greater role in Jawalla. Horticultural production is centered on

the production of cassava, but also includes the growth of peppers, yams,

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bananas, oranges, plantains, papaya, tomatoes, and tobacco. When farmers are

ready for the labor-intensive activity of cutting a farm, they can generally rely on a

group of close kin and a few others to assist with this labor. While this scale of

cooperation is greater than it is in Warawatta, the villagers still lament that co-

operation has declined from what they remember from years passed. When I

accompanied one Alleluia Church leader and around five other people while they

cut the Church leader’s sister-in-law’s farm, I was told that with around fifteen to

twenty people a farm could be cut in an afternoon, but with the number I was

witnessing they would have to work a few hours a day for the whole week.

Hunting and fishing also formed a more important part of the Jawallan

subsistence base than in Kamarang-Warawatta. Just as with horticulture, I heard

complaints about the breakdown of sharing surrounding these activities. In the

past, it was more common for people from multiple households to eat together,

and then for the men from these households to hunt together. Today, I was told,

it was more common for individual men to go out hunting alone, and for them not

to share the surplus game which they procured, but rather to sell this surplus to

the shops who would then sell wild meats for profit alongside meats that were

imported from Guyana’s coast.

The Churches are the center of social life in Jawalla to a greater degree than

they are in Kamarang. Both the Anglican and Alleluia services are well attended,

and there is a great degree of cross over in the church memberships. Unlike the

Adventist Church, the Anglican Church has recognized Alleluia as a legitimate

Christian religion, and has not only accepted but also even encouraged

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participation in its services and traditions. The Anglican Church is the site of

rather intense activities, with its core members meeting not only on Sunday but

several times a day for prayer. The Alleluia services are well attended, and the

meal that is shared after the service is an opportunity for continued prayer as well

as discussion of various matters. The space in which Alleluia Church members

associate after the service is also the same space in which Village Council

meetings are held, and Church and Village Council activities often move

seamlessly from one to the other without clear cut boundaries between the two

occasions. The Alleluia Church leaders are clearly among the most respected

members of the community, and are sometimes referred to as Alleluia “Captains”

signifying that their authority is as significant as that of the Village Captains

though in a different domain than the Village Captains and without the sanction of

the state as the basis of their authority. The Alleluia leaders’ authority seems to

derive not only from their position as Church leaders, but also from their positions

in a kin-based mode of production. They not only organized Church activities,

but also were more central in organizing horticultural and foraging activities than

were the Village Captains. Also, unlike the Anglican and Adventist Churches,

women played a significant role among Church leaders, and in many cases

seemed to hold as much power as the men in Alleluia.

Philipai

I was repeatedly told by Akawaio Alleluia practitioners, that it is in the areas

where Alleluia was strongest that you find the “real” Akawaio, and “the old ways”

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– the “true” Akawaio culture. If asked to name a place where this “true” culture

exists, Akawaio invariably named the areas under the jurisdiction of the village of

Philipai. More specifically they mentioned Amokokopai, the most remote of the

villages that I visited in the Upper Mazaruni. Unlike Jawalla and Kamarang, the

social life of Philipai is not as wholly concentrated on a central village. The

administrative center is in Philipai itself, but the titled village consists of a number

of other smaller villages in outlying areas. One of these outlying villages,

Amokokopai, is the spiritual center of the Alleluia religion, where the official

leader of the entire Alleluia Church resides. As noted above, Kamarang has two

churches, one Adventist and one Anglican, and Jawalla has two churches, one

Anglican and one Alleluia. While roughly the same population and size of these

villages, Philipai has six churches: four Alleluia, one Wesleyan Methodist, and

one Adventist. The Alleluia Church is the center of social life for many more of

the residents of Philipai than any of the other villages. While the village of

Philipai was missionized by Methodist missionaries who forbid practices such as

Alleluia, they were not wholly successful in the village itself, and these

prohibitions had very little effect on the outlying settlements.

In Philipai there is a newly built school, a health clinic, a few small shops. For

a few families, the purchase and trade of commodities is important, and some

villagers periodically engage in wage work. However, it is quite clear that the

most important economic activities in these areas remain subsistence agriculture,

hunting, gathering and fishing; and this is especially true in the outlying

settlements. In order to get the village of Phillipai, one must take a full day’s

116

journey up the Kukui River from Jawalla. For much of the year, the Kukui is very

difficult to travel because of rocks and fallen trees, though it is easier to pass

during the rainy season. Once one reaches Philipai, to travel to an outlying

settlement like Amokokopai might take an additional half day’s walk into the

forest. These areas are spatially and socially separated from the areas like those

of the Kamarang River, just as the people in these areas are very differently

positioned in the Sub-District’s political economy.

However, even for these groups which are so remotely located, there are a

number of ecological pressures which tend to propel some downriver to work in

the mines, or to look for wage work, trade in small commodities or other sources

of cash. While the riverine subsistence base has not been destroyed by mining

as it has on the Mazaruni River, all of the villages face the problem that the

traditional subsistence base becomes less sustainable as people become fully

sedentary on land that is increasingly circumscribed. In the subsistence patterns

which existed before settlement in nucleated villages, a mode of production

which combined horticulture and foraging was neither fully nomadic nor fully

sedentary, but involved seasonal movements as well as the occasional

abandonment of areas when became depleted or conditions were otherwise

unsuitable – whether that was for ecological or for social reasons. In people’s

narratives of how they came to settle in particular areas, the stories inevitably

begin with abandonment of other areas because of fights with neighbors, deaths

that were blamed on sorcery, or ecological reasons such as “cushi ants were

eating out all our gardens.” When I was in the Upper Mazaruni there were two

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significant problems in many areas which would have been resolved by moving

in the past: a solution which today’s pattern of permanent villages settled on

relative small parcels of titled land makes difficult. The first of these problems

was that many areas were plagued by cushi ants, which destroyed the cassava

crop; and the second problem was that most areas in the Upper Mazaruni were

over-hunted, which means that many who cannot afford to buy meat from the

shops often go without meat. This “source-sink” in game animal populations has

often historically been solved by South America’s tropical forest peoples by

trekking to another location where game animals are more plentiful, allowing the

abandoned area time for populations to replenish themselves (Stearman 1999:

233-250). In areas as remote as Amokokopai, I saw children with distended

bellies from malnutrition, and people eating “farine” (a word normally referring to

manioc flour) that was made out of wood chips.

Miners

For people resident in all of the villages described above, the real possibility

of starvation is a “push” factor which propels people into the mining economy, as

is the fact that people have long been dependent on cash for the purchase of

tools, household items, and other necessities. There is also the “pull” factor of

the lure of the possibility of “striking it rich”. Stories are forever circulating about

the immense riches that came to some lucky soul who stumbled across an

enormous diamond or nugget of gold. In reality, the wages in the mines are

barely subsistence wages and working conditions are harsh. Nearly all miners

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contract malaria eventually, and for some it is a death sentence. Miners who

went into the mines to try to save their families from starvation make barely

enough money for their own upkeep, let alone for their families, while at the same

time their employment in the mines draws a critical source of agricultural labor

away from the villages. I was told repeatedly by ex-miners who had given it up

that if you spend all of your time mining you will starve – a seeming paradox for

those who went into mining in an attempt to save their families from just that fate.

Furthermore, for some, mine owner/merchants keep mine workers in a kind of

debt peonage by advancing them credit for store-bought goods. This is an

especially effective tool for entrapping miners when they are advanced credit for

alcohol or for drugs, and their addictions keep them forever indebted to their

employer/suppliers.

There is mining all along the Upper Mazaruni River, from Imbaimadai near its

headwaters to the falls which separate the Upper from the Middle Mazaruni. My

own observation of mining was between the villages of Kamarang and Jawalla.

On one trip I rode with a shop owner from Jawalla, who did a good amount of

business selling to the people in the mines: to people in individual settlements as

he passed by on boat, and from his own encampment set up to sell goods there.

He was one of a number of merchants there who sold to the miners, made

money off of loans to them, and invested in his own dredges. While it was most

common to find young men working in the mines, it was not uncommon to see

whole families, with even small children and the elderly helping with mining.

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Often there were no set wages, but rather workers were paid on a percentage

basis.

The environmental destruction caused by the mining in the Upper Mazaruni is

enormous and immediately obvious. While there are regulations and

environmental safety standards, these rules are virtually unenforceable in a vast

interior with an undeveloped system of monitoring. Mercury used in separating

gold from ore poisons the waters. Turbidity caused by the missile dredges along

the rivers has made large parts of the river uninhabitable by fish and unfit for

drinking, or bathing in. Mining for money has become a vicious cycle as it

destroys a part of the riverine subsistence base thus making it more necessary to

work for wages in order to buy meat imported from Georgetown. Finally, the

standing pools of water left by the missile dredge and by the small pit mines are

a breeding ground for malaria-spreading mosquitoes. In the space of a few

years, the Upper Mazaruni went from an area where malaria was rare, to an area

where malaria is endemic, with the majority of people in the Sub-district having

been infected.

While there have apparently been a good number of medium-scale foreign

operations in the area, I did not encounter these operations in the area of the

Mazaruni that I visited. I heard stories about Brazilian miners, but they are not as

common in the Upper Mazaruni as in other areas of the country, like the

Patamona territory to the south. The areas I visited also did not have Canadian

and American miners that once again have a presence in Guyana. The owners

of the mining operations between Jawalla and Kamarang are a combination of

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Amerindians and coastlanders. All of the coastlanders I encountered in the area

were either Afro- or Indo- Guyanese, or mixed. I did not encounter Portuguese

or Chinese Guyanese miners, though I did encounter one miner of English

decent whom everyone assumed because of how poor he was could not possibly

have been English. They assumed he was a Portuguese Guyanese, but to even

see a Portuguese in such a state shocked them, let alone an Englishman.

During the time that I spent in the Upper Mazaruni, I consistently noted that there

seemed to be a great deal of tension in the area between Amerindians and the

“coastlander” miners, and that in the wake of the elections these tensions

particularly came to light in discussions surrounding the recent electoral success

of GAP in the Sub-district, as well as in discussions about the law suit of the

APA.

From the conversations which I have with Amerindian and “coastlander”

miners, it was clear to me that there wasn’t a sense among either that

Amerindian and coastlander workers might have common interests as workers

which were more important in this context than common interests they might

have with owners of operations on the basis of racial identity. Furthermore, the

idea that the exclusion of coastlander workers from the Sub-district was desirable

was often justified by Amerindians using explicitly racist language. Indeed,

Amerindians from other regions of the country with no relationship to the

community, as well as Brazilians were sometimes hired on dredges owned by

local Amerindians that excluded coastlanders who had long-term relationships

with the community.

121

The disrupting effect of the racial discourses and how the most vulnerable

were the most affected by their deployment was driven home to me at one day

by an Indo-Guyanese miner named Blackie who lived in Kamarang. After having

seen me take repeated trips to Warrawatta to see the village and to talk to people

in the village, Blackie said to me one morning rather angrily, “You don’t want to

see where I live!”

“What?” I asked, a little surprised.

He repeated, “You want to see where they live, but you don’t want to see

where I live.”

I said, “Sure I do… show me.”

He took me to a shack behind one of the shops, maybe only 8’ by 8’, with a tin

roof. Inside were a portable kerosene stove, his bed – which was a piece of

foam on top of a make-shift frame, and a few clothes and other possessions. We

sat and drank coffee. He showed me pictures of the family he had left behind on

the coast.

What was Blackie trying to tell me? He was a poor man. He was struggling

to just get by. He worked hard and had nothing. Why was I only worried about

indigenous rights? Why wasn’t I also worried about his rights?

I took what Blackie was trying to tell me seriously. Like Stephen Nugent

notes for “caboclos” in Northern Brazil, non-Amerindians in these areas are too

often portrayed only as intruders, and their only characteristic that is considered

important in traditional Amazonian ethnography is the fact that they are

encroaching on Amerindian land. What this perspective fails to take into account

122

is that these people, eking out an existence in the bush or the backlands, are

often also impoverished and marginalized members of the national society. For

most, if they better economic opportunities on the coast or elsewhere, they would

be pursuing them. Mine workers and “pork-knockers” such as Blackie indeed

have an awful lot in common with the Amerindian who turns to mining out of fear

of starvation. Yet the racial politics of Amerindian elites, as well as the racial

politics of the coastal elites, promotes ideologies which pit the interests of these

incredibly vulnerable and marginalized people against one another.

Political Leadership and Identity Politics

In all of the conversations that I had with Amerindians in Guyana, it seemed

to me that those who put forth the most explicitly racial arguments about politics

and rights were the Amerindian leaders of the “political class.” Leaders of

indigenous rights organizations as well as Amerindians who played active roles

in party politics of all kinds often thought of the political power of Guyana’s

“races” as a zero-sum game (Biolsi 2001). Indeed, when expressing informally

the goals of an Amerindian rights movement in Guyana, many Amerindian

leaders seemed to think that the most important goal for securing Amerindian

rights was to exclude Blacks and Indians from Amerindian areas. Ironically,

however, these same leaders – who mainly derived their power from their

relationship to the state, the missionaries, and the schools – were often spoken

about by Amerindians in more remote areas as not being “true” Amerindians.

123

Unlike the political class of Kamarang and neighboring villages, leaders such

as the Alleluia leaders of Amokokopai were not political in the sense that they

would run for political office or form organizations that would file law suits against

the government. The Alleluia believers less often sought to work through the

state for change, but rather sought mainly to be freed from its influence and the

influence of coastal society. They sought to avoid the state rather than confront

it, and only became politicized when avoiding the state no longer seemed

possible – as in the case of the proposed Hydroelectric Dam. The Alleluia

leaders that I spoke to were far less likely to make racial arguments, and their

notion of what defined one as Amerindian was cultural rather than biological. In

Quebenang, for instance, a number of the residents are of mixed Afro-Guyanese

and Amerindian decent, but yet by virtue of their participation in what is

considered “true” Akawaio culture, their claim to authenticity is not questioned in

the same way as the “pure blooded” Amerindians of the political class.

When asked about the stated goals of organizations such as the APA, many

of the Amerindians who considered themselves “more traditional” agreed in

principal with their aims: to reclaim legal title to lands, and to give Amerindian

villages the power to regulate the access of miners to Amerindian areas. On the

other hand, some expressed doubts about the sincerity of these leaders.

Sometimes these doubts centered on their tactics, but most often, what was

questioned was their claim to speak for all Amerindians. They believed that

these leaders (like politicians in general) used the rhetoric of rights while having

their own selfish interests at heart. Furthermore, what made many suspicious of

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the political class was that they were highly assimilated to national culture, and

lived lives that seemed unconnected to day-to-day life in the villages. One

Jawalla villager asked me: “Mr. Zed says he’s for Amerindian rights, but is he

Amerindian, really?”

“Yes,” I said, “he’s an Arekuna from Paruima.”

“No,” he said, “what I mean is: has he ever cut a farm before? Does he hunt

or fish?” I laughed and told him I wasn’t really sure. As my informant was

pointing out to me, Mr. Zed’s power did not derive from his position within kin-

based communal production. His power derived from his relationship with the

state and with the NGOs. Above all, what was being questioned was his cultural

authenticity and therefore his right to represent Amerindians.

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CHAPTER 6

CONCLUSION

This dissertation began its exploration of the history of Akawaio identity and

political leadership by suggesting that identities such as the Akawaio auto-

denomination of “Kapon” are based on linguistic and cultural traits much older

than the European encounter, and that the “Kapon” have been associated with

territory that included the Upper Mazaruni since long before the colonial

encounter as well. These identities were not simply the product of interrelated

processes of ethnic soldiering and tribalization which began with the Spanish

presence in the region during the 16th century as Whitehead suggests.

During the Dutch colonial era, Akawaio society did undergo dramatic changes as

a result of their involvement in slave raiding, warfare, commodity production, and

the emergence of a new set of leaders with privileged access to European trade

goods. However, the Akawaio never developed a “tribal” socio-political

organization (Fried 1975; Sahlins1961, 1968; Service 1971; Whitehead 1992) –

they did not act as a unified tribe, and they did not develop powerful lineage- or

territorial-based chiefs who could lead them as one. Furthermore, warfare during

this time cannot be explained simply as the result of attempts by Spanish or

Dutch authorities to encourage “ethnic soldiering.” But if ethnic soldiering and

tribalization cannot help us to understand the roots of modern forms of identity

which are important to understanding contemporary Amerindian cultural politics,

there are processes which began during the Dutch colonial era that can help us.

126

Once the establishment of a mode of production based on plantation slavery

became a central goal of the Dutch authorities, the colonial state also took on a

project of racial formation as the ideological glue which held the colonial social

formation together. In the colonial racial project, the Amerindians might have

been viewed as savages, but as a free and independent people they were still

viewed as clearly racially superior to Africans and African-descended Blacks who

labored on plantations in perpetual bondage. In the context of the rising

plantation economy, Amerindians were used as “bush police” to hunt runaway

slaves, and were used to fight maroons and to put down slave rebellions.

However, racial formation was uneven and incomplete among Amerindians

during the Dutch colonial era, and a racial worldview was probably only

internalized by a small number of Amerindians with close alliances with the

planters – probably most commonly among the Caribs and the Arawaks.

Contemporary accounts indicate that the “racial project” had not been deepened

and elaborated enough to satisfy the desires of colonial authorities. Various

groups of Akawaio Kapon acted in relation to settlers, slaves and the colonial

state in ways that were autonomous, diverse and flexible throughout the colonial

era. Especially for groups deep in the interior, the salience and significance of

race seems to be of much more recent origin than the time of slavery when

Amerindians were used as slave raiders and “bush police.”

During the British era, the Akawaio role as raiders and traders became less

important, and Akawaio returned to a way of life focused more exclusively on a

kin-based communal mode of production. Alleluia prophets played a role in re-

127

organizing Akawaio social relations after a long period of two centuries during

which kin-based social relations had been warped, disarticulated, and torn

asunder through the violent process of colonialism. It is mainly in relation to this

re-organization that the Alleluia movement needs to be understood. Contrary to

how anthropologists have interpreted this movement, it should not be understood

primarily as a movement of opposition to the colonial presence (Forte 1996b;

Staats 1996), nor as a “cargo” movement based on the desire to acquire Western

goods (Butt Colson 1998), but rather it is an inward-looking and society

transforming movement that is interested in transforming internal power relations,

but is fundamentally uninterested in the state as a locus of power except where

the state directly interferes with the conditions of the reproduction of indigenous

society.

It appears that the real historical roots of the contemporary racial politics of

Amerindians in areas such as the Upper Mazaruni are to be found only with the

spread of British territorial governance into interior during the late 19th and early

20th centuries. In the Upper Mazaruni, this did not occur until the mid- 20th

century. During the process of British colonial state formation in the interior, new

Amerindian elites emerged surrounding the missions, the schools, and state

offices, and these new elites entered into a complex set of alliances and conflicts

with already existing leaders in Amerindian society. Those with close ties to the

missionaries were sometimes opposed to and sometimes in alliance with Alleluia

captains, and both Alleluia captains and missionaries were opposed to the

practices of the piamen (shamans). Village captains (at first state appointed, and

128

then elected) asserted their authority over settlement captains, while these

leaders sometimes sought the support of village captains while at other times

defying their decisions. Both traditional and emergent forms of Amerindian

leaders entered into complex relations with the government and with coastal

miners who began to work in the Upper Mazaruni especially after the 1950s.

During the independence struggle, race would become a significant feature of

public political life, as Guyanese voters were mobilized around political parties in

ways that were ostensibly racially motivated, with Indo-Guyanese voting for the

People’s Progressive Party, and Afro-Guyanese voting for the People’s National

Congress. Amerindians, also, were mobilized as a racial constituency during this

era, predominately by the pro-colonial United Force, whose bases of support

were Portuguese businessmen, and the new class of state-based Amerindian

leaders. With the rise to power of the PNC, and the marginalization of the

significance of the UF after independence, Amerindian leaders positioned

themselves in various ways vis-à-vis the government, and vis-à-vis the PNC

party machinery. At the national level, the Rupununi Rebellion was one critical

turning point in how Amerindian leaders positioned themselves politically.

Nationally and locally, the Upper Mazaruni Hydroelectric Project was also a

watershed moment for political leadership among the Akawaio. Since the end of

the PNC era, Amerindian leaders have also had complex and ambiguous

relationships with the People’s Progressive Party government and the various

opposition parties. Many who had been government opponents during the PNC

era did so by allying themselves with the PPP, but they are now faced with a

129

PPP government whose policies also seem contrary to the interests of the

Amerindian communities. For perhaps a majority of the villagers of the Upper

Mazaruni, they are now faced with an unsympathetic PPP government, but they

are still deeply suspicious of the PNC because of its record vis-à-vis Amerindians

while it was in office. It is among these people that the Guyana Action Party had

such tremendous support during the 2001 national and regional elections.

Like the Village Captains and those with ties to the political parties, the

indigenous rights leaders also emerged out of the class with close ties to the

missions, schools and state offices. This class is the most assimilated to national

society, and has the highest degree of formal education of any of the Upper

Mazaruni villagers. The most active of the indigenous rights organizations is the

APA, which was formed first at the encouragement of anthropologists associated

with Survival International, and of the local Anglican Church during its

participation in the anti-dictatorial struggle of the PNC era. The APA has taken a

confrontational stance towards the government on a variety of issues. With

active members throughout the country, one of its core areas of support is the

Upper Mazaruni, where APA leaders have chosen to wage a legal battle over

land rights and a political battle over the presence of miners in the sub-region.

Like the organization of an “indigenous” political party, the indigenous rights

movement in Guyana operates by fostering a nascent cultural and political

nationalism that appeals largely to a racial constituency through the deployment

of strategic essentialism. This kind of essentialism is a long-term danger for both

indigenous communities and the national societies for a number of reasons. It

130

creates divisions on the ground between miners and Amerindian villagers and

prevents the formation of a politics which could address the real problems of the

Sub-region. It prevents class alliances within Guyanese society that might be

aimed at a transformation of state and society, and finally, it provides an ideal

situation for capitalist globalization: it divides the working class against itself while

creating forms of territorial ethnic nationalism which might be used as a

beachhead for the transformation of social property relations along capitalist

lines.

131

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