Wapisiana

ETHNONYMS: Matisana, Vapidiana, Wapishana, Wapixana

Orientation

Identification. The Wapisiana offer no explanation of their name but acknowledge that, in some pronunciations, it contains their word for people, pidyan.

Location. Many Wapisiana believe that they came from the upper Rio Negro and occupied an area extending north from the Rio Branco Basin into areas now occupied by the Makushi, who drove them south under pressure from European colonizers on the Caribbean coast. Presently, the Wapisiana are located in the Federal Territory of Roraima, Brazil, northern and eastern Boa Vista, as well as in the southern Rupununi savannas of Guyana. Their villages are insulated by the ranches, settlements, small towns, and commercial developments of Brazilians.

Demography. In 1984 the Brazilian National Indian Foundation (Fundação Nacional do Índio, FUNAI) estimated that there were 2,995 Wapisiana in twenty Brazilian villages. According to a 1981 survey in Guyana, there were approximately 5,000 Wapisiana in the southern Rupununi. There are no estimates of the number of Wapisiana who live outside of the villages.

Linguistic Affiliation. Wapisiana is the only remaining Arawakan language in the circum-Roraima area. The Wapisiana have incorporated speakers of Atorai and Taruma into their group within the last several generations. Most Brazilian Wapisiana speak Portuguese, often instead of Wapisiana, and many Guyanese Wapisiana speak English in addition to Wapisiana.

History and Cultural Relations

The Wapisiana were integrated through marriage and other forms of exchange within a regional sociocultural system that comprised the numerous Carib-speaking groups of the Guianas. The groups in this region, including the Pemon, Kapon, and Wáiwai, share a material inventory (such as hammocks, basketry for the preparation of cassava bread and drink, and stone grating boards); hunting, gardening, and food-preparation technologies; myths and cosmologies; and kinship, social, and political organizations. Indirect contact with Europeans dates from Columbus's third voyage, in 1498, which reached the Caribbean coast of South America at the mouth of the Río Orinoco. For the next two centuries, information and objects spread rapidly through established indigenous networks of exchange. By the late 1700s the Wapisiana were brought to work at the Portuguese fort on the Rio Branco and mission settlements that protected international borders and secured the area for commercial development. With the establishment of ranching and other commercial enterprises by the Portuguese and later by Brazilians in the nineteenth century, the Wapisiana came into closer and more intense contact with non-Indians, and by the beginning of the twentieth century, contact was extensive and permanent. As non-Indians have entered the region, relations among the indigenous groups have been reduced and transformed. Now the Wapisiana engage in direct relations only with the Makushi and, to a much lesser extent, the Wáiwai. Most other intergroup relations are mediated or occasioned by the presence of non-Indians.

Settlements

A Wapisiana settlement was once no more than a shifting and impermanent cluster of houses. During the twentieth century, villages have become nucleated, usually around a church. The government has added schools, meeting houses, and sometimes shops to village centers. In a few cases, Wapisiana have lined up their homes along the heavily used dirt roads that carry trucks, buses, official vehicles, hucksters, and even pleasure travelers from Boa Vista to other non-Indian towns and to the Venezuelan and Guyanan frontiers. The Wapisiana have traditionally preferred to live in open country, some miles from their gardens in the forest. This pattern continues, even in the less traditional villages, the residents of which produce their own food and participate least in the cash economy. The typical Brazilian Wapisiana village today consists of about twenty-five rectangular, clay-walled, palm-thatched houses spread over a delineated parcel of land. Villagers meet, usually at the church or in a school or clubhouse, to discuss local matters and make plans. Men often play soccer in an open area near the central buildings after these meetings, and holidays are celebrated there. Some villages have communally owned herds of cattle; there may be a corral and some pasturage maintained by the village men, usually away from the center. Villagers cut their gardens in the forests on the low hills that rise up from the savannas, sometimes walking several hours with heavy loads of cassava roots, which they process near their homes. Some families maintain second houses at their farms and process their cassava flour there. A few families live at their farms, but this is not well regarded by others in the Community.

Economy

Subsistence and Commercial Activities. The staple crop is cassava (Manihot esculenta ), which the Wapisiana grow in their cut-and-burned plots along with beans, melons, maize, rice, sugarcane, and numerous other food crops. They also cultivate sweet potatoes and other roots, squashes, tomatoes, greens, onions, and dozens of different kinds of hot peppers. Some of these vegetables are found in small kitchen gardens near their homes, alongside cotton, tobacco, calabashes, decorative flowers, and medicinal herbs. Wapisiana women grate the cassava, express its juice, sieve it, and then toast it on iron griddles into flour (fariula ) or thick, flat breads. This lengthy process removes the deadly hydrocyanic acid. Wapisiana men hunt for deer, agoutis, wild turkeys, and other small game and birds. Men, women, and children fish. The Wapisiana have raised cattle, swine, chickens, ducks, guinea fowl, and many other introduced animals for over 200 years, and these now contribute regularly to the Wapisiana diet. The sale of produce, animals, and homemade food provides small amounts of cash for purchases of store-bought food and household goods.

Industrial Arts. Wapisiana men fashion wooden stools and plait baskets, sieves, and squeezers for use in the preparation of cassava and other foods. They also make arrows, working heavy-gauge fencing wire into points, but these arrows and the bows they buy or acquire from other Indians have been almost entirely replaced by shotguns. Women make clay cooking pots and spin cotton and weave the thread into baby slings and hammocks. Introduced crafts include needlework, dressmaking, and rustic furniture making. Some men make knives from worked auto springs and fashion bone or plastic knife handles.

Trade. The Wapisiana earn money and spend it in shops in Boa Vista or small towns in the interior. They trade among themselves on an ad hoc basis and irregularly with the Wáiwai. Peddlers sometimes try to trade with the Wapisiana, but these transactions are described as exploitative, and they are avoided by all but those who are too isolated to understand.

Division of Labor. The ideal division of labor corresponds to that reported in early ethnography: men hunt, cut and burn fields, make baskets, and educate their sons. Women plant and harvest, process cassava, cook and clean, make cotton hammocks and clay pots, and care for their babies and daughters. Men, women, and children together catch fish and engage in some horticultural work.

Land Tenure. The Brazilian government has delineated Wapisiana villages, but has not yet demarcated Wapisiana lands; every village is encircled and penetrated by non-Indians. The Wapisiana do not believe in private ownership of land, and even though they are confined to shrinking spaces, they exhibit flexibility in the assignment of house and garden space. Newcomers to an area must secure permission from the villagers before they settle there.

Kinship

Like other Guianan Indian groups, the Wapisiana do not name or organize themselves into kin or descent groups. The traditional terminology resembles the Crow system.

Marriage and Family

Marriage. The cross cousin is the category preferred for marriage, whereas marriage with the true parallel cousins is prohibited. There is some evidence that marriage with the actual sister's daughter was once desirable, a practice that continues in a loose, categorical sense insofar as men show a preference for young girls. Polygyny, once common for leaders, has nearly disappeared, probably under pressure from missionaries. Most marriages are now consecrated by a Catholic priest. Divorce is not uncommon and is initiated by either the husband or the wife; a village leader may intervene to try to convince a couple to stay together.

Domestic Unit. The nuclear family plus a grandparent is the common configuration. Often a man who is a leader will surround his large house with smaller homes for his sons' and daughters' families. Men traditionally exerted authority over their daughters' husbands; a year of service to the wife's father is still customary.

Inheritance. There is no explicit rule for inheritance. Leadership is said to pass from father to son, but there is little ethnographic evidence of this.

Socialization. Young children stay with their mothers, assist with household and garden work, and act as companions to adults, a vital social obligation. At adolescence, the Wapisiana traditionally initiated both boys and girls with painful stinging-ant and cutting ordeals; these practices have all but disappeared. Every Wapisiana village now has at least a federally provided primary school, and more advanced schooling is available in some villages and missions or in towns.

Sociopolitical Organization

Social Organization. Traditionally, Wapisiana men traveled more extensively than women, conducting trading expeditions and engaging with other men in transactions involving cassava graters, dogs, and other valued objects. Exchange put men into direct contact not only with Wapisiana of other villages but also with Indians of other groups and, later, with non-Indians. Thus, men engaged in social relations on a broader geographical plane and at a higher, regional level of sociopolitical organization than did women. Since intergroup trade has declined, regional political organization has provided a new context for intergroup relations and a new means for men to become important actors and communicators. Within their own households, men have traditionally commanded the labor of their wives and daughters, unmarried sons, and younger sons-in-law. A man's daughters' husbands still perform bride-service for a year or more, and this service contributes to a man's material capacity for leadership and to his prestige.

Political Organization. Traditional leadership was an achieved status with several components. Old men gave advice and directed action insofar as they could specify the proper way to behave or perform a task. Men who spoke well represented the settlement to strangers and negotiated with them. A third form of leadership involved a man or woman initiating an activity by personally beginning to work. Nowadays, each Brazilian village has an elected chief whose position is formalized by FUNAI. Indians may vote, and they are courted by low-level local politicians. In 1985, for the first time, a Wapisiana man won a local election.

Social Control. The injunction against coercion is so strong that parents neither compel their children to take medicine nor remove knives from their hands against their wishes. Another social law, however, just as fundamental requires Wapisianas to be together, share resources, and carry a fair share of the work. Those who violate these principles risk being accused of sorcery or threatened with it.

Conflict. Withdrawal is the common, traditional means of resolving interpersonal conflicts, and village fission is the means for dissipating interfamily tension. Since Wapisiana settlements have been reduced to scattered parcels of land surrounded by non-Indian ranches, it is no longer possible to split and re-form villages. Thus, it is more difficult now to resolve conflict. There are also new sources of conflict such as the competition among missionaries of different faiths over Indian worshipers and the introduction of cash and expensive goods into the regional economy. Within the village, it is still the older men, and the elected chief in particular, who mediate local conflicts such as those involving theft or inappropriate marriage. Outside the delineated settlement, Wapisiana are subject to Brazilian law. The Wapisiana find themselves embroiled in conflicts with ranchers and the territorial and federal governments, frequently over settlement and land use. They work with national indigenous groups toward resolving these problems.

Religion and Expressive Culture

Religious Beliefs. The stratified Wapisiana cosmos has three main levels: the sky, the land, and the underground. In the normal course of life, things, beings, or attributes of one level penetrate the others, simultaneously enabling social relations, production, and change and creating the possibility of illness, death, or destruction. In the distant past, people could turn into animals and animals could talk. The world changed and this is no longer possible, but there are numerous beings that combine human and animal traits and that threaten the well-being of Wapisiana and their communities. Catholic missionaries have worked in the region for two centuries; they had established churches in all Wapisiana settlements by the beginning of the twentieth century. Today, itinerant priests from the Consolata Mission provide services on a periodic basis.

Religious Practitioners. Traditionally, certain Wapisiana men became specialists in healing; they beat leaves and "blew" cures. They could also use the same techniques to make people sick or to kill them. Nowadays, no Wapisiana admits to these practices and only a few actually follow them, but a number of men and women do perform a sort of curing that is influenced by Catholicism, northeastern Brazilian folk medicine, and other non-Indian practices. In most villages, a Wapisiana man is the catechist who leads the Sunday service in the absence of the priest. Wapisiana boys attend the seminary in Boa Vista but none has yet taken holy orders.

Ceremonies and Arts. Today the only large-scale ceremonies are Catholic rites and celebrations of Christian holy days. On a very small scale, the Wapisiana perform traditional rituals in the course of their daily activities.

Medicine. In addition to "blowing" and curing to restore cosmological balance, Wapisiana use numerous plants to treat physical symptoms. Brazilian Wapisiana also take advantage of malaria testing and treatment and nursing services at White settlements, and they use the Indian hospital and women's facility in Boa Vista.

Death and Afterlife. Deaths were attributed to evil spirits or to kanaima, healers who used their powers for evil purposes or to satisfy a blood lust. Nowadays, Wapisiana use words like "hepatitis," "malaria," and "pneumonia" to identify causes of death, but they often still believe that the true cause is a kanaima or another malevolent spirit. The Wapisiana bury a person's goods with the body for use in the afterlife.

Bibliography

Farabee, William Curtis (1918). The Central Arawaks. University of Pennsylvania Anthropological Publications, vol. 9. Philadelphia: University Museum.

Herrmann, Lucila. (1946-1947). "A organização social dos vapidiana." Sociologia (São Paulo) 8:119-134, 203-215, 284-304; 9:54-82.

Secchi, Nelson, and Sandra Secchi (1983). "A situação atual dos índios Wapixana." Boletim (Diocese de Roraima, Boa Vista), no. 5.

NANCY FRIED FOSTER