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| Photo: Kike Arnal |
All over the world, indigenous cultures are disappearing. When knowledgeable elderly members of indigenous communities die these days, they take much more knowledge with them than they leave behind. This was not always the case. In the past, for example, Ye’kwana tradition involved frequent, informal apprenticeships to enable younger people to learn ritual chants, medicinal plants, mythology, weaving, construction and other skills from their elders. As in our own society, indigenous people differ greatly in the depth of their lifetime’s knowledge. Certain individuals stand out as experts in particular areas. In 2000, Caura Futures sponsored a small natural history course centered around one such person, Edewudahuh, a noted medicinal plant, mammal and songbird expert. He taught the course, attended by both Ye’kwana and Sanema students, in the community of Edowinña. The modest course was a success. It resulted in a photographic record of over ! 50 medicinal plants and the oral transfer of what forest lore Edewudahuh imparted on daily walks during the month-long course. We planned a much more lengthy repeat, but Edewudahuh died just two months later back in his community, likely of curable malaria. This painful loss infused an urgency into our plans to record valuable knowledge.
We resolved to start a cultural library using digital technology to capture what was being lost. This project has been run by Emilio Rodríguez, the Ye’kwana founder of Edowinña. Emilio has made hundreds of hours of audio and video archives using a simple MP3 recorder and inexpensive Hi-8 digital video cameras. His most recent trip involved two weeks of travel over the Pacaraima Mountains of the Caura headwaters into Brazil, where Yamajuumü, another particularly accomplished Ye’kwana elder lives. Yamajuumü is an advisor on medicinal plants to the Caura’s only shaman, as was Edewudahuh. In Brazil, Emilio made recordings for two weeks before returning.
The latest phase of the cultural library project will involve the construction of a library building, in traditional Ye’kwana style, in Maripa, a port town on the Caura, and a central trading location for many Ye’kwana. The library will serve as a focal point for recording and learning knowledge. Archived recordings (copied in a dim archive with backup elsewhere in Venezuela) will be available for any Ye’kwana who want access to them. Older Ye’kwana, who wish to record their knowledge will have a place to stay and do so, with an adjacent traditional dormitory and dining area. But filming and recording forays will also continue to outlying villages in order to document medicinal plant and other site-specific knowledge.
We anticipate that the Sanema and other indigenous groups of the Caura and beyond will use the library as a resource for developing t! heir own similar projects. But those will develop primarily as a result of communication among these groups, rather than from outside suggestion.
Indigenous people of the Caura traditionally harvest fruit by climbing trees—many over 20 meters tall—using a loop of bark or vines placed around their feet. Climbers grip the tree trunk with their constrained feet and employ friction between the loop and the tree’s bark to ratchet themselves up to the fruit. Increasingly, young men no longer climb, but simply chop trees down. This is part of a new trend where displays of force hold more prestige for the young than what they regard as an unnecessary, perhaps foolish struggle. The shortsightedness of this modern practice—and its effect on fruit resources for wildlife—lead community elders to support a program that encouraged prowess in the old climbing techniques. Around 300 Sanema and Ye’kwana men women and children gathered below Para Falls on the Caura for the first Palm Climbing Workshop and Competition in May 2002. By bringing people together to share old climbing techniques, learn new ones, and test each other in competition, this event promoted a return to sustainable fruit harvests. Modern safety techniques and simple equipment were distributed along with T-shirts promoting traditional climbing practice (T-shirts with commercial messages are rampant). The incredible enthusiasm of the participants indicated an enormous potential for renewed indigenous conservation of the Caura Basin’s vast rain forests.
The second phase of the Palm Climbing Project will consist of a roving team of indigenous instructors who will travel from community to community in 2006. They will teach climbing techniques and organize small local competitions, similar to those of the first Palm Climbing Workshop. Competition poles left in each community will facilitate further practice of climbing techniques. Another watershed-wide competition will be held in 2007. We will also begin to publicize the Palm Climbing Project outside of the Caura Basin to other areas of Venezuela and to other countries in South America. Ultimately, our goal is to have an international sustainable harvest/palm climbing event at Para Falls in 2008.
We will also begin planting Oenocarpus palms around communities where they have been heavily cut.
Indigenous people in the Caura rely heavily on commercial hunting and fishing to generate cash revenue. The price paid for bush meat is often considerably lower than the price of beef. Cash is used for motors, supplies, some food, and health care. Income from non-timber forest products could help eliminate commercial hunting. Oenocarpus palm oil (derived from the fruit pulp) has commercial value as a remedy for asthma, as a fine cooking oil similar to olive oil (monounsaturated), and as a base for fine soaps and shampoos. Indigenous groups in other areas have started successful commercial ventures harvesting this oil (during WWII, annual Oenocarpus oil production in Brazil reached >200 tons, roughly $6.6 million in today’s dollars). In the Caura Basin, there are several known naturally-occurring monodominant Oenocarpus stands which will be mapped using GPS technology. Agreements must be reached as to how the fruit will be harvested and transported and where the oil will be extracted. Ultimately, we are advocating that a very small processing facility be located in the region to retain maximum product value with the indigenous producers.
Malaria paralyzes and devastates communities throughout the tropics. Projects which spread the use of mosquito bed or hammock nets have had impressive success reducing malaria in African countries and in South America. Unfortunately, most of the Ye’kwana and Sanema have inadequate nets (or none at all) such that, during the rainy season, infected people provide a continuous reservoir for the transmission of malarial parasites. At the height of malaria season, whole villages can be infected. Nets can greatly reduce the number of debilitating and deadly cases of this scourge. When the Tennessee Valley Authority was first created, in the USA, malaria spread out of control in nearby regions. A broad effort to place wire screens over windows and doors in thousands of homes virtually eliminated the disease. Sixty years later, with no effective malaria vaccine available, a minimal effort in the Caura would be to employ such simple barriers to transmission, whose effectiveness improves dramatically as complete coverage is achieved. An initial project with the Ye’kwana produced a better mosquito net design and nets for 40 people that they sewed themselves. The project would provide fine mesh material and manual sewing machines for communities. A similar project that brought in finished nets to Yanomami communities generated an outcry that outsiders were generating income from the introduced product. In this case, we want to integrate users of nets into the design and fabrication process. Every person in the Caura Basin could have a net.
Increasingly, indigenous people of the Caura rely on artificial lighting which enables them to stretch their workday, conduct community meetings and attend to medical problems at night. Several villages have bought generators which require extensive maintenance and fuel and pollute the night with diesel smells and sounds. In most villages, however, people still prefer the use of solar panels; they recognize the sustainability of this technology. Price is a considerable barrier to going solar, which has limited the use of solar energy. We will provide 30 watt solar panels and batteries for powering existing short-wave radios and low-voltage lighting in the central meeting areas of 25 communities.
Commercial Hunting and Fishing
Managing hunting and fishing for long-term viability is achievable for indigenous populations in the Caura. Feeding a wider Venezuelan population from wild fish and game resources, however, is a clear recipe for disaster. Recent accounts of the exploding bushmeat trade in Africa indicate the devastating impact that organized markets can have on wildlife populations. Left without protein resources, forest-dwelling peoples are themselves driven even further from their traditional way of life. Yet the most adept hunters are themselves indigenous people. Pressure to generate cash income, in order to buy medicines, for example, makes selling bushmeat one of the few options Ye’kwana and Sanema men have available to them. In the Caura, dugout canoes with large ice chests can be seen regularly, carrying crews of fishermen and hunters. They salt tapir (a large terrestrial mammal) and peccary meat and place fish on ice for sale in port towns. Although most of these men are criollos (non-indigenous Venezuelans), some indigenous men have regularly joined the trade and more do so opportunistically. As a first step to ending all commercial hunting and fishing in the middle and upper Caura, bushmeat and fish sales by indigenous people to the criollo market must stop. This is an unrealistic goal without providing some alternative. The palm oil project described above is a long-term alternative, and mosquito nets, if widely deployed, will greatly diminish the incidence of malaria and the need for cash that it creates. But these projects will not have immediate effects. We propose a three-pronged initial approach to the problem: (1) Document the whole extent of the trade. A team of Ye’kwana and Sanema men would patrol the middle Caura and its tributaries in order to determine how much commercial hunting and fishing traffic exists. Currently, we have almost no hard data in this regard. This would not be a law enforcement attempt (most of the trade is illegal under Venezuelan law). (2) Establish a lottery system whereby young indigenous men who currently hunt and fish commercially as freelancers can draw a tag allowing them to collect funds or equivalent for providing a set quantity of meat or fish to indigenous families in need (care traditionally done, but diminished by the available market). Tags could be freely traded among individuals. This approach allows those who have special hunting or fishing skills to derive limited profit from them, improves the health of indigenous people in need, and sharply curtails the bushmeat trade with criollo populations. Preventing meat from 50 tapirs, large mammals with correspondingly large territories (the two species of tapir native to Asia are nearly extinct) from being sold to restaurants, for example, would cost roughly $4200. (3) Sponsor three major community meetings in the port town of Maripa between indigenous people and criollos to debate and discuss how to resolve the problem of fish and game depletion, and to emerge with agreements.
Roughly sixty years ago, outboard motors reached remote parts of the Caura. Where a dozen people had paddled, poled and hauled heavy canoes upriver, now one motorista and a couple of companions could venture. Despite their considerable cost, outboard motors have become essential equipment for indigenous travel. Government-subsidized gasoline, currently around 20 cents a gallon, makes them cheap to operate. There are several easily solvable, but serious problems associated with the use of motors in the Caura. First, there is fuel transport, accomplished using a variety of containers, from rusted steel drums to plastic cylinders. A majority of these containers slowly leak. Occasionally, a sunbleached plastic drum will burst, spilling tens of gallons of gasoline directly into the river. Second, there is transmission and propeller lubricating oil, which is often changed at the water’s edge and dumped there. Thirdly, and most tragically, men, and especially boys, siphon the leaded gasoline by mouth to make frequent transfers from one container to another. These three problems will be directly addressed with the following steps: (1) a watershed-wide exchange of old gas containers for ones of a new design which will be developed by engineering students in consultation with people of the Caura; (2) An oil recycling program, wherein used transmission and other oils will be exchanged for vouchers good for replacement oil; (3) the introduction of compact hand siphons (more robust than bulbs and more compact than hand cranks) that are integrated with tubing, also a design problem submitted to engineering students; (4) water quality and fish tissue testing from throughout the Caura; and (5) a broad education program, especially directed to the young, on the toxicity of leaded gasoline and water pollution caused by motors in general. Ultimately, a shift from two-stroke to four stroke motors, and even to electric motors will be required to maximize pollution reduction; such a shift will comprise a future project.
Please mail comments and questions to:
tarek@caura.org
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