Dear Editor,
We, the Wapichan people of the South Rupununi District Council (SRDC) reaffirm our support for Guyanese sovereignty against Venezuelan claims. The SRDC is a governance body that represents 21 villages, each of which has chosen to be represented by the SRDC, in accordance with our right as Indigenous peoples to be represented by institutions of our choosing. We wish to respond to a letter written by Melinda Janki on December 7, to correct some of her assertions which are untrue. First, Ms. Janki makes inaccurate claims about the history of our people. Second, she mistakenly implies that the source of our inherent rights is the State, through the Amerindian Act. Our lands are central to our identity and existence, and our rights do not threaten Guyanese sovereignty.
Our people have lived for at least 1000 to 1500 years within the Wapichan territory in present-day Guyana. Most of the available anthropological and archaeological evidence shows that our ancestors have lived in our territory for more than a thousand years, and linguistic evidence supports a date even further in the past, between 2000 and 3000 years ago. The history of Wapichan people is written on the mountains, hills, rivers, and creeks throughout our territory. This evidence contradicts the view held by Evans and Meggars, who spent only a few months here in the 1950s and dated only 28 percent of the sites excavated, and whose dating methods have been found to be inaccurate by up to 1000 years.
For example, in his book Prehistoric Guianas, Guyanese anthropologist Denis Williams concluded that the Wapichan people were occupying the eastern part of the Guianas around 1500 years ago. This conclusion is shared by the Brazilian Government’s agency for Indigenous peoples’ affairs, FUNAI, which conducts in-depth technical studies, involving numerous archaeologists and anthropologists, as part of its Indigenous land regularization programme and which concluded that the Wapichan entered Brazil initially from what is now Guyana. The Handbook of South American Indians also states that the Wapichan were in the Guiana highlands as much as 1000 years ago, and the British Government relied on its prior relations with the Wapichan during the border arbitration with Brazil, stating that “Guiana, or at any rate the central part of it, was originally inhabited by four branches of American Indians, called Warows, Arawaks, Wapianas, and Caribs.”
The British Government clarified that the “Wapianas” consisted of “True Wapianas or Wapisianas, Atorais, and Amaripas” and that “the Wapisianas, like the Macusis, have always been intimately connected with the [Rupununi] district.” Ms. Janki posits that the petroglyphs in the Rupununi are connected to the Atorad people. She should also have mentioned that the Atorad are among the ancestors of the present-day Wapichan. The Wapichan and Atorad are not two distinct peoples today, many of our people have Atorad ancestry, but we choose to identify ourselves collectively as Wapichan. This is confirmed by Guyanese social scientists Janette Forte and Laureen Pierre at the University of Guyana’s Amerindian Research Unit, who have stated that the term Wapishana or Wapichan nao “is used today in Guyana and Brazil to refer to speakers of two mutually intelligible dialects: Wapishana and Atorai [or Atorad],” and that “‘Wapichan’, ‘Atorad’ and other ethnonyms identified various dialectic subgroups of a larger, integrated group, and the ethnonym ‘Wapichan’ has expanded now to include all the subgroups.”
It is also confirmed by anthropologists like Ernest Migliazza, who explained that the “designation Wapishana spread to Atorai” and that the Wapichan language spoken in Guyana is a mixture of Atorad and “True Wapichan,” which are dialects of the same language. These academic sources are not the only evidence of our historical occupation of our territory. We have knowledge based on our stories and legends. For example, our oral history tells us that the Wapichan and the Atorad are from the same parents, who birthed both our peoples in the Parabara savannah. Based on our knowledge from our ancestors, we are fully aware of our historical occupation of the Rio Branco-Rupununi-Essequibo basin, long before the establishment of international borders. (The border with Brazil, for instance, was not determined until the early twentieth century.); and in any case, international borders are irrelevant to definitions of Indigenous identity. This is reflected in the formal internationally accepted definition of Indigenous peoples contained in International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 169; by that definition, Indigenous peoples are those descended from the populations that historically “inhabited the country, or a geographical region to which the country belongs.”
It is thus irrelevant to the specific issue of indigenous status where the border was placed (by British Guiana and Brazil, without any discussion with our ancestors) in 1904. Indigenous peoples have inherent rights to our lands. The government has a duty to respect these rights. They are embedded in the Constitution of Guyana in article 149G, which protects our right to our way of life and cultural heritage, and in international laws and conventions incorporated into the Constitution. The rights guaranteed to Indigenous peoples in these conventions are elaborated in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It is easy to see that our rights to our traditional lands did not begin from the 2006 Amerindian Act. Many bodies of experts like United Nations committees, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and the Caribbean Court of Justice agree that our rights are based on our traditional ownership of our lands. Some of these same bodies have said that the Amerindian Act needs to be improved so that it better protects these rights.
For many years we have been seeking legal recognition of these lands. For example, the boundaries of our territory were identified by our ancestors to the Lands Commission in 1967 and up to the present day we continue to occupy, use, and care for these lands. The request documented by our ancestors in that report confirms our cultural, spiritual, and physical connections to our land. These connections are also evident in our territorial management plans and other studies conducted by our own people in recent times. It is disappointing that, at a time when national unity is necessary, Ms. Janki would feel the need to sow seeds of division and confusion within Guyana by spreading falsehoods about our history and by outrageously asserting that our rights could somehow compromise that unity. As Indigenous peoples, we have always protected our lands, headwaters, and other ecosystems. This benefits Guyana, the world, and all our future generations. We call on all Guyanese to support our efforts and the efforts of all of Guyana’s Indigenous peoples to assert our rights and defend Guyana’s unity.
Sincerely,
Wenceslaus Albert, Secretary
Michael Thomas, Chairperson
South Rupununi District Council
