Rupununi Imaginaries
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RUPUNUNI IMAGINARIES Katherine MacDonald A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Geography York University Toronto, Canada October 2014 ©Katherine MacDonald, 2014 ii Abstract: Migration activity across the Guyanese-Brazilian border has increased considerably recently, and is impacting both the peoples and the environments of the Rupununi. The activities resulting from these migration movements threaten to increase pressures on Indigenous territories within Guyana, resulting in the annexation of traditional ancestral lands, leading to potential losses of subsistence and livelihood practices. By examining these movements through the lens of relations between the Indigenous Makushi and Wapishana peoples of the Rupununi and place-making, this dissertation aims to identify how accepting Indigenous ontologies as one of many perspectives of the world(s) helps in understanding places as multiple. Through this understanding and acceptance of multiplicities, these ontologies also contribute to new ways of imagining future(s). This ethnographic study was conducted through sixteen months of fieldwork within five Rupununi villages - Aishalton, Annai Central, Karasabai, St. Ignatius, and Shulinab - researching together with the Makushi and Wapishana peoples of the region who collectively live within the forest-savannah ecotone, mostly maintaining subsistence based lifestyles. By exploring personal histories, environments, and cosmologies, the possibilities for different, multiple, imaginaries-as-realities of the Rupununi are presented. In doing so, this study finds that Makushi and Wapishana ontologies are counter-imagining places, lands, and territories by re-engaging with the imaginaries of their ancestors, producing a complex set of alternate geographies. In using these imaginaries to produce different visions of place, Rupununi peoples are empowering themselves to create positive change within their lives in terms of how they want to build and develop their communities, livelihoods, environments, and cultural and political institutions. iii Table of Contents: ABSTRACT ii LIST OF TABLES v LIST OF FIGURES vi CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 1 Research Questions 3 The Rupununi 6 Analytical Framework 12 Place-making 13 Indigeneity 15 Social Natures 18 Context 22 Borders 23 Territory 24 Identity 25 Mobility 25 Dissertation Structure 27 CHAPTER TWO: METHODOLOGIES AND METHODS 30 Methodology and Geography 30 Methodologies and Methods 32 Ethnography as Methodology 32 Fieldwork Design 33 Methods 35 Participant Observation 35 Semi-structured Interviews 36 Secondary Information Sources 38 Key Principles of Qualitative Methodologies 38 Situating Self 39 Co-creation of Research, Research Collaboration, and Relationships 41 Reflexivity 43 Listening to the Silenced 45 Indigenous Methodologies 49 My Journey 51 CHAPTER THREE: RUPUNUNI HAUNTINGS 64 Cattle Haunting 66 Balata Haunting 81 Re-imagining the Future 95 iv CHAPTER FOUR: INTIMATE BORDERS 97 In Amazonia 98 On the Edge of a Place 102 Rupununi Border Concepts 105 Rupununi Border Experiences 117 Contingent Borders 126 CHAPTER FIVE: BECOMING PLACES 128 Producing Amazônia 129 How Garimpeiros Arrived in the Rupununi 136 How Lethem Became a Brazilian Free Port 147 How Brazilian Rice Farmers Were Welcomed to the Rupununi 155 In the Flow of Becoming 162 CHAPTER SIX: TELLING STORIES 165 Mythology of Territory 167 Etymology of Territory 175 Documenting Territory 181 Being and Becoming Territory 185 CHAPTER SEVEN: IMAGINED TERRITORIES 189 Imagined Territories 191 Accepting Indigenous Worldviews 201 APPENDICES Appendix 1 Fieldwork Timelines 205 Appendix 2 Data Collection and Analysis 206 Appendix 3 Feedback and Validation Posters 208 Appendix 4 Wapichan Wiizi 211 REFERENCE LIST 212 v List of Tables Table 1 Interview schedule 37 vi List of Figures Figure 1 Jodocus Hondius’s “Nieuwe Caerte van het Wonderbaer ende Goudrjcke Landt Guiana” (1598) 2 Figure 2 The unbounded and unmarked Rupununi 8 Figure 3 Map of the five villages selected as fieldwork sites 34 Figure 4 Map of the early cattle ranches and balata stations important for the Rupununi 69 Figure 5 “It’s just water” 97 Figure 6 The official international border between Guyana and Brazil 101 Figure 7 Points of concentrated Brazilian impact in the Rupununi 142 Figure 8 Lethem roads 149 Figure 9 Stories linked to land, reterritorializing the Rupununi 187 Figure 10 Differing ways of imagining territory 200 1 Chapter One: Rupununi Imaginaries Like gold ... imbued with violence and greed, glitter that reeks of transgression ... Taussig, My Cocaine Museum, 2004: xi. Imagined as a place in the forest made of gold, the dream of El Dorado enchanted the Europeans who arrived in America to plunder its riches and to conquer its people, irrevocably changing their worlds and disturbing forever the ‘land without evil’.1 The dream had already come true – twice, for both Cortés and Pizarro who found their riches among the Aztec and Inca of Mexico and Peru. However, the search for this final El Dorado was to continually lead the Europeans ‘beyond the next mountains’, ‘across that far river’, or ‘deep into that forest’ – but always further from ‘here’ as the people wished the conquerors and the evil they had brought away. El Dorado became the object, if elusive destination of a multitude of expeditions into the interior. Beginning with the golden kingdom of Manco Capec, the defiant Incan repulsed from Cuzco (Raffles, 2002: 86), El Dorado then became the lands of the Musica, a group of people living around Lake Guatavita, near present day Bogotá (Slater, 2002: 25). As the legend continued to enchant, El Dorado transformed again, and became instead of a place, a person, the resplendent monarch of Manoa, first mentioned in Quito, who was said to be so rich he adorned himself with gold dust daily, which he then washed off in his golden lake (ibid). This golden Lake Manoa itself then wandered around the continent as the site of El Dorado, first to the Amazon Basin, then to the Orinoco River (Raffles, 2002: 88), before coming to rest in the Rupununi, with one final transformation, becoming a city on the side of Lake Parima (Henfrey, 1964: 169; Hemming, 1978a: 148; 1978b: 223; Watkins, 2010: 5). European certainty in the El Dorado imaginary was reflected by the persistent presence of Lake Parima in official cartographic records. Claiming that It lieth southerly in the land, and from the mouth of it unto the head they pass in twenty days; then taking their provisions, they carry it on their shoulders one day’s journey; afterwards they return to their canoes, and bear them likewise to the side of a lake, which the Jaos call Raponowini, the Charibes Parime, which is of such bigness that they know no difference between it and the main sea. There be infinite numbers of canoes in 1 A Tupi-Guarani prophesy of a earthly paradise, where, instead of gold, the land without evil was a place where crops grew themselves and people spent their time feasting and dancing (Shapiro, 1987: 131). The land without evil is sometimes referred to as the Encante (Slater, 2002: 58). 2 this lake, and I suppose it is no other than that whereon Manoa standeth (Keymis, cited in Ralegh, 1596: lii), Lake Parima became fixed in the savannahs of Guyana. These imagined stories of Ralegh’s so enchanted Europe that his “Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtifvl Empire of Gviana” became an enduring colonial inspiration (Raffles, 2002: 78), and upon its release, Europe’s imagination followed that of Ralegh’s, with cartographers such as Hondius adding Lake Parima to maps of the region (see Figure 1). This imaginary was so strong that Lake Parima remained on colonial maps for almost three hundred years, until von Humboldt, another European, finally shifted the imaginary, erasing the imagined lake (Henfrey, 1964: 169; Hammond, 2005: 407; Watkins, 2010: 191). Figure 1: Jodocus Hondius’s “Nieuwe Caerte van het Wonderbaer ende Goudrjcke Landt Guiana” (1598) (Watkins, 2010: 190) But perhaps Lake Parima is not imaginary at all. In the fluid geography of the Rupununi, vast savannahs on the fringe of the Amazon basin shaped by the rains and the rivers, streams, creeks, pools, ponds, and lakes they generate, ephemeral floodwaters create places that become imaginary with time, only to re-appear with the return of the rains. These waters are named by 3 those who reside beside them, (Lake) Amucu,2 and are known and expected in their transience. And while locally they are thought to be beautiful, shining and glittering across the landscape, the prophesy ‘all that glitters is not gold’ haunts the European imaginary. Once imagined as the site of El Dorado, European disappointment instead cast Amucu as “a barren expanse of reeds and water, half concealed by mist” (Henfrey, 1964: 169). These inconsistent imaginaries demonstrate the possibilities of place in the Rupununi. Currently imagined as the southern savannah region of Guyana, itself imagined as a former British colony on the north-east shoulder of South America, the Rupununi straddles enormous differences: in watershed geography (across the Amazon and Caribbean drainage basins), in tropical ecology (across savannah and forested environments), in political history (across British, Portuguese, and Brazilian domination patterns), and in cultural and social diversity (across Indigenous and colonial traditions). In part, it is these differences that encourage such a variety