Macushi

The Macushi — written Macuxi in Brazil and Makushi in Guyana — are the most numerous Carib-speaking people in the Americas, and they live across a border that was drawn straight through them. Around 33,600 are in the Brazilian state of Roraima, some 9,500 in Guyana's Rupununi, and a smaller number in Venezuela. They belong to the wider Kapon and Pemon world of Carib speakers of the Guiana highlands.

Portuguese colonisation reached them in the middle of the eighteenth century, and Fort São Joaquim was built at the confluence of the Uraricoera and Tacutu in 1775 to hold the frontier. Mission villages tried to gather the Macushi into fixed settlements and largely failed; people did not stay. A rebellion in 1790 led by the chief Paraujamari ended the official policy of forced settlement.

The nineteenth century did what missions could not. Rubber collection and debt labour pulled people out of their communities, and cattle ranching spread across the Rio Branco savannas. The records are blunt about what followed: the movement of Macushi families off their land was less migration than expulsion, as ranches took the grasslands and the rivers.

What survived that century was a people who never conceded the land, and the twentieth century became a long legal argument about it — one the Macushi eventually won, in the highest court Brazil has.

Macushi country is savanna. It runs from the open grasslands of northeastern Roraima up into the foothills of the Pakaraima mountains, and across the Guyanese border into the north Rupununi, where some twenty settlements sit between the savanna and the hills. It is not rainforest, and the seasonal rhythm of a flooded grassland shapes everything about how people live there.

The centre of the Brazilian side is the Raposa Serra do Sol Indigenous Territory: 1,678,800 hectares holding around 10,000 people in some 85 villages, with roughly 140 Macushi villages in Brazil altogether. Its demarcation was one of the longest and most bitterly fought land cases in Brazilian history.

The sequence matters. The territory was identified as a single continuous area in 1993. A ministerial directive recognised it in 1998. Ratification came in 2005, excluding the town of Uiramutã and military installations. Roraima's state government and the rice farmers occupying the land contested it all the way to the Supreme Federal Court, which upheld the demarcation in 2009 and ordered the remaining non-Indigenous occupants out.

The ruling settled the largest outstanding question in Indigenous land rights in Brazil at the time, and it did so on the principle that the territory had to remain continuous rather than being carved into islands around ranches — the point the Macushi had argued for sixteen years.

Macushi belongs to the Cariban family and is the most widely spoken Cariban language anywhere — a distinction that says as much about the losses in that family as about Macushi strength. It appears in the literature under many spellings: Makushi, Makusi, Macuxi, Macusi, Macussi, and the older names Teweya and Teueia.

It is spoken across three countries, which means it lives under three education systems and three dominant languages — Portuguese in Brazil, English in Guyana, Spanish in Venezuela. Transmission is strongest in the villages and weakest in the towns, and the language is classified as endangered despite its comparatively large number of speakers.

Macushi teachers have organised around this. In Roraima the Organisation of Indigenous Teachers of Roraima has been central to Indigenous schooling and to producing teaching material in the language rather than only about it.

In Guyana the work has taken a different shape. The Makushi Research Unit of the North Rupununi District Development Board, a group of thirteen women, has documented language and cultural knowledge across thirty communities — research carried out by Makushi women in Makushi communities, which is the model the archive would like to see more of.

Macushi farming is swidden cultivation on the savanna and its forest edges: bitter manioc above all, with maize, yam, sweet potato, banana, watermelon and pineapple. Men clear and plant; women weed, harvest and process, and it is women who hold the detailed knowledge of what is planted and why.

The scale of that knowledge is documented. Working across thirty communities, the Makushi Research Unit recorded 124 varieties of bitter cassava and eight of sweet cassava — a catalogue of selective breeding held in women's hands and, until it was written down, entirely in memory.

Bitter cassava is poisonous until it is processed, and the elaborate work of making it edible is the daily labour that structures a household. From it come flour, bread, the fermented drinks caxiri and pajuaru that pay for collective work, and cassareep, the dark reduction that preserves and flavours a pot for days.

The year has two halves. In the rains, from about May to September, families disperse to upland swiddens. In the dry season, from November to March, people concentrate for collective hunting and fishing on the drying savanna. Cattle have been added to this since the twentieth century — community herds set up with the Diocese of Roraima, Funai and the state government, in direct response to game becoming scarce.

Macushi making is fibre work, and its master material is buriti palm. Young leaf fibre is stripped and dried into tibisiri, which is then worked into bags, mats, hammocks and cordage. Tibisiri bags are among the most recognisable Makushi products in Guyana and are now sold well beyond the Rupununi.

Basketry is the other pillar, and much of it exists to serve cassava. The sieves, presses and strainers used to render bitter manioc edible are themselves woven objects, made to a shape dictated exactly by the job, and a household's working equipment is largely something someone in it wove.

Wood, clay and cotton fill out the rest: canoes and paddles, stools, mortars, cooking pots, and hammocks. Beadwork and feather ornament appear on dress for festivals rather than daily wear.

Craft has become an income in both countries, and Makushi women's groups have taken the lead in organising it — which has also made the work visible as skilled production rather than as souvenirs. The archive records makers by name wherever a source provides one, and would welcome documentation directly from the weavers.

The defining event of recent Macushi history is the Raposa Serra do Sol judgment of 2009. After sixteen years of contestation, the Supreme Federal Court upheld the territory as a single continuous area and ordered the removal of the rice farmers and other non-Indigenous occupants who had established themselves inside it.

The victory was real and it was also conditional. The Court attached a set of conditions to its ruling that have been cited ever since in arguments about what Indigenous territories may and may not do, and the state of Roraima has remained politically hostile to the demarcation. Holding the line has been continuous work rather than a settled outcome.

The pressures now are mining interest in the Pakaraima uplands, ranching on the savanna margins, and the ordinary difficulty of delivering health care and schooling across a very large, very thinly populated territory. On the Guyanese side the questions are different in form and similar in substance: land titling, mining, and the reach of services into the Rupununi.

Macushi organisations have been prominent in the Indigenous movement in both countries — the Indigenous Council of Roraima in Brazil, the North Rupununi District Development Board in Guyana — and the archive treats them as the authorities on their own affairs.

The Macushi textile tradition is fibre rather than cloth, and buriti palm is its foundation. The young, still-folded leaf is harvested, its fibre stripped, dried in the sun until it pales, and worked into tibisiri — the thread from which bags, mats and hammocks are made.

Cotton is spun and used, principally for hammocks and for cordage, and the hammock is the single most important woven object in a Macushi house: it is bed, chair, and the place a person is carried in when they are ill.

Dye comes from forest and garden plants, and the colour range on tibisiri work is deliberately restrained. Pattern is structural — produced by the weave itself rather than applied afterwards — which is why the quality of a piece is judged on evenness and tension rather than on decoration.

This is women's work, taught between generations in the household, and it has become one of the more reliable sources of independent income in Rupununi communities. As with several sections here, the technical record in accessible published sources is thinner than the practice deserves, and weavers themselves are the contributors this section needs.

Macushi ceramics are a household craft rather than a celebrated art, and that is precisely their interest: the pots exist because the cassava does.

The vessels are cooking pots, water jars, and above all the large pot in which the reduced cassava liquid is kept simmering. Clay is dug locally, built by hand rather than thrown, and fired in an open fire. Decoration is minimal; these are working objects judged on how they hold heat and how long they last.

The most important of them holds the pepper pot — damurida in Macushi usage — the dish in which cassareep, peppers and whatever meat or fish is to hand are kept going over days, with the pot replenished rather than emptied. Cassareep's preservative quality is what makes that possible, and the pot is effectively a household institution.

Ceramic production has declined where enamel and aluminium reach the villages, as it has across the region, and it now survives most strongly where the older cooking practice does. The archive notes this without treating it as loss: a people choosing lighter cookware is not a people losing culture.

The dance most associated with the Macushi is the parishara, also written parixara: a line dance performed by men and women together, accompanying the festivals and the collective work parties that punctuate the year.

Music here is inseparable from work and from drink. Caxiri and pajuaru, the fermented cassava beverages, are what a household provides in return for collective labour — clearing a field, raising a house — and the gathering that follows is where dancing and singing happen. The music is an obligation discharged as much as an entertainment.

Instruments recorded in the region include flutes, rattles and drums, played to accompany dance rather than as solo performance. Songs belong to occasions, and some belong to particular people; the archive does not reproduce song texts.

A separate and closed category is the curing song of the piatzán, the shaman, which describes the recovery of a captured soul. These are ritual speech rather than performance, and they are named here without being quoted.

The Macushi world is layered. There is the terrestrial plane where people live, a subterranean one inhabited by beings called Wanabaricon, and a celestial one, Kapragon. Between them move other classes of being: the Omá:kon of the mountains and forest, who appear in the form of game animals, and the Makoi, serpent beings of waterfalls and deep pools.

These beings can capture a person's soul — the stekaton — and soul capture is understood as the cause of serious illness and of death. This is not metaphor within the system; it is the mechanism, and it determines who is called when someone falls ill.

The specialist is the piatzán, the shaman, who holds the means of confronting those beings and recovering what they have taken. The work is done through song, and the song narrates the retrieval as it happens.

Origin is told through the hero Macunaíma and the tree Wazacá, which held all cultivated plants and whose fallen trunk became Mount Roraima — the mountain that stands at the meeting point of Brazil, Venezuela and Guyana and is visible across Macushi country. The archive names this cycle and does not retell it: the narrative belongs to the people who hold it, and its telling is theirs to do.

Macushi understanding of illness begins outside the body. Serious or persistent sickness is read as the capture of a person's soul by one of the beings that share the world — the Omá:kon of the hills and forest, the Makoi of the deep water — and treating it means recovering what was taken rather than only easing what is felt.

The piatzán is the specialist who can do that. The work is done in song, and the song is a narration of the journey and the retrieval. It is learned from a particular teacher over a long apprenticeship, and it is not taught openly.

Alongside this sits a wide household knowledge of plants for wounds, fever, pain, digestion and childbirth, held mostly by older women and drawn largely from the garden rather than from deep forest. It is the layer of practice most easily lost when families move to Boa Vista or Lethem.

Public health here is shaped by distance. Communities are scattered across a very large savanna, clinics are far apart, and malaria, tuberculosis and waterborne illness recur. The archive records the practices and the practitioners; it publishes no preparations, plant parts, quantities or plant-and-method combinations, which are not its knowledge to give away.

Macushi building follows the landscape, and the landscape has two halves. In the forested uplands, households have historically lived in communal houses holding an extended family under one roof. On the open savanna, dwellings are separate and scattered, and a village reads as a cluster of houses rather than a single structure.

The materials are timber, clay and palm — buriti above all, for thatch as well as for fibre. Walls are of clay over a timber frame or left open where the climate allows, and the steep thatched roof does the work of shedding a savanna downpour.

A house is built collectively. Relatives and neighbours come to raise it, and the household repays that labour with caxiri and pajuaru — which is why building appears in the record as an occasion with music and dancing attached rather than as a construction task. The obligation runs both ways and is remembered.

Villages are laid out by kinship, with clusters reflecting which families are related and how. Residence after marriage is typically with the wife's family, so a cluster grows around a set of sisters and their households — the spatial expression of how Macushi politics actually works, since a leader's standing rests on the breadth of their relations by marriage.