Puinave

The Puinave, whose self-designation is Wãnsöjöt, live in dispersed communities of the Inírida River basin in Colombia's Guainía department and eastern Guaviare, with smaller settlements along the Orinoco on the Venezuelan side of the border. Their homeland is a transitional landscape between Amazon forest and the Llanos savannas, dotted with the granite hills of the Guiana Shield. Their language is generally treated as an isolate — proposed links to the so-called Makú families remain unproven — and it is still spoken by a large majority of the people.

Society is organized into some two dozen patrilineal, exogamous clans, and intermarriage with Curripaco, Cubeo, and other neighbors is common. Livelihoods follow the regional pattern of shifting manioc cultivation, fishing, and hunting, complemented by commercial harvesting of chiquichiqui (piassaba) palm fiber. A distinctive feature of Puinave contemporary life is urbanization: more than half now live in or around the departmental capital, Inírida, working in education, health, commerce, and public administration.

Most Puinave adopted evangelical Christianity through the mid-twentieth-century missions of Sofía Müller, which replaced communal malocas with village settlements organized around churches. Their communities belong to regional associations affiliated with the Amazonian indigenous organization OPIAC, and they navigate mining pressure and border-zone economies in the Guainía region.