Amerindian Heritage Month

How can you generalise about humans? I am often staggered by how unfeasibly different even family members can be. Generalisations about races went out with the Ark (as did all races- except the Chosen People, and a few lucky bestial couples, along with of course a lot of very smug fish who have harked back to it ever since as the Great Piscine Renaissance).

Nevertheless, there are some things I’ve noticed about ‘Amerindians’ as a group which fascinate me. To celebrate Amerindian Heritage Month, which starts today, I should like to start by mentioning some of those observations. Then each Monday I will attempt a ‘portrait’ of one of the Wapishana people I have got to know in Aishalton.

When I arrived in Guyana, I was told that Amerindians are shy. I believe this impression comes from two things: in my experience, Amerindians talk less than Guyana’s other populations, and I have found them to be reticent with strangers. The first Amerindian I met completed most of a seven-hour jeep journey without speaking to me, and would not make eye contact, let alone return my smiles. I thought I must have either gaffed horribly, or repulsed her with some malodorous foulness or other. The following day she came up beaming and threw her arms round me. I don’t believe it’s shyness so much as an instinctive, uncalculated caution. The vast majority of the Amerindians I have met have been both very friendly and very private. It’s a warm yet respectful combination.

Sorry, I know it’s a cliché, but they are happier. This might be due to the fact (from my experience, I believe it to be fact) that people in developing countries, especially in rural areas (I suspect it isn’t true in the capitals), are brilliant at getting enjoyment out of a life whenever nothing is going actively wrong, where many of us developed country people seem to be expecting something to be going actively right in order to be happy. Maybe that is part of the reason why they are also widely perceived as passive: maybe their passivity is connected to their skill at contentment, and to sacrifice the one is to threaten the other.

We are formed by our language: of course the Wapishana language has shaped the consciousness of people in Aishalton. My teacher told me that the word “wapichan” means “slow and methodical” and the word “macushi” means quick, so a Wapishana will do a slow, laborious, thorough job where a Macushi will finish faster but less finely. All those gorgeous details, such as the word for face meaning literally ‘the savannah of the eyes’ and solar eclipse being rendered as ‘sun death’, create a mind-map uniquely contoured to suit life here. Having a small vocabulary also affects the way you view the world: grouping things differently, relying on words less. It makes it difficult to teach here, and to write up group documents with any kind of consensus.

Wapishanas have an immediacy of the mind which is lost to those of us who have learned detachment. They are either out or in. When they read a novel or a poem, the writer IS the protagonist. My trainees could not detach themselves to do a task purely as an example: at the Training Centre we did an exercise to teach spreadsheets, where the trainees called out scores for themselves in various personality traits. The spreadsheet training was swept away as people got thoroughly enthralled by the content. I’ve seen it in all sorts of fields, that incapacity to think in the abstract. In a way, I think it’s really good that we Westerners are able to look at ourselves as consumers, as audience, as targets for an advertising campaign- can see how the writer is trying to manipulate us at the same time as we read his message. But it sucks away our spontaneity. Our capacity for enthralment is stunted.

How much of this is cultural and how much socialisation cannot be disentangled. These are my impressions; I wouldn’t claim them to be diagnoses.

Amerindians are one of the great romanticised ethnic groups in the modern world, along with Tibetans and a few others. In a way, they are blessed by their isolation, and the fact that an outsider cannot “become” an Amerindian. The Dalai Lama does not encourage converts to Tibetan Buddhism. He points out that we are born into a culture and religion or world view and it’s probably as well to stay there. But he gets stuck with a lot of post-modernist Tibetan Buddhists (memorably termed “dharma bunnies” by a rather scurrilous friend of mine in Xining) who shop for the peace and harmony and try to ignore the sky burial, the occasional fat-cat Rimpoches and the status quo feudalism that come with it.

Perhaps because outsiders cannot buy in, perhaps simply from isolation, most Amerindians (unless they have lived on the coast) are unused to presenting themselves; either to impress, or to be understood. Ask a villager “what do you do?” and you will probably get a blank stare in return. The 1001 questions that determine job, status, abilities, social level and background are utterly meaningless here. I and most of my British friends probably don’t consider ourselves vain, but we have been packaging ourselves in increasingly sophisticated wrappings since our eleven plus or first SATs, or whenever the world first held up its yardstick and raised a sardonic eyebrow. Amerindians in the interior don’t do this. The outcome is that the careless or biassed bystander will confirm their prejudice that Amerindians are unimpressive, and will entirely misunderstand them. And I’m not entirely sure that anyone cares. I sincerely hope that they continue not to give a tinker’s cuss. What happens when Amerindians move to the coast, though?- that’s when the misunderstandings become dangerous.

The Interior is a Foreign Country: They Do Things Differently There

Not long out of Georgetown, we are stopped by an Afro-Guyanese policeman whose Creole leads to instant misunderstandings with Amar’s heavily accented Indian English. But the eye-opener is with Percy, our Amerindian driver, who is viewed with great suspicion. “You Guyanese?” he snaps, checking his I.D. card again disbelievingly. Percy does not respond in kind, despite his superlative claim to that identity, at least if centuries count for anything.

Guyana’s indigenous Amerindian population is only 7% of the total, but they occupy 95% of its land, and have done, archaeologists reckon, for approximately 11,000 years. 90% of the population lives in the remaining 5%, the coastal strip. For many of them, that 95% is one place, ‘the interior’. Ten years ago, a Guyanese could not travel freely in their own country. They needed a separate pass for each place in the interior to be visited. And it’s prohibitively expensive. And it is neither comfortable nor convenient to get ‘there’, or to move around once you have. Amerindians, except some groups nearby, face equivalent barriers to visiting the coast. The physical gap compounds the information gap which compounds an imagination gap that keeps the two worlds apart.

On our return to Guyana, we had been catapulted straight into the Jesuit Regional Meeting. It’s a delicate privilege to sit in on parts of an insiders’ meeting when you are an outsider yourself. But over the two days we are there, the generalizations being made stand less and less up to scrutiny, because in so many senses we are discussing two different countries. The key child protection issues are completely different between coast and interior. Demographics- different. Work roles- unrecognizably different. Constraints, problems, rewards, relationships- all different.

I have misquoted L. P. Hartley’s opening sentence in "The Go-Between" because there is a time-gap between the coast and the interior as surely as there is a cultural gap. We in the interior live in a deluvian world, drenched with nature red in tooth, claw and my blood (in the case of the mosquitoes). We live in constant awareness of food, water shortage, death, birth, jaguar attacks, huge dinosaur-like birds, cow slaughtering- what Garrison Keillor calls “living between the ground and God”. On the coast most people live a life more akin to the one I was born to: cars and phones and running water and street violence and sassy children and fashion and abysmal radio adverts for small businesses and junk food and jobs. We inhabit different centuries of social interaction, of opportunities and of possessions- different belongings and different belonging.

Aishalton is a self-absorbed world by necessity, since we have no commonly available media at all. No news. No transport. Most difficult of all, no communication. I remember chuckling at an attendance list being passed by a visiting NGO round one of our village meetings with “Name” and “Telephone” as the two columns, in a place with no landlines and not even a mobile signal. Villagers may understand all the words in a Georgetown newspaper but unless they’ve worked there, been educated there or lived there they cannot visualize any of it. I recall my student last term: “Miss Sarah, what’s a pavement?” Clearly, the Georgetown people running the meeting suffered the same imagination gap- “How can there be no telephones?” I’m told that in the 1960’s, students used to do exchange visits to the interior. Maybe it’s time to relaunch this. Because with voting increasingly following racial lines, and with the steady increase in the rich-poor gap between coast and interior, an alienation slowly breeding from all those gaps could rip holes in Guyana’s skin through which its unity bleeds away.