ABSTRACT
Tropical-forest spirits singing with beautiful voices, fruit scattering on the forest floor, a scissors-tailed kite circling high above the forest canopy—it’s time to sing a magical protection hoa song, or you will die! So believe the Warao of eastern Venezuela, deep within the tropical forest of the Orinoco River Delta. “And so many Warao die because they do not know the songs,” says Jaime, a Warao elder and religious leader. The Warao speak and sing in a language believed to belong to the Chibchan-Paezan phylum, making them related to the Yanomamö, Kogi, Kuna, and other native Americans in northwestern South America (Greenberg 1987:382).
