ABSTRACT
To begin this concluding chapter I return to the theme with which Walter’s words opened the book, this time in a lengthy comment from Nicholas (Toka, 10/11/00) as he talks about the prejudices experienced by the Amerindian communities of Guyana and the need for them to reclaim their heritage, to “buck the system” a I have called it: to challenge the view of Amerindians as backward communities, as passive recipients of first-world beneficence, a characterisation that underlies much of the Discourse of Development in general and that is encapsulated in the Guyana Amerindian Act in particular. In this extract Nicholas eloquently captures a number of key ideas from the perspective of his own lived experience, ideas which, in a mirror image of Uncle Henry’s “indigenising” of Iwokrama’s language in Chapter 6, I will then attempt to recontextualise in more abstract (if far less eloquent) terms.
So when you look at that, what I’m saying is that, you’re going to still have schools, you’re going to still have a lot of things, er, you would still have people that would speak Makushi, and that should be encouraged, right, because what I find today, one of the big problems with Amerindians, I think it’s very important, one of the big things I’m finding out, is why we can’t go forward? Why we are ashamed? Ashamed of our culture, and we know we get this nametag that they put on us as ‘buck’ in Guyana, but we are always ashamed when people call us ‘buck’ and these kind of thing, and they always look down on us because “You are no good; you’re a non-entity; you’re the one that knows nothing”, right? And they can tell us that because we don’t know what we know. We don’t know where our roots are, right? And if you go back to the East Indians, they could always look back to India, they don’t look to Georgetown, what makes them proud is India. And even the Africans are proud because of Africa. 1 [ … ] But with the Amerindians, especially like the Makushis and the Wapishanas, those in Guyana, the Caribs, Waraus, whatever it might be in Guyana, nine tribes, they don’t have nothing to look to, but perhaps a few mountains, a few thatch-roof houses, right? Some naked savages in the fifteenth, in 1492, right? So that’s all we’ve got to look to, look at, right? And then, as our tribes we don’t have any heritage, we don’t have anything to look back, history to show that we have any civilisation, so when people tell you, like, it’s real to you, right? But then that’s if we look at ourselves as Makushi and Wapishana; if we look at ourselves as the Amerindian people that escaped, that came over across the Bering Strait and came travelling down this way, if that would be the right thing, right, if we look at that, then we could go back to the Incas, the Mayans, the Aztecs, and when we look at that we see great civilisation, then we have something to be proud of, and until Amerindian people … now if you notice, the African people have a similar problem, where you find that Martin Luther [King] and all of these different men, Bob Marley, they came back and they started singing to like establish Africa, and now they go back and they start to use things like ‘The Cradle of Civilisation is Africa’. That put something into them. Now if the Amerindians could actually see we actually had links with the Aztecs, we actually had links with the Incas, we actually had links with the Mayans, our empires were great, we are a great people [ … ] So you see these things could be taught to the children in school at a early age; when they coming back you wouldn’t be able to go and tell … you could imagine you go outside and I use this in one of my, erm, presentations, you go out there and … I used to go to school in Lethem, and these boys are coming, you know I used to smoke then, and they would come and say, erm, I would say “Gimme a ciggy, nah?” and they would turn and say, “(xxxxx), buck people have no got cigarettes.” And you know the first people that actually smoked was Amerindians, you know? Then, you didn’t know that, right, so you feel so bad, you know, like, you really didn’t, you didn’t know about smoking, then it should have been in the reverse: I should have been telling them “Yeah, yeah, this is buck people thing, you know.” If these things are taught to the people you finds that there’s a cultural, I don’t know how to put it, I guess there might be some anthropological term [ … ] something like, they could look back at those things and it makes them (xx) heritage. They have a heritage …
