Mapping the Gran Sabana.

• Author: Sletto, Bjorn

When he was a young man back in the 1950s, Jesus Velasquez built his daub-and-wattle home on the banks of the dark and muddy Apanwao River, deep in the Grail Sabana. Velasquez chose his pata, his land, well. There were forests nearby with deep, black soils. To the west rose a series of dry hills, the Waipa and Chini mountains, where deer were common and easy to hunt. In the river, the fish were large and plentiful. He built his house on a grassy plain and when the rainy season began, the earth was full of swarming maywak, delectable ants that he could mix in his pepper sauce. He called his village Maywak to honor the ants that shared the plains with him mid helped him survive when hunting was difficult, and he knew he had found his sanctuary.

Today, Velasquez's little settlement has grown into a village of about eighty people. They are Pemon, for whom these rich lands of southeastern Venezuela have been theft" traditional home since the time before Columbus. But life in Maywak these days is a strange blend of the old and the new, people living uneasy, liminal lives, caught between modernity and tradition, as in most indigenous villages in Venezuela. Although village homes are still made of mud and straw and poles, most roofs are of sheet metal instead of grass. A concrete building houses the elementary school, where Pemon schoolchildren raise the Venezuelan flag and sing the national anthem in the early morning mist. But still, the "village has no running water, and no electricity. There's a dirt road to Maywak that's passable with a four by-four, but only in the dry season. Once, someone brought home a car battery and now teenagers play merengue and American rock in the blackness of the night. But in the morning, the boom box is silent. All you hear are the muffled voices of children chopping wood for the morning fire, and the murmurs of men going hunting with their bows and arrows. Women still tend the gardens, bake the traditional kasabe bread, and brew kachiri, the fermented drink made from manioc roots.

The contradictions that define life hi Maywak even extend to the very name of the village. Only villagers and other elder Pemon know the community's real name is Maywak. On the only map of the area, produced by the government agency EDELCA, Maywak is called "Vista Alegre," a Spanish name dreamed up by a nameless bureaucrat. On other maps, Maywak does not appear at all, as if it never existed.

This is why Velasquez always wanted to make his own map. When he was young, he recalls, he and other men tried to draw a map of their homeland--the woods, rivers, hills, palm, and shrub lands--that make the Gran Sabana a crazy quilt of greens, browns, yellows, and life-giving veins of blue. "But we didn't know how to make a map," he says, with a glint in his one good eye. "We didn't have the training."

So, Velasquez says, he waited. As only a Pemon can, he waited for fifty years. He smiles his easy smile. "Today we have our map, thanks to the boys who came to help us. Now we finally have our kowamopo dapon, the 'paper of our land.'"

The paper of their land came to Maywak in July 2003, conceived in the minds of Velasquez and other elders, and brought to life by a group of young activists from Kumarakapay, a nearby, larger and more modern Pemon village. The mapping of Maywak was part of a four-year, participatory mapping project initiated in 2000 by village chiefs, the capitanes, of twelve Pemon communities in "Sector 5," one of eight Pemon sectors, representing about 20 percent of their territory. Sector 5 forms the extreme southeastern corner of Venezuela, squeezed between the rain forests of Guyana in the north and the savannas of Brazil in the east. The project aimed to map the cultural landscape--what Venezuelan law calls habitat--of the entire sector. It was an ambitious goal. These vast savanna lands dotted by forest patches, palm swamps, shrub lands, and mist-covered sandstone massifs called tepuis stretch some 125 miles from the Sierra Lema in the north to the Kukenan River in the south, less than eight miles from the frontier city of Santa Elena and the Brazilian border. Only one asphalt road, the Pan American Highway, crosses the Gran Sabana. Although some communities are linked to the highway with rutted and treacherous dirt tracks, most villages are a four-to-eight-hour hike from the highway on trails that wind through deep swamps and over steep and rocky hills, and through river currents that tug and push at your legs as you wade...