Sikuani

The Sikuani, also called Guahibo, are the principal people of the Orinoco llanos, in savannas between the Guaviare and Meta rivers across eastern Colombia and western Venezuela. Their Guahiboan language forms its own family rather than an Arawakan one, though with absorbed Arawak loanwords.

Their life centres on bitter cassava, which women process into casabe bread and roasted fariña flour with fibre squeezers called sebucanes, while men hunt with bow and arrow, fish and weave hammocks from cumare palm fibre.

Society is patriarchal and tends toward endogamy: each named band holds its own territory and dialect, independent of the rest, and families live in rectangular thatched houses, with a separate small hut for menstruating women. From the late 1700s expanding Colombian and Venezuelan cattle ranches brought sporadic but severe violence, and the Sikuani kept their autonomy by retreating into remoter plains.