Pemon

The Pemon were Cariban-speaking Indigenous people of the Gran Sabana, a grassland plateau with flat-topped tepui mountains in southeastern Venezuela, near Guyana and Brazil. They comprised closely related groups, above all the Arekuna, Kamarakoto and Taurepang, whose speech formed the three main dialects of the Pemon language.

Their decentralized communities lived from farming, hunting and trade. Their mythology placed gods and ancestor spirits on the tepui summits, with the creator hero Makunaíma at the centre of their stories. Europeans entered their country in the 1700s, when missionaries travelling up the Caroní made first contact and began converting Pemon communities to Christianity.