Wapishana

The Wapishana, also written Wapichan or Wapixana, are an Arawak-speaking people of the grasslands around Mount Roraima, sharing the Rupununi and Rio Branco savannahs with the Macushi and Pemon. Their tongue is the only Arawakan language of the region, amid Cariban-speaking neighbours.

Traditionally they lived by cassava farming, grating and toasting the root into flat bread, as well as hunting and fishing, and made pottery and woven cotton hammocks.

Their first indirect contact with Europeans came in 1498, when Columbus's third voyage reached the South American coast and goods began to move through Indigenous trade networks. From the seventeenth century Portuguese slave raiders pushed up the Branco River, and by the late 1700s Wapishana villagers were settled and put to work around the Portuguese fort on the river.