Child, Pet, and Prey: Relations of Dependence in Amazonia

The first time I encountered an Indigenous group known as the Sanema, who make up the northern branch of the Yanomami language family, was during a trip to Venezuela in 2005 as a volunteer for a small North American non-governmental organization (NGO) that provided educational scholarships for local Indigenous peoples. The foreign NGO worked predominantly with a Carib-speaking group, the Ye'kwana, who were renowned leaders of the region. Testament to this political sophistication was their multi-ethnic tribal council called Kuyujani, which was founded in 1996 and housed in offices based in a building on the outskirts of the state capital Ciudad Bolivar. My NGO colleagues and I arrived at the Kuyujani offices one hot day in February 2005 to meet with the Ye'kwana leaders about the allocated scholarships. After a brief meeting in the offices at the front of the building we were shown around the rest of the complex to meet scholarship recipients attending high school in the city. As we walked around, we encountered several Ye'kwana people, some of whom were families of Kuyujani staff, but most were youth reclining in hammocks, listening to music, or reading their school text books. The boys wore jeans and polo shirts, the women sported brightly colored skirts and blouses, some wore trainers, sunglasses, and gel in their hair; others had backpacks, radios, or mobile phones.