I was down in Guyana recently assisting scientific researchers, and I spent plenty of time with local peoples, the Macushi folks in particular. Some were Wapishana. Down there, the politically correct term for indigenous people is Amerindian so I will refer to them as such.
I asked them about the Kanaima... According to one older man, they are Carib and Patomonas with special shapeshifting abilities - at night they can turn into beasts. He says one day him and other Macushis were at a logging site with some Caribs and Patomonas, and they were all laughing and drinking at dinner, but later in the night, they had all disappeared into the forest, and there was no trace of human footprint.
According to another man they (Kanaima), are river monsters that emerge at night to capture people and eat them.
According to a woman I talked to, it is a secret member of the village. If you committed a crime, the Kanaima would know, and at night, the secretly appointed member of the village would find you and torture you, before ending your life with a wooden club. If he decided to leave you in immense pain but alive, he would cut out your tongue so you couldn't reveal his identity.
That last story is most like what has been described earlier. Anthropologists in Guyana seem to think it was a form of social control, to help keep people in line. But as you can see, various Amerindians have different versions of the story, some totally unrelated to anything crime or spirituality related.
-----
As for Aputu (block-clubs), I asked an Amerindian from the Kaieteur region and began drawing it and he recognized it immediately. Before I could even finish my sketch he said I should add a stone ax blade onto the drawing of the club, and explained how his ancestors got certain stone and ground them smooth and sharp on large boulders in the river, and how even today, when the waters low you can see the areas on the boulders where the grinding took place because of smoothed out depressions on the boulders... he went on to explain pictographs, high-water/low-water, canoes, etc.etc.
So this does point to a high prevalence of stone ax/celt blades set into the block-clubs. He mentioned that he doesn't know anyone who owns one anymore though...
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by fearn
Wood's cheap in the Amazon. Why not use it?
F
|
I asked the Macushi guys down in Guyana and they said no one around here uses clubs anymore - if there is a fight, which is rarer nowadays, its with "knife or cutlass" (machete). Maybe in some more remote places they still use clubs, but all the Amerindians I met said if there's any fighting it's with cutlass. Down in Trinidad, Tobago, and Guyana they call machetes "cutlass" or "cutlash"... Machetes are pretty easy to get down here in Guyana, so it would have to be a much more traditional and remote group of Amerindians if they still used the block-club (or any bludgeon really).
Now, granted, I only got to spend time with the Macushis, and there's 8 other Amerindian groups here in Guyana: Caribs, Arawaks, Wapishanas, Patomonas, Wai Wai, Arecunas, Akawaios, Warraus... and of course the occasional Amazonian tribesman from Brazil. So it's entirely possible that amongst the nations that were most war-like, and still retain more traditions, and historically were fond of using block-clubs - that they'd be more likely to still have some. I'd bet on some Caribs still owning them.
But tribal warfare has ended for some generations, though they all have stories from when it was prevalent. It seems at most the violence is personal issues resolved with cutlass, or gold miners/bandits preying on other gold miners - but that's with shotguns and AK-47s - many guns are illegally imported from Brazil.
--------
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by KuKulzA28
Found this photo, you guys may appreciate. 
 |
I don't know exactly which group this was from, but I will do more research and ask my Guyanese friends, and maybe I can figure out which ethnic group this was.
There's some chance it was a totally staged photo, but maybe I can figure out who group they're SUPPOSED to be based on the costume and weapons.