Ity striving to preserve its heritage
mportant.”
Children from the community usually attend the Wakapoa Secondary, Eighth
f May Secondary, Cotton Field Secondary and Anna Regina Secon-dary Schools.
Asked about how his ommunity is living up to he theme of this year’s Amerindian Heritage Month Guyana’s First People Maintaining a Rich Cultural Environment’, Wilson was ager to share his thoughts.
“From the time I’ve ecome a leader of this vilage in 2001, I believe that reserving our culture is one f the things that kept us trong and kept us alive. We ever find ourselves destroying our environment. We always have a clean nvironment. Our natural esources are always there nd we never over harvest ur forest at all. Even before he Guyana Forestry put in estrictions that we should nly cut certain diameter of rees, our council had lready put that in place. When we talked about proecting the area, although we had no talks with the overnment, as a council we elt that using these forests would make our resources e done away with. So as a ouncil we decided to put way part of our forest as a rotected area. We did this ecause we feel when our ittle children and our grand nd great grandchildren ome up, they would never know what is a purpleheart ree or any of the other trees. We decided that when our children grow up, we can take them to the area and tell them about the protected trees. Our culture is being protected by the older folks and we have to keep that going.”
Wilson commented that members of his village once had a habit of poisoning the creek when the water was low which would have allowed them to catch a great number of fish. However, this, he said, has been now been restricted.
“We realize that when you poison the creek in the low water it would kill everything, so we do not poison anymore but instead do what we call traditional fishing or traditional trapping of fish. We only catch what the family would utilize using a rod and a hook and that’s it. We use to have people from the Pomeroon River and the coast coming in here and setting miles of seine and they used to catch mainly Hassar fishes and the other fishes like Patwa. They used to take them out of the seine and leave them by bundles by the edge of the creek and we felt that was wasting the fish. Because of that we stopped all seine catching of fish and banned people from coming here to do that and we warned our people not to indulge in trapping the fish by seine. Any of our people caught doing that has to come and do community work because we are preserving our resources for the future generation.
“This restriction is indeed working because today, if you come to Akawini when the water is low, you will be able to collect fishes by the handful, because they go up on the grass because they are so much and you can go with a … strainer and collect more than six fishes at once. When that season comes around because of the abundance of the fishes, we would call people from the Pomeroon to collect them, because we find if we don’t call people to collect, the creek would be polluted with the dead fishes.”
The language of the native Amerindians is one which is hardly spoken, but when it is spoken, it certainly is pleasurable to hear.
79 year old Ethel Tobin of the Carib Nation is one such native who speaks fluent Carib dialect.
Tobin who was sitting along with a friend awaiting the start of the celebrations said that it is her desire to see more youths learning the language.
“It have other people who speak the language but they don’t know it all, but at least they can understand certain things that we say when we speak that way. I think that more young people should learn to speak it too, so that when they get old they can teach their children,” the septuagenarian opined.
According to Toshao Wilson, it is the will of the community council to have the language included in the school curriculum so that the youths can be able to learn the dialect, in an effort to preserve the culture.
Curriculum
“We made a request for the language to be included in the curriculum, because this is how we will preserve it. The older folks know the language, so we had said that we would ask them to teach our youths. We had also said that we would want to pay them because we just can’t pressure someone to teach the language in school without paying them,” the village leader shared.
Wilson also noted that arts and craft are done by villagers, but the culture seems to be slowly dying away. However, efforts are being made to have them done on a large scale, since most of the materials needed are readily accessible by villagers. The problem of finding sustainable markets for the art and crafts still remains an issue, therefore, suitable markets must be