Ethnoecology, Resource Use, Conservation And Development In A ...

from the early 19th century unambiguously indicate that by this time Wapishana
settlement extended throughout the South Rupununi (Riviere 1963: 62-4, 114-128).
However they reached there, the immigration of the Wapishana refugees to the South
Rupununi brought them into contact with several other tribal groups. As many of
these came to be ancestors of the present-day Wapishana, a history of the latter
requires them to be considered.
Best known of the other tribes ancestral to the Wapishana are the Atorais or
Atorads, whose assimilation by the Wapishana was in its final stages by the time of
Farabee's visit in the second decade of the twentieth century. He reported the
presence of a little over a hundred Atorad speakers, mostly of mixed ancestry, living
among and culturally barely distinguishable from the Wapishana (Farabee 1916: 428;
Farabee 1918: 131-134). Im Thurn (1883: 170-171) had previously reported that
Atorai, along with another group called Amaripa, lived in settlements shared with the
Wapishana, although as I have already mentioned (chapter 1.3) it is highly probable
that this is a second hand observation. Farabee also claimed that the homelands of
the Atorad tribe had previously encompassed all of Guyana south of the Kanukus, but
gives no source for this observation. However, it is also consistent with a testimony
given by an Atorad witness in the border dispute between Brazil and British Guiana at
the turn of the century (Riviere 1963: 22). Nowadays, the Atorad language has been
incorporated into modern Wapishana (ARU 1992: 1-2) and is still spoken by small
numbers of individuals in the South Rupununi. One resident of Katoonarib mentions
the presence of Atorad speakers in her village (Forte and Melville 1992), and
informants have told me that a few Atorad speakers still reside in the Rupununi,
notably in Karaudanawa.
Farabee also observed what he considered to be the last stages of a similar
process of assimilation on the part of the Taruma people (Farabee 1918: 135-136).
Along with the Atorad, this tribe was by the 1940’s reported to be extinct as a
distinct group (Peberdy 1948: 18). The Taruma appear to have inhabited the forests
of the Upper Essequibo, to the south and southeast of the south savannahs, an area
visited by the Jesuit missionary Cary-Elwes in 1919 and 1922. His account suggests
extensive contact with the Wapishana, locations in the area having names in both
languages (Butt Colson and Morton 1982: 221). Should the conjecture of Evans and
Meggers (1958: 121-4) - that Guyana was a refuge area populated only in post-
Colombian times and in response to dislocations caused by European activities - be
correct, then the Taruma may have been among the earliest inhabitants of this
region.