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

south as Kujuwini (Riviere 1963: 130-2), and one Atorad giving evidence in the
Brazilian-British Guiana border dispute described Atorad country as having been
bordered by the Takutu, Kujuwini and Kwitaro rivers, and the Kanuku mountains
(Riviere 1963: 122).
Present-day Wapishana speakers in Guyana, then, are the descendants of a group
of eastward migrants from the Wapishana homeland in the Uapes basin, along with
several peoples encountered by these people in the areas they moved into. The latter
include people originating from a wide area, whose minimum extent was between the
Takutu and Essequibo Rivers west to east, and the Kanuku Mountains and Kujuwini
River north to south.
3.2.2 Twentieth century history: cattle ranching, balata and missionaries
Initially as a result of obscurity, later controversy, the location of the border between
British Guiana and Brazil was not determined to the satisfaction of both governments
until the 20th century following legal arbitration (Riviere 1995). Wapishana people
resident on what was to become the Guyanese side of the border had very little
direct contact with the colonial society until this century. The first recorded European
attempt at settlement in the South Rupununi is that of a Dutchman, DeRooy, who set
up as a trader at Rurwau, near Dadanawa, in 1860, having purchased a bull and cow
from Brazil. Several decades later John Ogilvie was told of two or three other
Europeans settled in the region at around the same time, and two escaped African
slaves are known to have married into Wapishana villages during this period (Baldwin
1946: 36-7). Connections with the wider world during the pre-independence years of
the 20th. century were almost entirely the product of three factors: the cattle and
balata industries, and missionisation.
The cattle industry in the South Rupununi began in earnest in the last decade of
the 19th century following the purchase of DeRooy's herd, now numbering close to
200 head, by H.P.C. Melville, a Scot who had married two daughters of an Atorad
chief and settled on the Rupununi river at Dadanawa. Along with John Ogilvie, a
European prospector and explorer who settled in the South Rupununi a few years
later, he was to play a crucial mediating role in the integration of the South Rupununi
peoples into the colonial society. The major beneficiary of a short period during which
freehold titles to savannah lands were being issued by the government, Melville
pioneered ranching in the south savannahs with great success, and by 1920 was able
to sell out a vastly enlarged herd to the Rupununi Development Company (RDC),
which occupies his former homestead at Dadanawa and the surrounding ranch lands