Thinking of Amazonia, the reader’s immediate association may be with Brazil. Jonathan D. Hill’s book describes a huge, mobile network of indigenous communities, a network that crosses international boundaries but is centered in remote, inland areas of Venezuela and nearby Brazil. Interlacing worldview and myth with song and story, he conveys on various levels his detailed knowledge of Wakuénai ways. The community used his earlier work, for example, to play a grandparental role, instructing younger generations in songs and chants conveying traditional knowledge, myth, and wisdom (xiii). Hill, who has done considerable prior research on the Wakuénai, wrote this book to stand alone, even for readers with little or no familiarity with indigenous groups or South America. Made-from-Bone, the trickster figure that is the center of Wakuénai myth, is capricious and elusive, like many Western Hemisphere trickster gods, but he is also powerful to the point of omniscience. Enemies such as Great Sickness often pursue Made-from-Bone, and he may flee temporarily, or go into hiding, but they never conquer him, not even temporarily.
From an ethnopoetic point of view the book is enticing and evocative, but would benefit from additional detail about the translation process Hill used. The translations render eloquently the mythic happenings in their proper settings. Hill provides thematic overviews before the actual texts, as a frame and guide. He uses relevant nouns in the original Wakuénai language, to identify flora and fauna that may have no other names. His glossary of these is long and helpful. The text includes spoken interjections that seem to be authentic in their sound—“Heee!” (53, 123, et al.)—some of them clearly onomatopoetic. This reader felt the lack of any sample text or transcription, any interlinear or working translations, from the original Wakuénai language; the mechanics of the publication process may be at fault here.
There are heritage-based, conceptual, and esthetic reasons for including such materials, perhaps in an appendix. Heritage aspects have to do with preserving as an artifact certain traditional poetry in as intact and autonomous a condition as possible. Tracing the conceptual process of translation through interlinear versions, even with a short sample, provides insight into the context and worldview of the original text (McDowell 2000). Esthetic reasons have to do with onomatopoeia, pacing, and parallelism in content—three structuring tactics that may survive the translation process, especially in the interlinear step.
Fieldwork and ethnography capture moments in a swiftly-moving world; Hill describes the geopolitical context in a balanced, nuanced way—Hugo Chavez’s election as President of Venezuela, bringing with him a new constitution and many new laws, as well as the proposition that indigenous people of Venezuela merit consideration and respect. He makes it easy for his readers to sympathize with his informants, especially the family of Horacio López Pequeira, his original informant and chant-owner. Thus the author’s commentary and interpretations – all labeled as such very clearly -- are indispensable guides, not only to the narrative material as such, but to the world the myths inhabit and the people who inhabit it with them. Hill finds it reasonable, for example, that the origin of white people has a place in the Wakuénai account of the world’s creation, because white people, like the worms they came from, are a perpetual presence the indigenous people must contend with (63–65). In the final narrative of the book, an indigenous healer defers to the “president,” who authorizes him to heal injured people in a hospital in a “golden city,” thus making the “shamanic-nationalistic” connection (143–144, 153).
Jonathan D. Hill has written a worthy counterpart to McDowell’s “So Wise Were Our Elders,” Basso’s A Musical View of the Universe, and Oakdale’s I Foresee My Life. His book is a reminder that alternative worldviews have sometimes been able to survive in all their richness and artistry, even if subjected to relentless hostility by external, dominant groups over many centuries.
Works cited
Basso, Ellen B. A Musical View of the Universe: Kalapalo Myth and Ritual Performances. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985.
McDowell, John H. “Collaborative Ethnopoetics: A View from the Sibundoy Valley.” In Translating Native American Verbal Art, edited by Kay Sammons and Joel Sherzer, 211–232. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institutional Press, 2000.
McDowell, John H. ”So Wise Were Our Elders”: Mythic Narratives of the Kamsá. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994.
Oakdale, Suzanne. I Foresee My Life: The Ritual Performance of Autobiography in an Amazonian Community. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.
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[Review length: 738 words • Review posted on September 8, 2009]