Let me introduce Peter Joseph.
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The Benab, or Village Hall |
Peter is an Amerindian, and lives in St. Ignatius, a
settlement of 2,000 folks living adjacent to the Guyanese community of Lethem.
The village, home to both the Makushi and the Wapishana people was officially
settled in 1909 by a Jesuit priest, but as is the way of indigenous history,
their culture and settlement predated this cartographic moment by thousands
of years. Of course the village was not called St. Ignatius before the Jesuits
arrived, but had been called Zewari by the local people for ever.
Traditional groups of people have called these lands home
for millennia; recent archaeological work tentatively dates settlements in the
Amazon as far back as 5,000 years, a formidable timeline. The contemporary Amerindians,
as one might imagine, do not really accept the national border system that
keeps the rest of us in administrative check, and are free to travel and settle
throughout the region.
Peter had spent some time in Brazil, as so many others of
this region have done, and upon his return, decided to build a tourism program.
He took a tourism management program in Georgetown, and returned to the
Rupununi to reclaim land formerly owned by his grandparents, but then left to
lie in distress.
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The Rupununi Savannah and Kunuku Mountains |
By sheer dint of hard work over four years, he built his
fledgling attraction at Kumu Falls. Rebuilding a three-mile road through the
bush, carrying one or two bags of gravel using only a chainsaw, and using this
same at a time by motorcycle; felling trees to make planks and hauling this raw
lumber from the forest one at a time to build the structures at the heart of
the project, and clearing garbage bag after bag after bag is a very good
indicator of the man that Peter Joseph is.
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Peter Joseph |
The core of Kunu Falls
I have worked for years with tourism programs in small communities,
and feel that the importance of tourism as a part of the economic and cultural
mosaic that is each separate economy is vital. I believe that working with a
group’s history, and by rediscovering traditional beliefs, music, art, history
and connecting with the community’s past allows a clearer vision of the future.
Tourism is but a by-product of this connection, and important one to be sure,
but most importantly, it is an opportunity for the past to be integrated into
the economic and social evolution of the village. Peter’s project of one of the
best that I have ever seen.
I loved the day there; the immersion into the Amerindian
culture in this pristine setting was a tonic. Meeting Peter and hearing his
stories, both personal and cultural were fascinating, and the drive that this
sort of development gives to the culture and economy of the indigenous culture
of the region is immeasurable.
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