1955 WAI WAI INDIANS magazine article, Guiana natives Pygmies color photos

Description

Selling is a 1955 magazine article about:
Wai Wai Indians
Title: Life Among the Wai Wai Indians
Author: Clifford Evans & Betty J. Meggers
Subtitled “Smithsonian Archeologists, Husband and Wife, Find British Guiana's Pygmy-size Bow-and-arrow Marksmen Facing Extinction”.
Quoting the first page “Far beneath our DC-3, British Guiana's dense jungle unrolled like a thick green carpet. Scudding above it, we could not help feeling that we were flying backward in time-back to that mysterious age before white men set foot in the New World.
Our destination was Gunn's Landing Strip, a dirt runway scratched from the wilderness in the Crown Colony's far south, almost on the Equator. Near there, along the upper Essequibo River, live the Wai Wai Indians, a remote tribe whose way of life has remained virtually unchanged through the centuries. These Carib-speaking aborigines, the only uncivilized people still left in British Guiana, are waging what is probably a losing fight against extinction or absorption.
My wife and I had probed many a prehistoric site in tropical South America, but our present expedition promised to be different. This time, by observing the primitive Wai Wai as well as excavating sites, we hoped to catch part of our archeology alive.
As our plane lurched to a stop in the little clearing, we caught our first glimpse of the Indians. They stood by the crude runway, their light-brown skins glistening with red paint. Clad only in the simplest of breech-clouts and aprons and carrying long bows, they would not have seemed out of place in Columbus's time save for the strings of glass trade beads girdling necks, legs, and arms.
Beside these stocky Indians stood two of the American missionaries whose help as interpreters was to prove invaluable to us.
Hours later, after a hike through the "big bush" and an upriver journey by dugout canoe, we reached the missionary settlement which was to be our headquarters.
During the next few days we tried to find out about archeological sites. In response to our questions, the Wai Wai chief recalled places that had been pointed out to him when a boy as "ancient" long-abandoned villages. All had names, some simple, some jawbreakers like "Totoyoguyaotontoh."
Almost every geographic feature in Wai Wai country, even each big river bend, has its name. To us, many of them looked alike. Not so to the Indians; they can locate Totoyoguyaotontoh, or any other spot, as easily as a New Yorker can find Times Square.
At dawn several days later we loaded a dugout and embarked on our first exploratory trip. Our guide was Charlie, a civilized Wapishana Indian from a village farther north, who had married a Wai Wai woman. His English words were few, and our conversations with him were thus limited to simple ideas.
Charlie, good-natured and willing, had one big drawback: he was a poor provider. Civilization had robbed him of his native hunting prowess; he had lost the art of silently stalking game in the forest.
Whenever Charlie went off hunting, distant shots would raise our hopes. Almost every time he returned to camp empty-handed.
"What happened?" we would ask.
"Me shoot monkey," he would answer gloomily. "Him stay, hang by tail."
When provisions began to run low, we started looking for a Wai Wai hunter. Yukuma, a young stalwart, accepted the job, and we arranged to pick him up at his village early one morning. Delayed, we arrived hours late, but Yukuma had made no preparations. After all, what is time in the jungle?
Eventually our hunter assembled his baggage, after taking time to go to the field and cut a dozen sticks of sugar cane. He piled the dugout high with cooking pots, a large basket of cassava bread, his hammock, two bows, stacks of arrows, the sugar cane, and his shotgun.
A few Wai Wai, we discovered, own guns, earned by working for the missionaries. But ammunition is scarce, and, anyway, too many gun blasts frighten off the game. For daily…"
7” x 10”, 18 pages, 6 B&W and 16 color photos.
These are pages carefully removed from an actual 1955 magazine.
55C1
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