Biodiversity and Knowledge Associated with the Wapishana People’s Language: An Ethnolinguistic-Territorial and Conservation Case Study in the Amazon

Abstract

Indigenous Lands represent one of the most preserved territories in Brazil, playing an essential role in the conservation of the Amazon. It is argued that one of the important links between Wapishana Indigenous people and nature is their language. The language carries a history of experiences and understandings with names of animals and plants that are not known in the Portuguese language, neither are the classifications of species and families in the Latin taxonomy. This means that these species and Indigenous knowledge about them continue to live on because they are important to the Wapishana people, and the relationship between them is unique. The management of plants has been passed on from generation to generation in the Wapishana language. Language is also an ecological container, a memory of nature as it was for hundreds of years, and even names of animals that no longer exist, are told and revived in the Wapishana language. Serra da Lua region, located in the municipalities Canta and Bonfim, Roraima, Brazil, is a territorial reference for the Wapishana people, because it has a high concentration of Wapishana speakers. The nine Indigenous Lands in Serra da Lua region with a total of (32,20) 3245 Km², are mostly demarcated as ‘islands’, it means they are not demarcated continuously, but are surrounded by farms. As this is mostly a savanna area, forest resources are limited, restricted mostly to areas of forest vegetation interspersed in the savannas. The Indigenous population is 8,809, mostly of Wapishana ethnicity, but also Makushi and Atoraiu people. This paper aims to consider and link the particularities and the uniqueness of an autochthonous population with Amazonian biodiversity and the management and classifications of plants and animals linguistically developed for centuries in Wapishana culture.