Wayãpi - Economy

Subsistence and Commercial Activities. The Wayãpi practice slash-and-burn agriculture with long fallow periods and subsist primarily on bitter cassava, sweet potatoes, cush-cush yams, bananas, and, only among southern communities, peach-palm fruits. Among the Rio Amapari and upper Oyapock River groups, hunting is most important, whereas fishing is predominant for the northernmost group. There is little participation in the cash economy with the exception of one southern community (Mariry), which carries out limited exploitation of gold claims. Civil-service salaries are integrated into the gift system in the communities of the upper Oyapock. In the Camopi region, however, there is an increasing trend toward individualism.

Industrial Arts. Until recently, crafts were a matter for the whole population: cotton textiles and ceramics for women; basketry, bows and arrows, canoes and paddles, and houses for men. Since the end of the 1970s Western goods have been taking the place of Indian ones, with the exception of baskets and cotton textiles, principally hammocks woven on looms. Small dugout canoes are still made, but big outboard-motored canoes are bought from the Saramaka or from the Karipuna Indians in the lower Oyapock. Bows and arrows are still commonly used for fishing, along with cast nets; for hunting, shotguns are now used.

Trade. Historically, the Wayãpi were linked into a network controlled by Wayana Indians in an area extending, from west to east, from the Tapanahoni River in Suriname to the Rio Amapari in Brazil. This network involved Bush Negroes, Wayana, Apalai (Aparai), Trio (Tiriyo), Emerillon, and Wayãpi Indians and was based on preferential intertribal pairs of trading partners called yepe. The Wayãpi traded mainly cotton thread, hunting dogs, and feather crowns in exchange for manufactured goods such as axes, knives, cutlasses, and fishhooks. Today this network has been disrupted by increasing control of the national boundaries.

Trade is still alive among Wayãpi subgroups and increasing between villages in Brazil and French Guiana. Along with traditional goods like tobacco, letterwood for bows, and feather headdresses, such Western products as ammunition, tools, fishhooks, pans, and glass beads are increasingly traded.

Division of Labor. Today the division of labor is the same as in the past. Men's agricultural work consists of the felling of trees and bushes, whereas women plant, tend gardens, and gather. Hunting and fishing are men's affairs, but women participate in the collective fish-drugging parties. Women cook, care for children, and make ceramics and textiles. Men build houses, make canoes and weapons, fashion featherwork, and weave baskets. Some men, principally in French Guiana, in addition to their traditional activities, earn money as boatmen or guides or work as part-time civil servants.

Land Tenure. There is no individual claim on virgin land until it has been cleared and a garden planted on it, but in the case of old, fallow garden land, permission is required from the man who first cleared it. Territorial rights do exist for hunting and fishing; grounds are shared by members of one or two communities, but members of distant villages cannot enter these grounds without permission. Those who discover fish-stunning poison vines and palm trees colonized by edible grubs become their owners and invite their relatives for collective fishing and grubgathering parties. These lands have come under increasing threat from wildcat gold miners, colonization, and tourist projects. There is a new awareness of and concern for tribal land. Both the northern and southern groups are striving for official delimitation of protected areas.