| A mythic narrative
teaches that even peoples unknown to the Yanomami owe
their existence to the powers of the demiurge Omama.
It is told they were created from the bloody froth of
a group of Yanomami ancestors, carried away by a flood
after the breaking of a period of menstrual reclusion
and devoured by alligators and otters. The 'tongue-tied'
language of outsiders was transmitted to them by the buzzing
of Remori, the mythic ancestor of the wasp commonly
found on the beaches of the large rivers.
In order to arrive at this inclusion of whites
in a common humanity, albeit as a result of a 'second-hand'
creation, the ancestors of today's Yanomami had to pass
through a long period of dangerous and tense encounters
with these strange peoples, who they called napëpë
('strangers, enemies"). In fact, they first
saw the whites as a group of ghosts coming from their
dwelling place on the 'shores of the sky' with the scandalous
proposal of returning to inhabit the world of the living
(the return of the dead is a particularly important
mythic and ritual theme for the Yanomami). |
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"Discovering the whites"