Piaroa people

Piaroa (Huottüja)

Huottüja, De'aruhua
Huottüja man making a sebucan.
Total population
14,494[1]
Regions with significant populations
Venezuela,  Colombia
Languages
Piaroa, Maquiritare, Yabarana, and Spanish[1]
Religion
Indigenous, Shamanism, Christianity
Related ethnic groups
Maku[2]

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The Piaroa people, known among themselves as the Huottüja or De'aruhua, are a South American indigenous ethnic group of the middle Orinoco Basin in present-day Colombia and Venezuela, living in an area larger than Belgium, roughly circumscribed by the Suapure, Parguaza (north), the Ventuari (south-east), the Manapiare (north-east) and the right bank of the Orinoco (west). Their present-day population is about 15,000 (INE 2002), with an estimated 2,500 living on the left bank of the Orinoco River, in Colombia, in several reservations between the Vichada (north) and the Guaviare (south).^[3]

Since the Piaroa (Huottüja or De'aruhua) were discovered by missionaries and explorers around 1780^[4] they have been an autonomous society with many individual small self-governed villages scattered over a very wide area. Ethnologists and linguists from the 18th century misidentified the Huottuja as three different tribes belonging to the Saliban family, the Ature, Piaroa, and Quàqua, in actuality were three different regional dialects of the same Piaroa ethnic group from the north, center and south.^[5]

In recent years populations living within the traditional territory began to reclaim their cultural heritage and sovereignty by designating official leaders, establishing an admiralty court (tribunal), creating laws that protect their environment, and mapping their villages, rivers, creeks, trails, cemeteries, mountains, valleys, monuments, protected areas, community centers, and conucos (familiar garden patches) in their own language and in Spanish. Under pressure of unlawful incursions into their territory during 2016 through 2019 in the North, South and West by ex-FARC and ELN guerrilla groups from Colombia engaged in illicit activities such as mining and deforestation and due to the failure of the national government under the Venezuelan Constitution, Chapter VIII: Rights of Native People to protect their people or defend their territory, the Piaroa established a Special Indigenous Legal Jurisdiction^[6] which includes all of their people that live in the original territory and the traditional sovereign territory. In 2020, Piaroa living on the Catañiapo River successfully and peacefully removed over 200 armed Colombian non-state actors and called an assembly of indigenous jurisdiction officials.^[7]