RECLAIMING THE FOREST

This film can certainly be recommended, especially for courses on development and its effect on tribal peoples. Nancy M. Flowers

57 minutes (16mm) or 39 minutes (VHS) Colour 1986
Film-makers: Paul Henley and Georges Drion

Reclaiming The Forest is about the competition between national governments, itinerant gold miners and indigenous inhabitants for control of an area of South American rain-forest.

In 1982, a gold rush broke out near a small village on the Venezuelan border with Guyana. Although it was situated in a National Park, thousands of prospectors poured in from all over Venezuela and neighbouring countries, including many hundreds of Amerindians from Guyana. Many of these Amerindians were in fact returning to the area that their fathers or grandfathers had abandoned some sixty years ago when they were persuaded to move over to Guyana by Seventh Day Adventist missionaries. But the present severe economic conditions in Guyana make the new gold mines of Venezuela very attractive.

The film investigates the conditions of these Amerindian migrants, most of whom belong to two closely related Carib-speaking groups, the Akawaio and the Arekuna, and many of whom work as wage labourers for large mining companies. Their circumstances are then contrasted with those of Wally Torres, a small mining entrepreneur of Arawak descent, who also came from Guyana, but some ten years earlier. Although Wally is in many ways better off than his Carib-speaking neighbours, he suffers like them from the insecurity that stems from having no formal land rights. These rights are denied to the Amerindians because they live in a National Park. Yet, at the same time, large mining companies are granted concessions that permit them to reduce the Park to an infertile wasteland.

This film demonstrates the potential conflict between the interests of aboriginal peoples and the responsibility of nation states to implement ecologically sound policies in tropical forest areas. In doing so, it also demonstrates the complex relationship between culture and ethnic identity under conditions of rapid social change. This film was made as part of a special Leverhulme Fellowship to give anthropologists a chance to make an ethnographic film and learn about film-making. Paul Henley made the film while training at the National Film and Television School. Catalogue numbers, (16mm: 57 min): 4RA148 £15; (VHS: 39 min): RA/VHS148 £8.

A.J.B. Colson, 1973. `Intertribal Trade in the Guiana Highlands'. Antropológica (Caracas), Vol. 34, pp. 5-70.

A.J.B. Colson, 1983. `El Desarrollo Nacional y los Akawaio y Pemon del Alto Mazaruni'. América Indígena, Vol. 43, pp. 445-502.

N.M. Flowers, 1988. Review of the film. American Anthropologist, Vol. 90, pp. 487-89.

D.J. Thomas, 1972. `The Indigenous Trade System of Southeast Estado Bolívar, Venezuela'. Antropológica (Caracas), Vol. 33, pp. 3-37.