The 'knowledgeable people of the forest' of the middle Orinoco, a peaceable, fiercely autonomous people of small self-governing villages who built their religion on Wahari, the master of the wild.
Long misread by outsiders as three separate tribes, the Saliban-speaking Huottüja kept their scattered villages and autonomy through missions and the rubber era; some 15,000-19,000 remain in the Venezuelan Amazonas and across the Colombian border.
1780Missionaries reach the middle Orinoco peoples Catholic missionaries and explorers make first sustained contact with the Piaroa (Huottüja) of the middle Orinoco, who maintain their autonomous, dispersed villages; the same era brings Portuguese slave-descents that push the Vaupés Tukanoan peoples up to the headwaters.
Further reading
The Piaroa: A People of the Orinoco BasinJoanna Overing · 1975
Overing's ethnography of the Piaroa (Huottüja) of the middle Orinoco and their religion of Wahari.