Master canoe-and-house builders of the upper Caura and Ventuari, the Ye'kuana raised the great round communal atta and ran the rivers as the trade-middlemen of the western Guiana highlands.
A Cariban people who long controlled the headwater portages, the Ye'kuana resisted the 1775 Spanish push and kept their forests; some 6,000 live today between Venezuela's Bolívar and Amazonas states and northeast Roraima in Brazil.
Ferguson's political history of warfare in the Orinoco-Amazon uplands, the Ye'kuana's contested headwater world (broad regional context).
Sweeping history of the Amazon and its peoples.