included cultural data, topographic features, historical and sacred monuments, and natural resources.

A parallel effort put together an archive of Yekuana visual images, crafts, medical knowledge, and so forth. This written and photographic record of Yekuana cultural heritage has become an important pedagogic tool in the Aramare school the Yekuana established. The school emphasizes the teaching of religion, ceremonies, dances and sacred music, playing of musical instruments, and oral history. Just as Yekuana culture and traditional knowledge were becoming an incomplete chapter in the lives of younger generations, the school became the center for their revitalization. The teachers there are wise old specialists in oral history, religion, and the ancient ways. Their role in the school is helping to restore the status that elders and wise men once had in Yekuana society. Within the context of Yekuana culture, the school also offers workshops in modern matters such as ecotourism and indigenous rights as provided for in the constitutions of several South American countries.

The archives are also a base for defending Yekuana IP in the modern world, although Ms. Arvelo deals minimally with this dimension. Though many contacts between the traditional and modern worlds have engendered apathy and even disdain for traditional ways, through the Kuyujani Originario Program the Yekuana have assimilated knowledge of the external world in a way that has strengthened their appreciation for their own cultural heritage. The program has become a model that many other Amazonian indigenous peoples are trying to adapt to their particular geographical, social, and cultural realities.

Ms. Arvelo notes that when the political and economic interface between modern and traditional is handled by persons drawn from the modern world (government agencies or NGOs) they often operate within the modern rather than the Yekuana perception. The situation improves markedly as people from traditional societies take up these responsibilities, for example, as they did through an organization called the Coordinating Body of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin or Coordinadora de las Organizaciones Indígenas de la Cuenca Amazónica (COICA). She identifies two tensions that remain, however. First, dealing with outside economic and political agents requires unity among traditional peoples, but indigenous political systems in the interfluvial areas are decentralized and resistant to the delegation of local power to a centralized agency. Leadership in traditional communities has more the spirit of continuing customary modes of life than adapting to new ones. Second, even leaders drawn from traditional peoples— particularly when working within an organization responsible for several traditional communities—sometimes “seem to lean more on the national and non Indigenous axis of power” (Ms. Arvelo’s phrase). They work within the modern conception of their responsibilities, and they see their status and ambitions as their modern colleagues see theirs—in the modern rather than in the traditional world. They fail to communicate the link to the modern world in a way that enables the indigenous peoples to be active participants in shaping the link.

Several lessons emerge from this experience. One is that creating a record of the Yekuana’s property that will serve them in their dealings with the modern world can be done in a way that strengthens rather than weakens indigenous culture. A complementary lesson is the need for an active program to maintain and build on indigenous culture. The momentum of the interface is more toward the modern world, but Yekuana experience 5