By Naomi Parris

BRINGING the curtains down on this year’s celebration of Indigenous Heritage Month, the Ministry of Amerindian Affairs, on Wednesday, held its final cuisine drive-through event at its Quamina and Thomas Streets location.

Members of the public gathered to grab a bite of the numerous Amerindian delicacies that were available.
Minister of Amerindian Affairs, Pauline Sukhai, in her remarks noted that while the celebrations have ended, there is a lot more in store for the Indigenous communities across Guyana.
“For the rest the year, we will be supporting Amerindian development in various forms and fashion to ensure that their investment funds are dispersed before the end of the year so that they can have some investments in their communities that will be able to provide some level of economic advancement before the end of the year,” she said.
Further, the Minister reiterated her commitment to land titling and self-development among women, children and farmers in hinterland communities.
“We are going to support the provision of land and water transport that will help many children in the riverine communities to start their new school term not paddling …over the years many riverine communities have been neglected where they were no gas and fuel and they had to revert back to paddling,” she said.
Minister Sukhai disclosed that some 40 communities will be re-introduced to the Community Service Officer (CSO) Programme while 26 communities will benefit from the establishment of ICT hubs.

“At this time, they will be getting computer equipment so that they will be able to connect; currently there are communities with connectivity that can’t connect because they don’t have smartphones, neither they don’t have computers or tablets; so we are going to work to ensure that before the end of the year, that development support begin flow in a much more aggressive way to the communities,” she told the Guyana Chronicle.

PACKED PROGRAMME
Although this year’s celebrations was jolted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ministry had a rich, colorful and fun-filled virtual programme to celebrate Guyana’s first people.
“Well, first of all, today is the final day of Heritage [Month] and for this year’s heritage, we had a different form of recognizing, celebrating the work of the Indigenous people and because of the COVID-19 pandemic, what we did was prepare a virtual programme,” she explained.
“We did quite a lot during the month in terms of showing Amerindian heritage. There were some live performances that were recorded and shown on different media [platforms]; we had lectures on various topics …youth and sports, on heritage and culture, we had [lectures] on different developmental topics and an event on remembering Stephen Campbell,” Minister Sukhai added.
The highlight of this year’s celebration was the cuisine drive-through which saw hundreds of Guyanese supporting the local Amerindian chefs, who had prepared a number of Indigenous cuisines throughout the month.

WAY OF LIFE

This year’s Heritage Month was celebrated under the theme “Fostering traditional practices for a safe environment” which the Minister noted was coined around the coronavirus pandemic.

She noted that this year’s theme speaks to the significance of the traditional way of life practised by the Indigenous people to achieve desirable outcomes for social and economic balance through the appropriate use of natural resources and the environment.
“Many times, what has happened is that we tend to forget, generally, the population tends to forget the Amerindians have been more or less the steward of our environment. Despite we live in the hinterland where there is a lot of resources, the Amerindians have not generally exploited [it] to the extent whereby it is being depleted. In fact, they recognize that our resources are expected to be shared with the new and coming generations,” the Minister said.