SEPTEMBER has been designated Amerindian Heritage Month.  Over the years, the meaning of this occasion has
been evolving.  In its first years, it aspired to showcase Amerindian dances and music and indigenous dress and culinary arts and crafts followed this.  Today, economic and social concerns have become its main focus.  In this process, the Government’s programme of development of the Amerindian community as part of the general national development strategy has become integrated into Amerindian Heritage Month.

Educational and Health facilities are being established in Interior areas where Amerindians live and where such did not exist.   Properly equipped schools and health centres are being built, and Amerindian youth are encouraged to train as nurses and medexes and to take advantage of the National Scholarships offerings.  Efforts are being made to ensure that Amerindian communities receive the various health and educational grants which have now become a feature of governmental activity.

The transferring of lands occupied by Amerindian communities to legal ownership has continued.  Most important, the construction of roads and bridges connecting the Interior to the Coast has begun and this connectivity will diminish the social and economic disadvantages the Interior has suffered as against the Coastal regions.

In Amerindian Heritage Month, the Nation celebrates the fact that Guyana is the only country in the world where the indigenous population is an increasing percentage of the entire national population and where indigenous people are steadily brought into the mainstream of national life. Today, there are Amerindian Members of Parliament and Ministers of Government. This bringing of the Amerindian community into the mainstream and the acceptance of Amerindians into all aspects of Guyanese life and treating this as social normality is something new.  Until the 1990s, the monolithic organisation of society was regarded as the desirable norm to which to aspire.  Administration and Government were centralised and the Euro-Creole culture and norms predominated, and all groups and individuals had to conform to them or were sidelined socially and economically.  This monolithic organisation of society, in contrast to the plural affected the East Indian community, who were largely Hindus and Muslims and retained many of the vestiges of their ancestral culture as well as the Amerindian community.  By the 1980s, the Plural organisation of the state and society progressively came to be accepted globally and in Guyana, at this juncture, democracy had been re-established in the 1990s and East Indian politicians who were sympathetic to the Plural organisation of the state were influential.  The Amerindian community and their economic and cultural interests now came to be accepted and promoted in contrast to the time of the Rupununi Rebellion when there was a clash between the Amerindian Plural interests and the unitary and monolithic interests of the state.
It is now widely recognised that the Plural organisation of the state would not result in divisiveness but would lead to stronger unity, as is seen in Canada with its Multiculturalism or in the USA, where the “salad bowl” has replaced “the melting pot”.  Amerindian Heritage Month now rests on a strong philosophical basis.

So far, as pointed out above, the early years of Amerindian Heritage Month were confined to showcasing Amerindian dance and music, clothing, craft and even cuisine.  Now, it focuses on social and economic development, such as securing legal ownership of ancestral lands and extending health and educational facilities in Amerindian communities.

There is an important facet of Amerindian Development which needs to be urgently addressed and which this column has constantly promoted, that is, the preservation and promotion of the Amerindian languages before these languages disappear in the face of the more aggressive English and Spanish.  Constrained by the limitations of space, we will briefly mention a number of steps that could be taken to achieve this goal:  Specialists in cooperation with the University of Guyana should be engaged to produce dictionaries and grammars of the Amerindian languages;  a Lingua Franca has to be decided upon and this would be used in official documents and in the schools;  the system of borrowing from English and other European languages should be outlined;  translations of the best masterpieces from world literature should be made in due course;  all public servants working in Amerindian districts should have some knowledge of an Amerindian language;  contact should be established with similar languages in neighbouring countries and proffer help in their language development.  Such a language programme would extend over several years and Amerindian Heritage Month 2022 would be historic if the language programme is launched this Month.