Cassava is one of the last living rituals of Lokono womanhood. More than food, it is a sacred practice, planted, prepared, and passed down by women as an act of memory, survival, and cultural continuity. The act of peeling, grating, and baking cassava bread is a form of cultural prayer, a tangible bridge that links the hands of women across generations.
In Pakuri (St. Cuthbert’s Mission), women have carried forward their customs, land wisdom, and resilience through cassava farming, craft-making, and other quiet acts of care. These are kinship routes, living pathways between generations, and they lie at the heart of food sovereignty. Without these everyday labors, the community’s spiritual and cultural backbone would erode.
Pakuri lies along the Mahaica River in Guyana, and is home to about 2,000 Lokono-Arawak people. Only 36 miles from the capital city, it is a world apart: 240 square miles of lush forest, savannah, and riverine terrain nestled within the Guiana Shield, one of the planet’s oldest geological formations. This land, teeming with jaguars, tapirs, and giant river otters, represents both ecological wealth and cultural archive, holding memory in the soil, the rivers, and the practices passed from one generation to another. “I would be glad to pass on what my grandmother taught me. She was a woman who taught me how to plant and how to know when something is ready. I’m the only one left from my generation…I’m still alive and doing something for myself,” says Grama Charlotte, a community Elder in her 80s. Her words are not nostalgia; they are testimony. Her quiet is not silence, it is work. It is resistance shaped like bread.
Forming cassava granule directly on a hot pan over the fire is an essential step in making cassava bread. Photo by Visit Guyana.
Mai Lovine, another Elder, underscores the urgency of this resistance. “Learn to make cassava bread, local drinks, farine (flour). If we don’t teach them, it will die with us,” she implores.
For women like Mai Lovine, cassava farming was not just about food, but reciprocity. “In those days, people shared. If I baked cassava bread and you needed, I’d give you. Now, everything is money,” she says. Her reflection points to a shift in values from communal survival to individual survival and the deep cultural costs that shift carries.
In Pakuri, cassava is more than a crop. It is memory, lineage, and inheritance made tangible. While weaving and basketry leave visible artifacts, cassava-making is ephemeral. It is consumed, digested, and yet renewed every season. Both activities hold memory in women’s hands, encoding survival and care into gestures repeated across centuries.
As Aunty Wendy, a middle-generation woman, explains, “You learn plenty from the land. It feeds you, heals you, teaches you. It’s like therapy. People didn’t sell; you’d go sit, eat a meal. Then, when you make, you give back.”
For her and others, cassava is a gift from the Creator. It carries ritual, spirituality, and a form of prayer that has endured even when other ceremonies were suppressed by Christianization. Through cassava, the Lokono cosmovision survives quietly, but powerfully, in women’s hands.
A Lokono youth in Pakuri, holding a beautifully made cassava bread in traditional regalia. Photo by DPI.
I remember my own childhood summers when my grandparents would ask my cousins and me to chew the cassava pulp and spit it out, a traditional method to begin fermentation for paiwari, a sacred drink. Because children’s teeth were believed to be free of cavities, they were thought safe for this ritual task. These seemingly small acts hold the weight of ancestral continuity; they are lessons in belonging.
The testimonies reveal a bridge, fragile, sometimes fractured, between Elders, the middle generation, and young women. The Elders, like Grama Charlotte and Mai Lovine, speak from lived experience, of farming, reciprocity, and survival under conditions of hardship. Their voices are prophetic warnings about what will vanish if their teachings are not passed down.
The middle generation, represented by women like Aunty Wendy, carries both inherited knowledge and the realities of a changing economy. They straddle memory and modernity, remembering a time when food was freely shared and lamenting today’s monetized culture.
Younger women speak from a different landscape, one frequently marked by silence, mental health struggles, and the burden of unspoken trauma. As one young woman reflects, “Being quiet hurt me so many times. . . . I didn’t have a voice. Every time I tried, I got shut down. A lot of things in Pakuri are swept under the mat, behind closed doors. Nobody knows—only the ones going through it.”
Sabana, age 15, offers her own plea: “Most older people don’t know what modern women go through . . . especially depression, anxiety, and a lot more. I wish people would open their minds so we women could build ourselves and come as one.”
Their testimonies make clear that food sovereignty is not only about planting and harvesting. It is also about emotional survival, healing silences, and restoring kinship. Without relational ties, food systems are hollow. Without land, culture becomes untethered.
A scene from a Saturday market, where Pakuri farmers showcase and sell roots and tubers, vegetables, and fruit. Photo by St.Cuthbert’s Mission/ Pakuri Village Council.
This work is part of a larger community-based case study developed through the Diploma Program of the International Indigenous Women’s Forum, whose framework and guidance helped create a safe space for the testimonies and women’s knowledge at the heart of this story.
To bridge these generations, women in Pakuri are shaping Wai Hiyaro Kalata, which translates to “We Women Heal.” It is a women’s circle, envisioned as a five-month pilot program led by Aunty Wendy, that will bring the generations together for planting, weaving, medicine-sharing, and open storytelling. It will be a safe, culturally rooted space where women and girls can share testimonies and life experiences, relearn craft and traditional farming skills, and reconnect with land and one another. The vision is to sustain these gatherings beyond the pilot, creating mentorship circles, reviving language, and weaving intergenerational solidarity into daily life.
But such initiatives require resources. Between 2022 and 2024, Guyana earned about $237.5 million USD from its forest-carbon credits agreement with Hess Corporation. Yet, despite consultations establishing that 15% of forest carbon revenues be allocated to village-led Indigenous development, many Indigenous women and their cultural initiatives remain underfunded. If the forests still stand, it is because these women, working with sacred knowledge and hands in the soil, have safeguarded them. It is only just that a meaningful portion of these funds be directed specifically to women’s cultural and wellness initiatives, because they are the very people whose care sustains biodiversity and climate resilience.
The testimonies gathered in Pakuri reveal a layered truth: silence can be both a shield and a wound, while resilience can be both strength and invisible labor. And women, whether through prayer, bread, weaving, or testimony, are the custodians of continuity.
The voices from Pakuri remind us that these themes are not abstract ideals. They are alive in the daily work of Indigenous women, in the cassava fields, in the weaving circles, in the silences that hold both grief and strength. Rekindling kinship routes means more than remembering the past; it means building bridges across generations so that the future is nourished with dignity and care. Food sovereignty is not just a political demand, but a lived reality that begins in women’s hands, rooted in reciprocity and love.
This is why the women’s words must be carried forward. They teach us that the path to food sovereignty lies through kinship, land, and care. They remind us that culture is not something abstract, but something spread thin into cassava bread, braided into baskets, whispered into the ears of granddaughters at dusk. If we listen closely, we will hear the truth that has always been there: Indigenous women have held up the land, the forests, and the culture, often silently, often without recognition. Their voices are not new; they have always been speaking. What is new is whether we finally choose to listen.
In Pakuri, cassava is not just a crop. It is kinship. It is sovereignty. It is a prayer carried in women’s hands, a living thread tying past to future. And as long as it is planted, grated, and baked, the voice of the Lokono will endure.
Sabantho Aderi Corrie-Edghill (Lokono) is a Barbadian-born, urban Indigenous daughter of Pakuri, Guyana, residing in Sweden. She is an intercultural researcher, Indigenous data provider, remedial educator, and children’s author, and serves as a representative of the Caribbean Amerindian Development Organization.
Top image: Women’s peeling circle scraping cassava. This is an agri-stability project involving approximately 30 villagers. Photo by Indigenous Guyana.
