President Hugo Chávez’s government is already facing broad public ire over electricity shortages, and the state electricity company fears that the fires could diminish the forests that help gather and release water, and boost river sediments into the Guri, the hydroelectric complex that provides Venezuela with most of its electricity.

Image Credit... The New York Times

But many Pemón, along with some of the scholars who study them, say the fires help prevent grasses from building into biomass for much larger fires that could tear through the region, in the way vast wildfires devastated parts of Indonesia in 1997.

“Outsiders think we are primitive savages, but they are ignorant of our ways,” said Leonardo Criollo, 46, a Pemón leader whose village, Yunék, sits in the shadow of the Chimantá Massif, a collection of 11 tepuis from which waterfalls descend from mile-high rock walls. “We burn so that we may live in harmony with the savannas around us.”

The clash of views on the centuries-old practice is part of a broader debate over the sovereignty and proper management of indigenous lands. Much of the Gran Sabana is cordoned off as either national park or military territory. But some fire ecologists claim that indigenous people around the world have long used fire to alter their ecosystems and shape regions like the prairies of the American Midwest.

Accounts of the origins of the Pemón in the Gran Sabana differ, but some historians say they may have migrated here about five centuries ago from the coast of what is now Guyana, after incursions by European explorers. Paleoecologists also debate how much of the Gran Sabana was originally covered by forests, and when fire-setting by humans here actually got under way.