The Kuwai-inyai, the 'people of Kuwai', are a tribe of shamanic bee-spirits who appear in the curing chants of the Hohodene and the Wakuénai of the upper Guainía. In the primordial narrative they heal the younger brother Kuwaikaniri of the deadly sickness that had come upon him, and so establish the pattern of reversible death that living shamans invoke when they sing over the ill. As beings of the sacred sound-world of Kuwai they belong to the great complex of spirits whose music orders health, growth and danger in the Baniwa cosmos.