Haburi, Inventor of the Canoe

Haburi is the great culture-hero of the Warao, the inventor of the dugout canoe and the paddle, who taught his people the arts of canoe-making and paddling that sustain their life as 'canoe people' of the delta. His myth, first recorded by Walter Roth in British Guiana and analysed in detail by Levi-Strauss, tells how he was born to one of two sisters, reared by the toad-woman Wau-uta, and after escaping her took up his dwelling on the mountain of Naparima. Levi-Strauss styles him the 'father of inventions' whose canoe-craft marks the threshold of human civilisation.

Domains

• invention and craft
• canoe and navigation

Powers

• to invent the dugout canoe and the paddle and teach their use
• to escape from the toad-woman who fostered him

Epithets

• Abore

Relations

• fostered by: Wau-uta, the Toad-Woman

Sources

• Walter E. Roth, An Inquiry into the Animism and Folk-Lore of the Guiana Indians (30th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1915).
• Claude Levi-Strauss, From Honey to Ashes (Mythologiques II), trans. J. and D. Weightman (Harper & Row, 1973; orig. Du miel aux cendres, 1966).