The creation of the Guambianos

First, it was the land… and then came the lagoons, the big lagoons. The largest of them was that of Nupisu, Piendamo, in the middle of the savannah, of the moor, like a womb, like a heart; It is Nupirrapu, which is a very deep hole.

Water is life. First, land and water. Water is neither good nor bad. This is where the good and bad things come from. There, in the heights, it was water. It was raining intensely, with torrential downpours, downpours, squalls, storms. The rivers became large, with immense landslides that swept away mountains and brought stones like houses; there were great floods and floods.

It was bad water. At that time, these deep guaicadas (hollow between two mountains) and these rocks were not like that, as we see them today, all this was pure mountain, these rivers made them when they flowed until they formed the sea. The water, that's life. It is born in the headwaters and descends in the rivers to the sea. And it returns, but not through the rivers themselves, but through the air, through the clouds.

Climbing the guaicadas and the mountain ridges, she reaches the páramo, the savannahs, and the rain falls again, the water falls, that which is good and bad. There she arrives, like earth and water, she is he-she (The Pishimisak is the perfect unity, the perfect pair; he contains in his being the two principles, the masculine and the feminine, which together give multiplication; but, at the same time, it is made up of two characters: the pishimisak itself and the kallim).

It's the Pishimisak, masculine and feminine at the same time, which has always existed, all white, all good, all fresh. From water was born kosrompoto, the rainbow that illuminated everything with its light; there it shone, the Pishimisak saw him light up.

They bore much fruit, they gave much life. The water was in the desert. At the bottom the plants dried up, the flowers fell, the animals died. When the water went down, everything grew and flourished, all the grass grew and there was food here. It was good water.

Before, in the savannas of the páramo, the Pishimisak took all the meals, all the food. Everything belonged to him. It was already there when the landslides took place which dragged gigantic stones which formed the guaicadas. But there were other landslides. Sometimes the water was not born in the lagoons to run towards the sea, but filtered into the earth, stirred it up, loosened it and landslides occurred.

These collapsed centuries in advance, leaving large wounds in the mountains. From them came the humans who were the root of the natives. They called the collapse pirran uno, that is to say, to give birth to water.

The humans who were born there, they called the Pishau. The Pishau came from landslides, they came from river floods. Under the water they came crawling and hitting the big stones, above them the mud, the earth, then the dirty water; on the surface, the fence, the branches, the leaves, the uprooted trees and, above all, the children, the chumbados, arrived.

The previous ones are born from water, come into the shau, remnants of vegetation that hang around and grow. They have been natives here for centuries and centuries. Where the collapse occurred, in the great wound of the earth, the smell of blood remained; it is blood sprinkled by nature, just as a woman sprinkles blood when giving birth to a child.

The Pishau were not other peoples, they were the same Guambianos, very wise giants who ate salt from here, our own saltines, and who were not baptized. They occupied all our territory, they built all our Nupirau before the arrival of the Spanish. Our land was large and very rich.

There were mines of very precious minerals, such as gold which was found in Chisquío, San José and Corrales, fine woods, fish, animals of the hills and many other resources that we knew how to use in our work to live well.

This was the creation myth of the Gambianos.