I have been studying the Waorani Tribe, and I aim to discuss all the things that the Waorani people do. I will be discussing what their family life is like, how they hunt what they hunt how they make their weapons, plants and animals and what their houses are made from and are like.

There are a lot of members to the Waorani family and in a way their life is quite good. Each member of the Waorani family has a job to do. The males of the family make the weapons to hunt with and provide meat for their families. When they go out hunting they collect nuts and fruit. They collect the poison off a curane. This is a vine that has poison on it to go onto the tips of the darts to go in the blow pipes. This poison will kill any prey it goes in to. The women gather crops together for meals and use the things in the rainforest to make fishing nets and hammocks. They make the hammocks by stripping long leaves, rolling them until they’re thin then weaving them together.

The men make their own weapons. They make blow pipes out of vine. They make the blow pipes in 2 halves then put them together. To make the darts that the blow pipes shoot, they use the leaves of the vine. They then get the poison of the curane and put it on the tips of the darts. They score around the dart, close to the tip so if the monkey is shot and the monkey tries to take the dart out, then the dart will snap and will leave the poisonous bit in the monkey and then they will die. They also use stone and steel axes. To make these the Waorani tribe get fairly thick sticks and make a hole to fit the stone or steel into it.

A Waorani house can hold up to 18 people. With the Waorani people being nomadic, they will have to build new houses every few months. They build their houses out of a frame made by the wood out of the forest. They then put palm leaves over the top, to shelter them.

There are lots of different plants and animals in the forest. The animal that the Waorani tribe fear the most is the jaguar. This is a big type of cat. There are woolly monkeys which are hunted with blowpipes. There are harpi eagles which are respected as a fellow hunter by the waorani people and they are kept as a pet/burglar alarm. There are peccaries which are wild pigs which are hunted with spears by people and jaguars. There is Curacao which is a type of wild chicken. They go out and get cassava or manioc which is a type of potato that is mashed up and fermented to make an alcoholic drink when mixed with water. The adults drink a gallon a day! A type of plant in the Amazon rainforest is a curane. This is a vine that has a poisonous bark which is used to make the poison for the darts that go in the blow pipes. Another plant is a capoc which is cotton wool from a plant. This is used to seal the dart in the blow pipe.

I conclude that the waorani tribe aren’t very healthy or hygienic. I think this because they don’t wash with clean water, they don’t eat very healthy food and the adults drink a barrel of alcohol a day! On the other hand they have some good ways of living because they hunt and make everything themselves.