Apacuana

Apacuana —also transliterated as Apacuane, Apakuama or Apakuana—was a 16th-century woman of the Quiriquires, a branch of the Kalina people that inhabited the Valles del Tuy region, in present-day Venezuela, notable for her leading role in a failed Indigenous uprising against Spanish colonization in 1577. Her story was presented nearly a century and a half later by writer José de Oviedo y Baños in his 1723 book The Conquest and Settlement of Venezuela, a foundational work on the country's history. Introduced by the author as an "elderly sorceress and herbalist", Apacuana is considered to have been a piache, that is, a curandera, a term used in Hispanic America to call a healer or shaman. She was the mother of Guásema, who served as cacique—a term used to designate Indigenous tribal chiefs in Hispanic America—while several modern writers consider her to have been a cacica as well.²