Guarasu’wes

The Pauserna are an indigenous people in Bolivia and Brazil who live along the upper Río Guaporé. Most of them live in the southeastern part of the department of Beni, in Bolivia. The people derive their name from the fact that the pao cerne tree is abundant in their area. Only a few of the older people speak the Pauserna language, which is closely related to Guaraní and is a member of the Tupí language family.

== History == Most likely the Pauserna migrated to Bolivia from Paraguay centuries before when the Guaraní attacked the frontiers of the Incan empire. The Pauserna's ancestors are believed to be the Guaraní. Guarayos and Pauserna once made up a single group; one part of that group, the ancestors of the Guarayu, was moved into missions, and the other part remained independent and is known as the Pauserna. Their first significant contact with outside people came in the 1880s, when rubber tappers came to the area. When Erland Nordenskiöld visited them during his expedition in 1914 they were small in numbers as a result of diseases. He visited them on the Brazilian side of Rio Guaporé in a village called Orikoripe. Here lived eight families and except for these there were about 15 more families in the whole Pauserna area at the time. Most of those families lived on the Bolivian side. Their population went into a period of sustained decline in the twentieth century. From approximately 130 people in the 1930 the Pauserna declined to 60 people in 1965 to fewer than 30 in the 1970s. The Bolivian population was censused at 125 in 2012.