Apacuana (pronounced [apaˈkwana])—also transliterated as Apacuane, Apakuama or Apakuana—was a 16th-century woman of the Quiriquires (also known as Kirikires), a branch of the Carib people that inhabited the Valles del Tuy region (then known by the Spanish as Salamanca), 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 mo