Indigenous Women Help Preserve Biodiversity
 

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Jul 4 (IPS) - Indigenous people in Colombia's Amazon jungle region use a garden for just two or three years before abandoning it to clear a new one somewhere else, thus practising sustainable agriculture in an exuberant but fragile environment where the soil is extremely poor.

This was explained by Rufina Román, the daughter of a shaman - traditional healer and priest - of the Uitota-Nipode indigenous community, who for the first time spoke in public about some of the secrets she learned from her mother, the shaman's wife.

Her audience included women from the Guambiano, Arhuaco, Kokama, Waunan, Bará and Wayúu ethnic groups from different parts of Colombia, where indigenous people belonging to 90 different ethnic groups make up one million of a total population of 44 million.

Five years ago when she was studying in Bogotá, Román, who was 23 years old at the time, told IPS that she had decided to return to the jungles of southern Colombia to learn from her mother the wisdom shared by indigenous women.

Araracuara, on the middle stretch of the Caquetá river, one of the largest tributaries of the Amazon river, is the traditional home of the Nipode clan of the Uitoto people.

Román felt a strong call to keep the generation-to-generation transmission of indigenous knowledge alive. ”That's when I started learning,” she now told IPS with a smile, although she pointed out that ”only the preservers of culture,” shamans like her father, ”are familiar with the code of life.”

Before that, Román had been at school in the capital. She thought that when she returned home, she would be able to teach her community many things. ”I thought I would sow there what I had acquired here. But they rejected what I brought back with me.”

She used a large coloured pencil drawing on construction paper of a woman's body dotted with plants and fruit as an illustration during her presentation at the international conference on indigenous women and biodiversity, held the last week of June in Bogotá.

The event was organised by the Fundación Natura, the governmental Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History (ICANH), and the World Conservation Union (IUCN).

It was also attended by women of the Ashaninka people of Perú, the Mapuches of Chile and the Kuna of Panama.

Román explained that each plant had its corresponding place in the body of the woman in the drawing, who symbolised the ”chagra” or traditional garden covering one or two hectares cleared out of the forest by indigenous peoples in the Amazon to grow their food and medicinal and spiritual herbs.

The sacred plants of coca and tobacco are at the woman's head, and drawn across her waist are people bringing in the harvest. ”The work on the chagra gives order to human life,” said Román.

The majority of indigenous families in the Amazon jungle region live today in ”bohíos” or wooden, palm-thatched huts with dirt floors in small isolated villages located in the large indigenous reserves. The chagras are even deeper into the jungle, sometimes as far as a two-hour walk away.

Studies show that communities only return to their old plots three generations later, when the jungle has completely grown back and recovered. ”The chagra sustains the pollen of life of the primary forest,” in Román's words.

In this manner, indigenous people avoid depleting the soil in the jungle, where the land cannot withstand continuous farming. ”The soil turns tough as leather,” say the people of the jungle.

But due to this semi-nomadic lifestyle based on ancestral knowledge of their surroundings, the indigenous peoples of the Amazon need large territories in which to move about.

The spacious wooden hut where Román's parents live is on the banks of the powerful Caquetá river, at the point where it narrows to pass between two imposing rock walls, forming the Araracuara rapids.

Across the river is the Predio Putumayo, a 6.5 million hectare indigenous reserve, located in one of the regions of greatest biological diversity in the world. The reservation is shared by seven ethnic groups, comprised of a total of 14,000 people.

Román's mother taught her that ”we must plant for the animals, because we hurt their forest. We must replace everything that we cut down.”

Indigenous women thus grow more than the community will consume, based on the idea that the ants, for example, have a right to devour part of the harvest.

”The secret of receiving wisdom and keeping it alive is contained in the work on the chagra,” Román told the participants in the seminar. ”Each plant sown has a live spirit, and represents food, healing, education, song, rites, marriage and baptism.

”The chagra is where knowledge takes material form. This means food is sacred and transforms our thinking and our hearts, and educates the human being,” she added.

She also said that ”The wise man may have all of the knowledge, but if he doesn't have a wife, he doesn't know anything,” because according to tradition it is women who ”help men's words flourish and come alive,” and ensure that knowledge is not lost but is passed from generation to generation.

But Román and her mother are also aware of what is occurring around them in this civil war-torn country.

”We know that there are national politics and international politics and interests, and that all of the sights are now trained on the Amazon jungle region. That a lot of stealthy stuff is going on with respect to indigenous knowledge, and that there is biopiracy and oil prospecting in some parts of the jungle,” she said.

”These are strange issues for us,” Román added. ”I am not an academic, and I don't know about these things. But now, what I'm learning from my grandmothers and grandfathers is for me the best university, and I will never speak in the language of another people, because it is another way of thinking.”

”I live there with them, I suffer with them, I talk to them, I chew (sacred coca) with them, and right now I am happy because I can come out with this strength, with this staff of knowledge which, as I was taught, allows us to manage the two principles, to understand good and evil in-depth, in order to live in harmony and equilibrium with oneself and with one's surroundings.”

”Today, anyone can have a chagra. But if the work code that is written in the law of creation is not put into practice, the human being's spirit will not be sustained, and it will only sustain the material part, providing food, but not nourishment,” said Román.

”That is why we say we are the essence of everything we plant in the chagra.”

The conference participants decided to create a network for indigenous women to maintain contact among themselves and with ”white” women as well - the women who organised the event: well-known environmental activists, anthropologists and indigenous rights activists who promote a gender perspective.

Anthropologist Astrid Ulloa, with ICANH, described the gathering as ”successful.” (END/2005)