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)
Copyright © 2005 IPS-Inter Press Service. All rights reserved.