As you may or may not know I have spent a month in the Brazilian rainforest at the end of 2022. I lived in a village of the indigenous Yawanawa led by chief Isku Kua. Yawanawa means ‘people of the wild boar’. I went there to do a Mamé dieta, which is a traditional and culturally significant dietary practice of the Yawanawa people that is done for the purpose of physical and deep spiritual purification. In that one month I have learned an infinite amount of lessons, both about myself, the Yawanawa philosophy of life, and life in general. The upcoming blog series is about what I learned from the Yawanawa people about their traditions and way of life and, more broadly, about what I learned about indigenous histories like that of the Yawanawa that still impact indigenous peoples today, and how they are navigating in that reality.
Photo taken in another Yawanawa village in Acre than where I stayed
One of the many things my stay with the Yawanawa taught me was the value of the forest as a pharmacy and with that the importance of the Yawanawa language in preserving knowledge of that pharmacy.
For everything there was a plant that could serve as a medicine: from stopping headaches to menstruation pain and from healing broken bones to smoothening the process of giving birth. The medicine man of the village took us on a tour through the forest. We could have spent hours in the first few meters. That is how much knowledge he had – and he even admitted that he knew very little compared to earlier generations.
Most knowledge in these peoples is passed down from generation to generation orally – through chants, songs and stories. The medicine man pointed out a painful fact in indigenous history, namely that a lot of knowledge has been lost already. This is not because their oral way of passing down knowledge did not work. Chants, songs and stories, and also practical knowledge were successfully passed on for many generations. It was when indigenous peoples were being killed and when their cultures were being restricted, often because they were deemed sinful or demonic by western missionaries, that the process of passing on knowledge faced a crisis.
It hurts me to think about how many indigenous philosophies, cultures and traditions this world has lost through colonization and the destructive influence of western people coming to the forest. These peoples carry a gigantic collective trauma and are until this day recovering from a history that is barely (if at all) in the past. Many indigenous peoples have lost large numbers and with that they lost a lot of knowledge. Since 1900, 90 of Brazil’s 270 indigenous peoples have been lost and many are still endangered – and this is only about the indigenous in today’s Brazil. From the indigenous peoples that are still alive and growing, the biggest problem in terms of cultural endangerment is the language. Many peoples faced restrictions from colonizers on practicing their traditional ceremonies and ways of life and this included the language.
According to the UNESCO Atlas of Languages in Danger there are 6700 languages spoken in the world of which 40% is in danger of disappearing.
The loss of a language means a gigantic loss of knowledge and cultural heritage. In terms of the indigenous knowledge of the forest, for most of the plant medicine in the Brazilian rainforest where the Yawanawa live there is no Portuguese or English name, only a name in the Yawanawa tongue. In the same way, animals in the forest have a very specific Yawanawa name. When I for example asked how I could say ‘parrot’ in the Yawanawa language they asked me ‘do you mean the blue one, the yellow one or the red one?’ – all have a different name.
It is estimated that a million species, most still undiscovered, live in the New Hampshire-sized Yasuni, making it an icon of biodiversity. By way of comparison, only about 1.5 million species inhabiting our planet have been documented by science. – Gleb Raygorodetsky in National Geographic
Fortunately, there are initiatives to revive these languages. With regards to the Yawanawa language, only several elders currently still speak it in the village. Therefore, chief Isku Kua has recently set up the Isku Vakehuhu Cultural Center in his village that will teach children from the village and nearby Yawanawa villages the Yawanawa language, cultural traditions such as the ones including plant medicine, and music.
It is not only important to revive these languages for the sake of these indigenous peoples themselves or for the world cultural heritage we would otherwise lose. Learning about indigenous languages and cultures might be one of the most important solutions for the ecological crisis. I will write about this in my next blogpost which comes online the 24th of February.
Photo from chief Isku Kua at the Isku Vakehuhu Center
The Isku Vakehuhu Center is also open for non–indigenous people that are interested in learning about the Yawanawa culture and way of life. Feel free to contact me for more information on this via my Instagram @iammeijer. I can connect you to the right people :)
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