TWO

Hello human reader! In the previous text, I introduced myself and what these writings are about. Shortly: My name is Tulia Gonzalez-Flores, and these are reflections sparked from encounters with local and Indigenous peoples in the Amazonian city of Pucallpa, home of the Shipibo-Konibo Nation. This time, my journey brought me to Yarinacocha, at the headquarters of Oni Xobo, the Shipibo-Intercultural NGO I will introduce in this piece. Their way of being, thinking and working, provoked deep reflections in our collective project Organising from Elsewhere about decolonising philanthropy and research methods; questioning the way we approach things.

***

Oni Xobo

The man skillfully drives the motocar (tuk-tuk) through cars, traces of smoke, buses, dogs, and people unexpectedly crossing the streets at will… to finally, make it alive to our destination. Pucallpa, with a population of 250k inhabitants, is the second biggest city in the Peruvian Amazon jungle, and it is always lovely hot and sometimes bothering noisy (I’m still scared at the decibels a Friday night can reach). I come into the Oni Xobo Cultural Center, a medium-sized patio with colourful kené murals of Shipibo artists, and a wooden platform for performing traditional dances and hosting workshops. Tanya and Romulo, the leaders of the NGO are usually super busy and I wait captivated in the company of three Shipibo young women who greet me and who work here. While they type in the computer they jiggle and speak fast Shipibo language. I am super curious about asking lots of questions, but I fear it would be disrespectful without genuinely knowing each other first. Being a mestizo woman, short and thin, I found myself comfortable around people in Peru and welcomed, but, as previous encounters with Indigenous peoples had taught me, there are ways of doing to which I am ignorant, so I just keep quiet.

I remember how I came to know about them. Whilst listening to a podcast interview during the pandemic I heard them talk about their community-based work for the conservation of the Shipibo culture as the container of traditional healing practices with Ayahuasca. This made total sense to me since the growing influx of Western spiritual tourism and the inaccurately called psychedelic renaissance is impacting deeply into the sociocultural, economic and political web of these Indigenous communities.

#Tanya & Romulo

Tanya comes out after a video conference. She is the only Western person working on Oni Xobo. Originally from Canada, living for many years in the Amazons, she is a Naturopathic Doctor and worked in ayahuasca integration and retreat facilitation before diving into a more interculturally informed investigation into self, healing, and plant medicine. Tanya and Romulo, her husband, embody for real the interculturality since he is a Shipibo healer and they have three small children. She greets me and I feel awkward since I contacted them on short notice, only a couple of days ago, and they still received me readily. I don’t know how to start but fortunately, their children come back from school and make our interactions more natural. They speak Spanish and are learning Shipibo. They are excited to show me around, the oldest brings out his colourful Tari (traditional Shipibo dress) and the smallest invites me to her bath. I looked at the hen on the patio ‘…and this is our chicken, we’ll eat it’ the oldest, five years old, explains realistically. I think of the full-time work of leading Oni Xobo while raising small children. I am truly impressed.

I share with them how I came to Organising from Elsewhere. I was invited to explore how we could radically listen to those who live from a sense of interconnectedness and relationality with the Earth, acknowledging that Indigenous peoples are a living example of the ontological shift needed in the world, one that respects all forms of life and the invisible.

Romulo comes to pick up the oldest child in his arms while going around organising with the team. He belongs to the Shipibo-Konibo Nation, a thin man with sharp factions. He gives me the -totally ungrounded- first impression of some of my Mexican friends who are very relaxed but very smart and political. He explains the context in which they work: 

‘Few peoples in the world still have a strong connection with their knowledge(s), that was kept away from colonisation. An unbroken direct line passed through generations of millenia. The Shipibo, my people, is one of those. There are 176 Shipibo towns with about 38 thousand people in the Ucayali region. However, some of those, in the process of transformation, were confused by modernity. So we had to become aware, to find the consciousness of acknowledging our traditional wisdom, to keep it, to preserve it. But the Shipibo also need to renew and to heal the trauma of colonisation. We are trying to articulate how.’

 The Amazonian jungle is home to people who have truly resisted and guarded their traditional knowledge sacredly. For example, Romulo’s unbroken lineage can be traced to at least seven generations of Onanyabo (traditional Shipibo healers).

#Their work and how they do it

Tanya continues explaining about Oni Xobo’s organisation: There are 12 permanent employees including students, all Shipibo. They work in the areas of health and ancestral medicine, education, arts and culture, and environment. In regards to ancestral medicine, they focus on strengthening all parts of this bioculture so that from now and into the future, plant medicine will still have a vibrant container in which to exist. For them, culture, plant medicine, and healing practices cannot be separated.

In the area of art, they hold continuous workshops and gatherings with sabios (knowledge holders) for sharing practices like embroidery kené, and Shipibo language, honouring their traditional wisdom while integrating modern expressions in painting, song and dance. Responding to requests from Shipibo communities, Oni Xobo supports muralists to travel and collaborate with neighbourhoods, creating large-scale artwork that reinforces cultural identity. They also organise an annual festival—now in its second year—in partnership with five different Shipibo communities, providing a space for collective celebration and exchange. In education, Oni Xobo takes an active role in evaluating Peru's Intercultural Bilingual Education Program. They aim to amplify the voices of Shipibo families, ensuring that educational initiatives reflect their aspirations for their children's future.

Their work is rooted in deep, long-term relationships with Shipibo communities, including remote places, to listen to their needs and desires deeply. They are working to unify a collectivity that has been divided over the past few decades since the influx of Western and capitalist culture. A large part of this has to do with interest in Ayahuasca, as well as extractive industries like wood and oil, deforesting the jungle and producing wealth for few but not helping the community’s systemic problems. As such, they are funded by the Indigenous Medicine Conservation Fund, which works with a radical philanthropic paradigm that gives the entire leadership and implementation to Indigenous communities on the ground. This fund also supports efforts by the Union of Onanyabo and Traditional Medical Practitioners of the Shipibo Konibo (ASOMASHK).

#Critique of Western research

Engaging conversations with Tanya and Romulo about radical listening brought them to point out two critiques, simultaneously simple and profound, shedding light on the coloniality behind research efforts in their context and how this is quite difficult to see for people trained in the Eurocentric academy. 

1. Entitlement and Western benevolent thinking about research.

Tanya explained that ‘many students doing their thesis have come to the Shipibo communities. Anthropologists, filmmakers, and other researchers had come making big promises and plans. But when they finish their thesis, they graduate and are never seen again, leaving behind mistrust. Also, they come with an entitlement, which many times is not on purpose, but not seeing that they come to take something…’ When she points to this, I cannot help thinking about the times I have seen colleagues, students, or friends doing their thesis, not aware of the entitlement that people will answer our questions just because we are trying to help (in terms of what help means to us). Deep questions are not asked genuinely, such as: whose interest does this research serve, really? 

The notion of science and academic training have developed the belief that research is always for the benefit of mankind, it is so taken for granted that most researchers and students embody this ideal that they are natural representatives of it (Smith, 1999). However, Indigenous peoples have other stories to tell that not only challenge the assumed nature of those ideals but hold an alternative narrative, the history of research through the eyes of the colonised (Ibid). Invoking the words of the Māori academic Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999):

‘From the vantage point of the colonised, a position from which I write, and choose to privilege, the term research is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism… It galls us that Western researchers and intellectuals can assume to know all that it is possible to know of us, on the basis of their brief encounters with some of us. It appals us that the West can desire, extract and claim ownership of our ways of knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce, and then simultaneously reject the people who created and developed those ideas and seek to deny them further opportunities to be creators of their own culture and own nations.’

Reading the history of Eurocentric research through the bodies of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Africa, and Polynesia always makes me tremble in awe of what we as a society considered to be ethical for the benefit of science. Although the history of different Indigenous Nations around the world is unique, as unique are their territories, I choose to read in collectivity this text to remember that science and anthropology had been a coloniser tool.

The second observation is one question that opened us to wider conversations about what is considered knowledge, the methods we use to produce, find it, or pass it over generations:

2. If you want to organise differently why choose methods and tools developed by the dominant culture?

This question may seem impossible for someone who believes that knowledge comes from people with an academic background and a set of rules and conventions of how it looks. However, surprisingly for some, assumptions that science looks like books, labs, and academic papers are because the Western system of knowledge has become the norm globally, and its methodologies are the only ones considered appropriate for knowledge production. This is what the seemingly remote word epistemology means: the theory of how we come to know things, why something is considered true, and what the sources of knowledge are.

The Shipibo and other Indigenous peoples have their forms for producing knowledge, their priorities of research, their experts, and their methodologies for doing science. In the words of Smith: ‘We [the Māori people] have a different epistemological tradition that frames the way we see the world, the way we organise ourselves in it, the questions we ask, and the solutions we seek (1999).’ So, researchers from the Eurocentric education system come with an underlying superiority in deciding what knowledge is there to be discovered, where it is allocated, the timeframe in which you can obtain it, and a moral authority to their right to access knowledge. For example, in some Indigenous communities, if you ask where to find knowledge, people have a natural drive to point to the elders, and this tells about the differences in knowledge allocation between cultures. Also, people would have to gain the right to have access to knowledge by being tested or overcoming sometimes unimaginable ordeals (such as walking a mountain, fasting for days, or defeating unknown enemies) only then would one have the right to the next piece of knowledge; and perhaps some forms of Indigenous knowledge cannot even come to be known (Smith, Lecture 2019).

This writing does not pretend to be a total criticising of Eurocentric science but to highlight that there is more than one system of knowledge. And to remember that as all master’s tools,without a deep reflection on how research is being used, by whom, and what is the underlying agenda, we risk replicating the system of injustice we wish to change.

#Decolonising research methods (our reflections)

The meeting ends and the kids are happy to have full attention for eating and bathing. I come back to the lodge to write a long email to Wolfgang and Gully about the encounters with Elsa, Edwin, and the Oni Xobo team for what is the start of fresh conversations. This collective project has been and still is in constant transformation, moving not in a linear way but circulating between thinking we know what is next, realising previously unseen perspectives, reflecting, sharing, and re-adjusting again: as a creative process that goes in a spiral shape. The following are some of our reflections after the encounters in Pucallpa:

• Indigenous knowledge(s) are alive within a body, a community, and a territory; hence, they are lived, non-static, and collective.

• To be in right relations requires constant reflexivity at every stage; for example, to reflect on our cultural context and the power dynamics at play, to analyse our emotions/thoughts, to inform through Indigenous scholars and to critique our preconceptions.

• To radically listen to Indigenous communities, the way by which the listening is done, cannot itself be another form of extraction.

• Assumptions about how knowledge is created (what questions to ask, what knowledge is, and how to collect it) need to be analysed and the approach reframed.

• Being in authentic relationships and acknowledging Indigenous ways of knowledge we might find a bridge to where we can collaborate.

• Indigenous peoples will work on research that relates to their priorities and problems. The context of these priorities is often the search for articulating resistance to the formation of new ways of colonialism. In the Shipibo context, one of these potential new forms of colonialism and extractivism is regarding plant medicine and traditional healing practices, particularly those related to Ayahuasca.

#From organising to right relations

After these talks, an experimental Zoom meeting, and meditations, we reaffirm with a wider perspective the initial purpose of invoking right relations for engaging with communities, collaborators, and places. This includes epistemic justice, which is about the fair relationship in the realm of knowledge, knowledge production, and how knowledge is represented.

For closing our meeting with Tanya and Romulo, we asked if they believed we could find a way to listen and understand in which our Western logic does not ‘eat up’ the Indigenous wisdom to divert it into something else under the paradigm of the current extractive system. Tanya said, when referring to models of healthcare, for example, that it might be not one or another way, but something totally new out of the bridging of both that we don’t know what it will look like.

While Romulo responded: ‘First comes the right intention, the heart, and to have faith. Then comes the search holding that tightly. We need to find that consciousness where we can bridge both worlds. Honouring our ancestors and their wisdom, and opening ourselves to understand what about this knowledge is important to articulate with others to bring understanding on how to live in connection with all living forms. We all are humans, stepping on the same Earth, and as such, all have the same interior being which is the World itself, so we all can learn. We all have the potential for wisdom.’

ONE

I arrived in Pucallpa, one of the two major cities in the Amazonian jungle, on a warm evening in May. At the exit of the airport, I was received by a group of people dressing in traditional Indigenous Shipibo-Konibo clothing: tari (robes) by men and chitonti (skirts) by women, with beautiful and colourful embroidery of what is considered now the cultural patrimony of Peru: Kené. They were singing to the travellers and welcoming us, but for some reason, I felt a bit uncomfortable as a tourist. As soon as I was outside, I was intercepted by several men asking if I wanted a motorcar (tuk-tuk); I ran away from the multitude to the one where it was parked the farthest. I am accustomed to Peru now, in the last three years, I have spent at least half of my time as a translator in the jungle but never in the cities.

We drove to a small neighbourhood 40 minutes outside the city; on the wall of the Lodge entrance, the sign “Shipibo Collective” got my attention. It was literary in English. The owners of the place I choose to stay are also Shipibo family. A relative received me since the family had taken some visitors inside the jungle to see a curandero (a traditional healer). The place was a green area with a big mango tree in the middle, plants and flowers as in the tropics blooming all the time. Each of the cabins had the name of a medicinal plant. I was located in one of the more rustic spaces under the name of Piñón Colorado. I smelled the humidity of the jungle; my skin was sticky and hot, and mosquitoes were around my legs. I loved all that. San José de Yarinacocha is quiet in comparison with the turbulence of Pucallpa. The crickets and frogs started the evening concert while I was unpacking. I was sitting on the terrace to drink a glass of water when I realised that, right in front of my cabin, there was a magnificent giant mural: an elderly woman with deep-dark straight hair, a penetrating gaze, dressed in an electric blue shirt with pink and yellow ruffles on the neck. The image was too familiar to me; I recognised her; she is Maestra Olivia Arévalo, a highly regarded Shipibo curandera and activist who died in her eighties murdered by a Canadian tourist. After a moment reflecting on her and her death, I took a mapacho (a wild tobacco cigar) from my bag and went downstairs. I did what the Mestros had taught me: I quietly introduced myself as Tulia from the Cerro Gordo outskirts in Teotihuacan, Mexico, and I asked for her permission to be here.

***

Elsa

The week is starting, and besides eating grilled fish with funny names such as “palomera,” grilled plantains and “chapo” (banana drink) instead of coffee in the morning, my search for the people I came to introduce myself and the team also starts now. Looking up Google Maps for the location I will go to, I find a little coffee shop two blocks apart from the place. The cafetería seems set up for foreigners looking for coffee as early as 7:30 am and serves vegetarian and vegan options. The owner is a local woman, so I decide to take a motocar there before my meeting.

Elsa greets me, she is a Peruvian mestizo woman from Lima who moved here five years ago. I acknowledge her as mestiza because she literally tells me that. I find it revealing that she adds this characteristic while introducing herself to a foreigner. I ask a couple of questions about the area and if she likes it here… She answers -what to me seems- very smartly. I notice a big pile of books ranging from history to spirituality to plants on the shelves. Shipibo kené art pieces and handicrafts hang on the walls. And there is organic, non-GMO peanut butter and other difficult-to-find foods like almond milk for sale. I am looking all around, enjoying my peanut butter smoothie, when…  What did you come for? She asks very to the point. I’m a bit surprised since it is not the usual way many of us Latin American people approach; we tend to go a bit around the topic first. However, I feel comfortable with the tone. I tell her I’m part of a project/collective that wants to engage and talk with a Shipibo/Intercultural NGO here in Pucallpa. “You are within the 1% of people that do not come here for Ayahuasca, then.”

#Ayahuasca

I disclose personal things. I desire to relate with Elsa as a person and not only as an observer. While still, I find myself aware of an underlying desire to keep the conversation open. I tell her I had received a treatment by a Shipibo Maestro before, which included Ayahuasca. Then, I repeat, this trip to Pucallpa does not have this intention at all.“I knew you had done Aya; otherwise, we wouldn’t be talking like this; the medicine connects people” I think she’s right, but I also see we are in a kind of balanced position to allow ourselves to be open. I am also a mestizo woman, about the same age, living in a rural area. We both went to university and moved to other towns, and she is outspoken and confident. She doesn’t seem to try to please me besides being her customer in a coffee shop. In this way, we engage in a vivid, refreshing, and a bit opinionated conversation.

I tell her I support Indigenous efforts for cultural conservation and sovereignty, including their healing and plant knowledge practices. “It doesn’t matter if you are a foreigner; believe it or not, the plants teach you,” she answers. “For example, my Spanish friend, who was an ex-addict and came to heal himself, connected very strongly with the medicine, so he started serving Aya to others. She looks at me, waiting for my reaction. “This is exactly the person I would never go to if I were looking for Aya,” I answer. She laughs hard; the environment feels like friends discussing more than convincing each other. She continues her kitchen cores.“The majority come to drink Ayahuasca, but they don’t go into a Dieta. For example, my Spanish friend, when he started to give to others, he didn’t know what he was doing, and I told him, cuz I don’t hold my words, I told him: ‘Hey, you don’t know what you are doing, you need to go into a Dieta.’ I haven’t dieted myself, but I knew he needed a Dieta if he wanted to give aya to other people. So he looked around for a Shipibo shaman. He dieted for a month or so, and now he is doing very well (economically). He bought some land, and he works there. As a background, a Dieta is a traditional practice of the Amazon Indigenous Nations, where people abstain from certain activities and foods while remaining isolated in nature for a certain period under the guidance of a Maestro curandero; with many purposes, including healing or training. In the Shipibo tradition, it takes years to become a curandero; some started ‘dieting’ from the age of 5-10, or at least for a good amount of years, inheriting the knowledge from their family lineage.

My heart is a bit sore to hear this -unfortunately common- story about a Western person, who comes for healing, finds a significant spiritual experience, and without thinking about privilege, colonialism, or cultural appropriation, buys some land and opens a ‘healing centre’ charging ten times more the price than a local. Before I can answer from a frustrated mood, her phone rings. She speaks very good English to someone on the other side of the line. When she hangs, I appraise her English.

#Western Philanthropy

“I have many foreign friends, and I know many Shipibos as well. One day, a gringo friend saw the Shipibo and said, ‘Oh, poor people, I will help them build a well in the community’. But I told him: My friend, they are not as poor as you think; if you support building a well, then ask that uncles, brothers, and fathers come to learn how to give maintenance to that well, and you don’t have to pay for labour, they can help with that. The Shipibos come and say to me, ‘I don’t have money.’I tell them: what do you know to do? And they bring their art (she shows me the wide variety of Shipibo kené in the shop for sale), and sometimes we become friends.” I remember what a Shipibo Maestra told me once: that there have been many ‘projects’ from people wanting to help, both Westerns and from the Government, and very, very few with success of some kind. She explained that sometimes they bring chaos to the community when promises are broken, the project creates conflicts between different points of view, or when some Shipibos that ‘have changed’ look to take some advantage over others.

In the Shipibo culture, there is no ‘saving money,’ If you give them 10,000 soles, it is the same amount they will spend. They live day-to-day because they are accustomed to not paying for water or electricity, and they can bring their food from the jungle. I respect their way of living, of not thinking about the future; this is them.” Her reflection reminds me of an amazing lecture by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a Nishnaabeg academic, artist, and activist from Turtle Island. One of the examples she gave was that Indigenous people do not have a savings account because their investments are in relationships. When someone gives to another, let’s say, bringing a pie to the neighbour, they don’t think they are ‘losing something,’ she explained. They are investing in a relationship. For years and years, they did this, so when a community struggled for food, their neighbour community would support them… and the opposite is true.

With this, the least I would like to do is discourage external support and good intentions. We need to keep doing the best we can while reflecting deeper. However, in Peru and other countries, including the so-called ‘developed’, philanthropy, in many cases, reproduces the logic of the ‘rich and the poor,’ taking away the agency of the communities and bringing up plans and programs they haven’t participated in the creation of. Most of the time, the paternalistic attitude of ‘we know better what is best for you,’ based on rationalism and ‘scientific research’ does not acknowledge Indigenous wisdom and resilience.

Two main themes emerged in my conversation with Elsa that portray the underlying ontology of separation and capitalism that dominate our world. Philanthropy and Indigenous healing practices with sacred plants. The latest considered part of “the psychedelic renaissance,” which may good be a satire, considering that the historical context of the Renaissance is the imperialist expansion of Europe and that Indigenous cultures never stopped using these plants; it is just that the Western world was not aware of them.

We live right now in the “house that modernity built,” with narratives engraved in our minds and bodies that include dispossession, genocide, and ecocide as part of ‘progress,’ ‘growth’” and ‘development.’

Edwin

I am invited to the OniXobo headquarters, an Intercultural/Shipibo NGO, to an event with traditional dances and food. They are gathering funds to send essential needs like soap to the Shipibo in jail. It’s a bit late when I’m able to arrive. The event started quite early; by now, there are only a couple of tables with music from a speaker (the live traditional music is over). I greet a couple of women I met the other day, ask for a grilled chicken with maduro, and sit with a group of men, all speaking in the Shipibo language.

“Can I?” the youngest of them asks me, serving me beer in a very small cup, only half of it. His name is Edwin; he introduced himself in Spanish. He dresses in tight black pants and a white shirt in a way that reminds me of my fellow nurse colleagues back in the university. Or maybe it is his short and well-groomed hair. Very smiley, he asks my name and why I came to Pucallpa. He moves his hands excitedly and pronounces the words with singular clarity.

#Power Dynamics

I told him my name and that I am from the centre of Mexico. I live on a ranch on a mountain. However, I am self-conscious when I answer the second question: Why did I come to Pucallpa?

-I came to meet the people from OniXobo and introduce myself so that we can, maybe, work together in the future.

-Why OniXobo? He asks.

-Because I would like to learn more about the Shipibo culture.

-Ah! You are researching! He says, stressing on the last word in a particular manner. Then I remembered what someone told me about the anthropology and filmmaking students who come to the Shipibos to do their theses, making promises, but when they finish and graduate, they leave and are never seen again.

-Well, I’d like to know more about you and the OniXobo team.

-Can I? I nod, and he pours beer into the very small plastic glass, literally three sips. He stops to think for a moment and repeats, “You are investigating me.” He laughs and points at me with his finger. I feel exposed.

-I guess… but you can also investigate me. I tell him to ask any questions regarding my life, where I am from, how old I am, what I do for work, etc. However, I still feel I am protecting myself somehow and ask myself what I am really doing. It is clear to him—and he makes me aware of—the power dynamics.

-So, are you researching the Shipibo? Then you go with another community, then another?  I tell him I know a bit about the Ashaninka, the Huni Kuin, and the Quero… but I am not looking to meet people belonging to these communities.

-But you know about them, you have read about us… Ok, he gets me here.

-I think we never finish meeting a person or a community because you are present, not only in the past.

-Well, yes, if I go to your country and research your people, how’s your culture… I cannot ever finish! He keeps quiet for a while.

-Who are your friends?

-They are from England and the Netherlands, mostly.

-They are powerful.

-They are quite average people…

-They are powerful. He repeats, smiling. I keep quiet for a while this time.

Power permeates everything that we do; it is relational and changes with situations and context. Every time we interact with somebody else, power relations are there. It doesn’t mean we are conscious of this all the time. Several characteristics, such as gender, age, socio-economic status, cultural capital, ethnicity, spoken language, sexual orientation, and others, affect these relationships (Berger, 2015). And in this case, Edwin makes the point that I have ‘read about them,’ which is an unbalanced position of knowledge. When I think about power dynamics, I also think about research and colonisation. ‘Research’ has been the tool of the coloniser for hundreds of years, and like philanthropy, Western sciences live within the “house that modernity built.”

#Self-awareness as a Shipibo-Konibo

Edwin then keeps the conversation going more lively. He tells me that when he was a child, he was very interested in his culture; he loved to learn, to ask his grandparents, to be involved in cultural things. “But later, some people came, and changed my thinking, and I went down.” (‘Going down’ in Peru refers to worsening in something, a skill, a practice). “After I realised, I changed my mind again and went up. I started asking my grandparents questions again.” I paid special attention to the phrase “[they] changed my thinking.” He continues by saying that a professor ‘expert’ in linguistics, during a talk, calculated how many years from now the Shipibo-Konibo language will be extinct, and it is going to be rather soon.

-And how did you feel about that?

-Disappointed, very disappointed, sad.

Edwin is very expressive in his gestures. He frowns and makes a painful gesture while shaking his head from one side to the other. He is 21 years old and studying at the university. I am amazed by his perspicacity and intelligence at such a young age. But when I tell him, he looks at me suspiciously.

-I’m not saying anything interesting. He says.

-Oh, you are surprising me; at your age, I was not aware of many things you are. He again shakes his head to one side and the other.

-I actually would like to write about this. What do you think? He laughs.

-If that helps…

I remember what the Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith would say in a lecture when being asked why to revitalise Indigenous knowledge(s) and languages: “We need to do this as Indigenous people, we need it because inside all of this is us, is who we are, and we not only need to find out who we are… we need to learn how to love who we are, who we were. Because one of the impacts of colonisation is that we hate who became, and we don’t like ourselves. So a lot of this process is to fall in love with ourselves.”

***

The sight of Maestra Olivia Arevalo is the first thing I see in the morning when I go out to the terrace to drink my coffee. In the shadow cast by her murder, there was an organising movement amongst the Shipibo community where, for the first time, called a convention of curanderos and practitioners of ancestral medicine to form the Union of Onanyabos and Traditional Medical Practitioners of the Shipibo Konibo (ASOMASHK), and in 2018 the Yarinacocha Declaration was made public. It starts as:

Recognising the repercussions of colonialism, Western state education, and the industry invasion in our communities that threaten the ancestral healing practices and knowledge(s) of the Shipibo-Konibo-Xetebo peoples…

And it follows calling for political awareness of inequality, spiritual extractivism, and solidarity with the struggle of the Shipibo for sovereignty, highlighting the importance of family and education of Shipibo young people in the arts and the healing science ‘curanderismo’. They also invite us to think of mechanisms by which foreigners searching for healing and wisdom through the plants, including Ayahuasca, could contribute to the cultural and political empowerment of the community.

Colonisation is not only something that happened 500 years ago; it is an ongoing process, and we are part of it consciously or unconsciously when we make decisions and, particularly in the way we approach things. Without a deep reflection, we risk being in service of the master’s current system and replicating it. Although I don’t know the solutions, and some things will only be clear while walking the path, I’m aware of the need to constantly ask myself: Why am I approaching things the way I do?  What am I willing to let go of those ways in service of creating a relationship that is right for everyone, human and non-human?