Eli Sánchez
Meeting Eli Sánchez was a result of serendipity and good luck. I was interested in finding a book in the Shipibo language, partly because I wanted to understand how widespread and available books in this language are and where they are located. However, as many things in the community context happen, the book came to me as a gift from a friend. I was talking with Ramii, a young Shipibo university student, when he disappeared into his room for a moment and came back with a little white book.
The front cover was the classic Saint-Exupéry Little Prince with golden hair, but the words read: Jatibi Ibo Bake. I was delighted to see this version with designs of a traditional kené. “If you read it enough times, I am sure you will learn Shipibo, Tulia.” Then he gave me instructions to find a place where I might find more books, near the church in the Plaza de Armas of Yarinacocha. (Picture of the book cover).
I went looking for the place, and I imagined a library, a bookstore or a shop. But it wasn’t anything like that. I came into the Shipibo market right in the corner of the plaza where artisans display their beautiful art in different forms of clothing, chitonti, taris, and asked a lady for “a place where I could find a book in Shipibo.” She looked at me, very confused. Then she laughed. She spoke fast Shpibo language to the other ladies. “I’ll take you,” she said. I followed her until we arrived at a black gate, the entrance of what to me seemed like a house.
Before anyone opened the door, a man arrived and waited with me outside. He was a bit taller than I, with brown skin and grey hair, and dressed in black pants and a white long-sleeved shirt. We smiled at each other while someone opened; he seemed to know his way and went to the back of the patio. Three or four men and women were working on long tables with educational materials, and words in different Indigenous languages were written on whiteboards.
I asked them about Shipibo books; they looked at each other, confused. I showed them my Little Prince copy, and they went, “Yes, it’s here!” They called someone to talk with me, Eli Sanchez, who was the same man who arrived with me at the gate. This was the office of the Peruvian Amazonian Indigenous Roots Association (ARIAP).
Distinct words create distinct worlds
Approximately 30.000 people speak the Shipibo language. It comes from the Pano family, which is a small group of 30 languages from the Amazonian jungle, from which fewer than twenty still survive today. Eli was excited to talk about their projects, radio and multimedia-producing initiatives to create animations, channels and content for youth and adults in Shipibo. He is also involved in developing materials for the Bilingual Intercultural Education system in Peruvian schools.
I asked him which of the words in the book meant “Prince”. He laughed and said that none of them, because in the Shipibo language, this concept doesn’t exist. So, the literal translation here would say “little owner of everything.” Ok, wow, we are getting into deep ontological questions here, I thought, and remembered a short and powerful TED talk by April Charlo, a Salish language revitalizer1.
I will rephrase: when she was working with a neighbouring language, she learned how to say “my hand.” So she thought she could insert “my” before anything. When in a gathering she tried to say “pass me my water,” and an aunty, a fluent speaker, turned to her with a frown and said “no, you cannot say that at all!” She asked what was wrong about it, since all the words were correctly placed. The aunty answered that in their language, they cannot use ‘my’ with anything in the natural world.
And Charlo went eyes open… “What?!”
Well, yes, and gets more interesting when Charlo says that to make sense of all that, she interpreted that “my” cannot be used with rock, water, or tree, but maybe with shoe, car, or house. But she found out that the only use for “my” is as “my mom,” “my brother,” and so on, not a literal translation of ownership, but an indicator of relationship. If we stop to think about it, language here is not merely describing reality, but creating another reality altogether, a world with different possibilities and relationships.
In modern times, the word “my” in Salish is used differently; it has partially adopted the concept of ownership in specific contexts. Charlo questioned herself, “what if unnatural concepts have been forced into the language of my people?” And even some efforts of revitalisation can alter the very essence of the language when adapting it to modernity and its reasoning. I kept wondering if the innocent Little Prince may be an example of this, and I still love that the book exists in the Shipibo language.
Language shapes patterns of thought into representations of reality, self-identity, mythologies, narratives and with them, a belief system that dictates what is ‘truth’ and justifies our actions; hence, creating a culture (Culture Hack). Words and narratives have never been neutral; they both limit and enable us to co-create a world. When the narratives we inherit are steeped in the logic of separation – ownership, extraction, separation – they make some relationships unspeakable, even unthinkable. They set the boundaries of what is imaginable.
Eli then shared, taking a serious tone, an observation about tenses in his language, “For the Shipibo people, the past is very important. We have different tenses for expressing the past: minutes or hours ago, some days ago, years ago, and even past lives and from the beginning of time. For the future tense, we have only one.” Being the nostalgic I am, I reminisce about how modern culture has compressed the past into a single story of human progress.
Ramii
Ramii was waiting for me at Yarinacocha’s main square, his familiar wide smile was a relief after travelling solo for some weeks. I met him through a Shipibo family I have known for years; he came over during the long school vacations to work with us on the other side of the jungle during his vacation from the university. Tall and strong, with a big smile all the time. He enjoyed singing in his language any time we gathered, thanking his father and relatives who had passed the songs to him. His father comes from a lineage of Onanyabo (traditional Shipibo healers, often referred to as curanderos in Spanish). I was curious about Ramii’s studies when he told me he was attending the Intercultural University.
We drove his motorcycle for 15 minutes until taking a narrow dirt road, dwellings made of wood and mostly metal roofs, chooks, and dogs around the streets, and small gardens. I couldn’t stop myself from thinking that the vision of this impoverished neighbourhood is far away from the eyes of foreigners and tourists who usually stay in healing centres around the corner, enjoying breathtaking landscapes and magnificent wooden malocas, mostly Western-owned businesses.
After parking outside one of the largest houses in the area, we encounter his dad. They took me to see the almost-finished maloca they are building. “My uncles and cousins are coming to help build every day. Although it is in our house, you know, this maloka will be for everyone. My dad wants to open a tea shop with native and local plant infusions. But vacations are over and I’ll be back at the uni next week.” We sat on the floor, and focused the talk on his studies in agro-industrial engineering.
An Intercultural University?
The National Intercultural University of the Amazones was founded in 1999 as Peru’s first intercultural university oriented to serve more than 20 Indigenous peoples across the Amazon region. Their curriculum includes a teacher degree in bilingual (primary) education and programs in agroforestry and agroindustrial engineering. I was very curious about Ramii’s program and asked about the curriculum: 10 semesters of complex mathematics, physics, chemistry, and industrial processes with a focus on business management. In the syllabus, the only class I found related to traditional knowledge was called “Amazonian Cosmovision.”
The university’s mission is to serve Indigenous students with the aim of reversing centuries of educational marginalisation and sustaining language conservation. This deserves by itself acknowledgement of the efforts made in these important issues in a place as Pucallpa, which has between 20% to 50% unemployment rate, and the main options for work are in the timber, mining, and tourist industries.
However, some reflective questions arose in me:
- Does institutional representation emerge from Indigenous communities? Are indigenous peoples subjects of authority?
- Who defines the curriculum? Are indigenous languages and cosmologies only supplementary?
- Is indigenous knowledge centred (or even taken into account)? Or are Indigenous peoples subjects to be assimilated into existing academic hierarchies?
- Are languages treated as carriers of worldviews or as stepping stones to academic success?
I also wondered about the ecological and agricultural traditional knowledge that Shipibo has developed over hundreds of years of being in relationship with these lands, and their calendar and rituals linked to harvesting and hunting. However, this traditional knowledge is considered inferior unless Western science provides “evidence” or academic explanations of its utility. In other words, Indigenous knowldeges are only considered somehow valid if subjugated, supervised, and translated by the dominant Eurocentric epistemic tradition.
Coloniality of Knowledge
In my last visit to my family, in Guanajuato, Mexico, my clever 12-year-old nephew, Emiliano, was studying for his History exam, so I offered to work with him and listen to the synthesis of each topic he needed to know by heart: navigational systems of European ships, the French Revolution and even Napoleon. He stopped, looked at me and said, “Why is Europe the centre of everything?” I was, of course, surprised and happy to hear this reflection, and the study session turned into a more politically engaged (aunty-over-exited) sharing.
To put it simply, “coloniality of knowledge” (Quijano, 1992) is the imposition of one narrative over others. In this case, the narrative of what knowledge is and what it looks like. “For instance, the worth of bodies and cultures is linked to the perceived ability to produce knowledge in a specific way. Cultural supremacy secures a position where certain bodies are perceived to naturally embody authority and impose on other bodies what they believe to be objective and universal parameters…” (Andreotti, 2022).
We come to higher education naively believing that they are neutral spaces and the main sources of knowledge because we cannot imagine otherwise, because… “after five centuries of ‘teaching’ the world, the global North seems to have lost the capacity to learn from the experiences of the world. In other words, it looks as if colonialism has disabled them from learning in noncolonial terms, that is, in terms that allow for the existence of histories other than the universal history of the West.” (Santos, 2014).
Staying within complexity beyond right and wrong
These reflections I share could easily spiral back into polarity – right versus wrong, us and them. But we are more entangled than these oversimplified oppositions. Staying with the complexity means acknowledging that different worlds exist, relaxing our ego’s need for quick fixes, and recognising that even within structures shaped by coloniality, people like Eli and Ramii are creating cracks2 where relational knowledge moves. Ramii’s decision to study agro-industrial engineering while building a communal maloka for healing is itself a weaving of different worlds, with all its complexity, contradictions, assimilations, and possibilities.
What do we need to do to loosen up our contracted bodies and egos, take ownership of the past without guilt, and let new narratives emerge beyond modernity’s amnesia?
Note
During these writings, I have referred to Indigenous thinkers and culture from different parts of Earth, which has a rather personal reason than a generalisation. Although Indigenous peoples suffer similar processes of colonisation and coloniality, all of them are diverse even within the same language family and territories.