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.

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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.’