One day, the god Carabí decided that he wanted to find water, so that he and his family could wash and drink. The water was hidden in a rock by a woman named Conga, and she refused to give Carabí the water. He tricked her and learned to make the key she used to extract the water from the rock; he then turned her into an ant. However, before being transformed, Conga had swallowed the entire river, and so the water was no more. Yet Carabí did not give up: he recruited his family, the monkey, the squirrel, the otter, and the fox, and they all worked together to get water out of the ancient tree Jenené. Before felling the tree, they all climbed on a raft so as they would not drown when the water flooded the forest, and after 15 days on the raft, they finally arrived on dry land. Ever since, the rivers, the forest, and the animals have been living in harmony.
Carabí is the god of the Emberá Chami people, a riverine hunter-gatherer group who reside in Panama and Colombia. Traditionally, many Indigenous groups do not believe that land can be owned, and so they are taken aback when they find their home invaded by outsiders with machines used to cut down the forest. And so, despite the great efforts of their god to ensure access to the rivers in the forest, they must once again fight to find a home alongside the monkey, the squirrel, the otter, and the fox.
“It is a game of musical chairs,” says Drea Burbank, co-founder of the B Corp Savimbo, which seeks to help the Emberá Chami. “They keep getting displaced due to economic colonialism — companies keep purchasing their land, and they are unaware, until one morning someone appears and begins chopping trees.” Currently, some members of the Emberá Chami, a very traditional deep-jungle group, have been restorted to living in barracks in prison-like conditions. Three generations are now involved in the process of finding a new location in the jungle to call home, and Abuelo, the elder shaman, is determined to succeed soon. He wants to die in the woods, teaching his children about their traditional ways, like his ancestors before him.
Not Charity
Our Caquetá and Putumayo regions […] will be ours only in name, and not in practice, as long as we fail to connect them to our territory with the enlivening bond of a commercial and industrial current. […] It is therefore our most urgent national duty to consolidate our right and to assert it, exercising it, that is to say, colonizing […] the mutilated part of our fatherland.
Santiago Pérez Triana, Por el sur de Colombia: Excursión pintoresca y científica al Putumayo, 1908 (quoted in Wylie, 2013)
Abuelo found an area of pristine deep forest at Pada Kera, within the Putumayo Amazon, which could be a wonderful location for the group to live and to continue pursuing its traditional ways of life. But for that to happen, they need money.
“They do not like charities — it creates dependency,” Burbank explains. “In their eyes, the land was stolen from them, and they do not want to accept it back as a gift. They want it to be their legal… home, and respected as such.” To help fund the purchase of the land they have raised some money by selling handmade traditional jewelry, hosting ecotourists, and working to track Jaguars for Savimbo. Once the land is theirs (again), the Emera Chami can provide a priceless service for us all: conserving the forest and its biodiversity, and acting as a barrier to block access to the rest of the pristine mountain that borders the area to be purchased.
No one protects the wilderness as well as the Indigenous people that have inhabited it since time immemorial. Indigenous peoples make up about 6 percent of the world’s population, but they conserve roughly 80 percent of all biodiversity.This statistic may be hard to believe, but it is acknowledged by the United Nations, World Wildlife Fund, and some governments; in Australia, for example, there is a growing trend of handing control of parks to Aboriginal groups. The traditional ways of life that have developed in harmony with the surroundings, as well as generational knowledge and language to describe the land and understand its dynamics, all make stewardship by such groups the best option for conservation — far better than leaving the land free from human intervention.
Once purchased, Pada Kera will be protected under a special Colombian legal structure that treats the land as a legal subject and the Emberá Chami as its guardians. Because it is pristine primary forest at the border of the Tropical Andean biodiversity hotspot, the conservation effect of saving this land will extend far beyond its technical perimeter.
Ugliest bear or fattest dog?
It is often easy to forget just how deep and mysterious the Amazonian forest is; being so concerned with conserving what we know, we often forget how much is not yet known. Burbank describes how, shortly after arriving in the region, her colleagues observed video footage of the forest and exclaimed that it had captured “the ugliest bear ever.” Upon inspection, the group decided that it was, instead, “the fattest dog ever.”
A conversation with a National Geographic expert proved that the second guess was closer to reality: it was, in fact, the Near Threatened Bush Dog, one of the rarest animals in the Amazon, once believed to be extinct. Despite the name, the Bush Dog looks nothing like a Golden Retriever; in fact, it is more closely related to the Maned Wolf than to your domestic pet. Because it is extremely elusive, not much is known about this species, other than this amazing fact: it is a dog with webbed feet that can therefore swim with ease!
The land the Embera Chami hope to purchase is home to many other species, including the Endangered Siren Glassfrog, Endangered Mountain Tapir, and Endangered Giant Otter — the last of which can grow to over two meters long and hunt piranhas, caimans, and even anacondas! Approximately 8,800 endemic species are believed to inhabit this land, and who knows what other unique and unexpected animals may yet emerge!
This region of the Amazon, the Putumayo, is situated within Colombia. It suffers from a high deforestation rate of 0.46 percent annually, mainly due to logging and cattle ranching — a rate that is higher than that of neighboring Ecuador. Since a peace agreement was signed in 2016 between the Colombian government and FARC guerrilla group, deforestation rates have risen due to easier access to the land in the absence of an armed conflict, an increase in coca cultivation, and a delay in the realization of licit agricultural alternatives promised in the peace agreement. This makes the protection of the forests and the animals in them, as victims of the peace agreement in which they were not considered, even more urgent.
Their own home
Burbank grew up in the mountains of Idaho, in the USA, spending her childhood in a protected forest, where even the sound is protected by laws prohibiting excessive motor noises. “The Amazon is ten times more magical, but it is not nearly as well protected. I realized that I wanted the people who live there to have the same access to nature that I had.”
Sadly, the Emberá Chami currently do not have access to nature in a way that might allow them to live their traditional way of life. The attempt to raise funds through eco-tourism only highlighted the depth of the problem. When trying to dance in front of the visitors, one tribe member told Burbank, “we can’t show our culture when we’re losing it.” They no longer perform for tourists; instead, they sell their jewelry and help rangers track wildlife to earn money.
Let us not look at the conservation of the forest as a favor returned to the world by a grateful people awarded a charitable gift. Instead, by making a donation to TiME and voting for Pada Kera, you will be allowing an Indigenous group to reclaim their ways of life on protected land and to provide services that have global value: protecting the animals, including the history of evolution carried in their bones, and the primary forest — an ancient forest that soaks up the world’s carbon emissions and, if chopped down, would take thousands of years to grow back — and contributing to the fresh air we all breath. In exchange, the Emberá Chami can go back to their ways of life, expressing hope to restore the harmony of the forest, the animals in Pada Kera and the rivers carved from the tree once upon a time.
We thank Drea Burbank for her help in preparing this article.
Author: Noga Syon
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