Issue Nº 12 - The Log

We are descendants of the Iko~Hido, or Children of the Remedial Anaconda. This name means the one who creates well­being, health, the one who keeps the peace and heals the territory. Our ancestors followed a route that began at the Puerta de las Aguas, in the Amazon Delta, then traced the Amazon River [upstream], and after that the Negro River, the Vaupés River, the Tiquié River until reaching the Pirá Paraná. Our great ancestral territory is also called the territory of the Hee Yaia Godo~Bakari (Jaguars of Yuruparí).
The system of cultural knowledge of the peoples of the Yuruparí was included by UNESCO in its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

The name ‘Jaguares de Yuruparí’ is derived from a cultural model of environmental management, according to which the entire region constitutes a territorial unity, a system in which everything is related: knowledge, sacred sites, rivers, forests. Everything is part of a lively system, which is preserved and revitalized through healing and ritual.
  The communities that settled on the Pirá Paraná and Apaporis rivers in the north-western part of the Colombian Amazon preserved their ancestral knowledge and life models the most. Beyond the villages of the Pira Paraná and Apaporis rivers, there is a very large region of more than 10 million hectares, which they recognize as their original territory.

Can you explain the need to translate oral knowledge into cartographies and maps?

Previously, the tradition was passed on orally, through what could be described as ‘speaking maps’. When our grandparents died, much of this knowledge vanished with them. To safeguard our culture, we came up with our own alphabet and started trans­lating all we know into written documents. Now we write it, visualize it: we make maps, recordings, transmissions and videos, which are our ways of sharing and learning the traditions. If that transmission is not done, the knowledge is lost.

It was important that the world got to know the way in which they conceive their territory, how they value it, how they manage it. And in order to translate it into a proper cartography, they have had to adapt to Western notions of spatiality. A conventional technique of map-making was not enough. We turned to a more artistic approach, cultural cartography, so that they themselves can design their territorial models, based on their conception of the area. They know their territory deeply, and they have a great spatial memory of it, because they have lived there for millennia, although they don’t share our notions of scale or measurement to represent it proportionally as we would. For instance, they might paint a small river big and a big river small, according to how far it is from their territory.

This process poses some problems in terms of language but also in balancing what knowledge of a territory can be shared in order to protect it.

Indeed, our people are just guardians and cultivators of the land; Mother Earth is the one who produces and owns the knowledge. We build, care and cultivate with a series of rules and rituals given to us by the ancestors to manage and protect the lands. To use resources, you have to make a proper request to Mother Nature, because since she is life, she is a person, you have to ask for what one is going to do, explain for what and for whom. Otherwise she will be bothered.
  But not all knowledge can be shared. It is important to omit certain information related to the sacred sites, because in them reside living trees that are important to nature’s balance. Some sacred things cannot be photographed or published, nor can we touch them, look at pictures depicting them, or document them, because it will entail payment with human lives, diseases or natural catastrophes like tremors, droughts or huge storms. Those are Mother Nature’s punishments.

Can you tell us about the concept of ‘speaking maps’, the traditional way of making sense of the territory?

Oral traditions are like walking in the footprints of our territory, like stepping again on the places where our ancestors existed. We follow the steps and the routes of our ancestors. And this is what encompasses what is called Hee Yaia Keti Oka, which is the way in which the territory must be managed according to the instruments learned and empowered by the Yuruparí.

Sacred sites are distributed throughout the territory. They form networks, systems, and those systems are the paths for traditional healing. When they want to cure a disease, for example, they have to appeal to the origin of that disease, which dates back to the origin of the territory, to the origin of the people in that region.

And the forest is part of this system…

Forests and trees are like living human beings. Nature, like us, has a birth, growth, maturation, and production. That is why we see them like other human beings, with specific behaviours and ways of being. This is why when the forest ends, life ends, because the forest is a life, too. Their life is closely related to ours. The relationship is that the forest is connected with life because each element, not only the forest but the earth, the stones and the rivers, that constitute our territory, also have their ways of life and since we are all linked, our life depends on them. 

This is an abridged version of an interview originally published in Formafantasma,  Cambio, Serpentine Galleries / Koenig Books, London 2020.