San Francisco de YarinacochaTo my shipibo brothers
To my venezuelans piaroa brothers
And to all those peoples in this dilemma
To my venezuelans piaroa brothers
And to all those peoples in this dilemma
And ronin said:
If we really want to recover our culture
We should start to use our real names
Our shipibo names
Besides they are so beautiful
Pekon Vita, Yaka, Soy Rama , Reshin Nika, I Corin Shanen Kena, Mocan Wesna, soy Mea Osan Yabi.
That other name, the fake one, the creole one
Is just another tool of the dominium society
Then he said to the children:
Now my name is Ronin, Ronin Metsa
Don’t waste your time calling me with that other name
Of course they all started shouting his creole name
And he ignored them as if nothing was happening
Then they tried, calling him Ronin Ronin
And then he answered
And they all started laughing
And continued with this for a while.
Thus was born the game of names:
Whoever responds to the creole name, lose
We have to start from somewhere
I wanted to wait to be there again amongst you to continue with this, but seeing the delay of my trip back, I have decided to add a new entry to this blog.
I said that in the two weeks I spent in the communities of Santa Clara and San Francisco, many ideas and a sincere desire to help them came into my mind and it is precisely this that I would like to comment because helping in this case is one of the most delicate things.
An indigenous community that has had no contact with the modern world, one could say that is like a very delicate ecosystem in which any foreign intrusion can cause a fatal imbalance, even with the best of intentions. That is why I believe that the wisest decision is the one taken by the so called uncontacted tribes. The only real help that can be given to this people is to leave them along, respecting their cultures, their ancestral territories and to allow them to grow naturally. They are the lords of the jungle, they know to be born, grow, live and die in it. They have everything in the abundance of Mother Nature; it is the contact with the creole that makes them automatically poor, once they enter the circle of money, the market economy, the globalization and everything which is called "progress".
In the words of the Shipibo people:
“We are one of the older indigenous people of the Ucayali in the Peruvian Amazonia, before the incursion of the western culture in our territory we have stayed for thousands of years with our own system of traditional organization, but with the arrival of the religious missionaries our system of life and traditional autonomy was broken. Our indigenous culture was expressed applying the practice, the ideological and philosophical principles that was transmitted from generation to generation under life rules and traditional knowledge, with a rigid discipline at all level of family clans.The system of traditional education has been practiced ancestrally in oral form and the old ones of each family handled a range of traditional knowledge. They had not gotten to make great superior studies, but they had and kept knowledge and information on astrology, geography, art, architecture, fishing, medicine and military techniques With the interference of the colonialism in amazonia our form of life and existence changed, we began to suffer racial discrimination, the exploitation of our natural resources and we were put under slavery. Thanks to the old mechanisms of social organization, reciprocity and distribution of goods and the most important “collective property of the territory”, we have been able to subsist as a people without been dismantled”. indigenous Shipibo Konibo. Iquitos (Peru), March 2002.http: / / www.gfbv.it/3dossier/ind-voelker/konibo-es.html)
That picture you see at the beginning of the blog Ronin the cosmic Serpent says it all, it’s a beer which welcomes to San Francisco. The transculturation is the process that have suffered all the indigenous cultures that have been opened to the West, as this opening has been done in an indiscriminate manner, thinking that everything that comes from the outside world is good or better than what we have, leading the native peoples to devalue their own culture, to the point in some cases to despise it, we even find some groups who deny their origins and call themselves creoles.
I believe that any attempt to integrate the indigenous communities to the modern world is useless, there is no reconciliation between society of domination prevailing in the West and society of reciprocity of the indigenous peoples, they are two opposite worlds. If we really want to save these cultures from their complete extinction we have to take extreme measures.
What helps Amazon people like Shipibo not to succumb to the overwhelming force of modernity, is the force, richness and depth of their culture, their knowledge of nature and of the medicinal and magical use of plants like the ayahuasca, sacred plant at the origin of their cosmology, without this they would be completely helpless and at the mercy of the attraction of this fascinating illusory world of the creoles.
It’s only natural that many ideas come to improve the quality of life of these communities, already polluted socially, politically, economically, environmentally and mentally, because the needs are so many, needs that have been created, needs that we did not have before and it is true that there are many people and organizations trying to help us to get out of the precarious situation in which we have entered, for example: trying to sell our art on the Internet, organizing women and creating clothing companies to join in an efficient way on the market and not go there , in the cities offering our merchandise saying: "colabora, colabora", as if we were begging, before the indifferent and sometimes contemptuous eyes of the creoles, this attempts are good, of course, something must be done but, is this the way? Yes, surely, the way towards the abyss Western society is going when consciously destroy our planet. Do we want to build cities in the jungle or go to live there? What do we want? To live better? That we did already before.
As I said to my compadre Pekon Vita: "No one can mend a culture as if it were an old dress." If the concern about the loss of culture which indigenous cultures in general declare is genuine and sincere, then we should be able to resist the attraction that mean all the comforts and novelties modernity offered and backtracking, we still have time, we have to look deep into our roots and be reborn as a worthy people, if we want to have a future as an ethnic group and not become a kind of social hybrid, a mere unfortunate experiment and increase the long list of marginalized peoples of this planet.
We must seek self-sufficiency for our people and independence from all that the creole and western world mean. Start again, strengthen our culture and if we decide to open up to modernity, we have to create something like a filter that allows anything that can strengthen and enrich our culture to be studied and analyzed thoroughly before we can assimilate it and include it in our culture and way of life, in other words a thorough environmental and cultural impact study. The opening to the modern world if we want, should be done in a intelligent and conscious way, taking into account all the pros and cons of our decisions, it can’t be done in a indiscriminate way or imposed as when the Spanish conquest or the spiritual conquest of religious missions or by the laws of free trade or a government policy or whatever, should be our conscious choice.
I said that in the two weeks I spent in the communities of Santa Clara and San Francisco, many ideas and a sincere desire to help them came into my mind and it is precisely this that I would like to comment because helping in this case is one of the most delicate things.
An indigenous community that has had no contact with the modern world, one could say that is like a very delicate ecosystem in which any foreign intrusion can cause a fatal imbalance, even with the best of intentions. That is why I believe that the wisest decision is the one taken by the so called uncontacted tribes. The only real help that can be given to this people is to leave them along, respecting their cultures, their ancestral territories and to allow them to grow naturally. They are the lords of the jungle, they know to be born, grow, live and die in it. They have everything in the abundance of Mother Nature; it is the contact with the creole that makes them automatically poor, once they enter the circle of money, the market economy, the globalization and everything which is called "progress".
In the words of the Shipibo people:
“We are one of the older indigenous people of the Ucayali in the Peruvian Amazonia, before the incursion of the western culture in our territory we have stayed for thousands of years with our own system of traditional organization, but with the arrival of the religious missionaries our system of life and traditional autonomy was broken. Our indigenous culture was expressed applying the practice, the ideological and philosophical principles that was transmitted from generation to generation under life rules and traditional knowledge, with a rigid discipline at all level of family clans.The system of traditional education has been practiced ancestrally in oral form and the old ones of each family handled a range of traditional knowledge. They had not gotten to make great superior studies, but they had and kept knowledge and information on astrology, geography, art, architecture, fishing, medicine and military techniques With the interference of the colonialism in amazonia our form of life and existence changed, we began to suffer racial discrimination, the exploitation of our natural resources and we were put under slavery. Thanks to the old mechanisms of social organization, reciprocity and distribution of goods and the most important “collective property of the territory”, we have been able to subsist as a people without been dismantled”. indigenous Shipibo Konibo. Iquitos (Peru), March 2002.http: / / www.gfbv.it/3dossier/ind-voelker/konibo-es.html)
That picture you see at the beginning of the blog Ronin the cosmic Serpent says it all, it’s a beer which welcomes to San Francisco. The transculturation is the process that have suffered all the indigenous cultures that have been opened to the West, as this opening has been done in an indiscriminate manner, thinking that everything that comes from the outside world is good or better than what we have, leading the native peoples to devalue their own culture, to the point in some cases to despise it, we even find some groups who deny their origins and call themselves creoles.
I believe that any attempt to integrate the indigenous communities to the modern world is useless, there is no reconciliation between society of domination prevailing in the West and society of reciprocity of the indigenous peoples, they are two opposite worlds. If we really want to save these cultures from their complete extinction we have to take extreme measures.
What helps Amazon people like Shipibo not to succumb to the overwhelming force of modernity, is the force, richness and depth of their culture, their knowledge of nature and of the medicinal and magical use of plants like the ayahuasca, sacred plant at the origin of their cosmology, without this they would be completely helpless and at the mercy of the attraction of this fascinating illusory world of the creoles.
It’s only natural that many ideas come to improve the quality of life of these communities, already polluted socially, politically, economically, environmentally and mentally, because the needs are so many, needs that have been created, needs that we did not have before and it is true that there are many people and organizations trying to help us to get out of the precarious situation in which we have entered, for example: trying to sell our art on the Internet, organizing women and creating clothing companies to join in an efficient way on the market and not go there , in the cities offering our merchandise saying: "colabora, colabora", as if we were begging, before the indifferent and sometimes contemptuous eyes of the creoles, this attempts are good, of course, something must be done but, is this the way? Yes, surely, the way towards the abyss Western society is going when consciously destroy our planet. Do we want to build cities in the jungle or go to live there? What do we want? To live better? That we did already before.
As I said to my compadre Pekon Vita: "No one can mend a culture as if it were an old dress." If the concern about the loss of culture which indigenous cultures in general declare is genuine and sincere, then we should be able to resist the attraction that mean all the comforts and novelties modernity offered and backtracking, we still have time, we have to look deep into our roots and be reborn as a worthy people, if we want to have a future as an ethnic group and not become a kind of social hybrid, a mere unfortunate experiment and increase the long list of marginalized peoples of this planet.
We must seek self-sufficiency for our people and independence from all that the creole and western world mean. Start again, strengthen our culture and if we decide to open up to modernity, we have to create something like a filter that allows anything that can strengthen and enrich our culture to be studied and analyzed thoroughly before we can assimilate it and include it in our culture and way of life, in other words a thorough environmental and cultural impact study. The opening to the modern world if we want, should be done in a intelligent and conscious way, taking into account all the pros and cons of our decisions, it can’t be done in a indiscriminate way or imposed as when the Spanish conquest or the spiritual conquest of religious missions or by the laws of free trade or a government policy or whatever, should be our conscious choice.
What did our ancestors do
when land was no longer fruitful
river’s resources were lacking
and families began to suffer?
