The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

In 1541 the conquistador Francisco de Orellana and his crew floated down the Amazon River on a raft after mutinying from a larger Spanish party searching the jungle for El Dorado. On their float they had harrowing and sometimes fatal experiences of the hostile indigenous communities along the riverbanks and of the lush but dangerous forest and river. Recorded first-hand by friar Gaspar de Carvajal, this account is the first of a European descent down the Amazon. Among the encounters recorded are a fierce battle with an Amazonian tribe of female warriors. This, as well as the evidence of settled indigenous cities, caused European audiences to write the narrative off as sensationalism, and it was excluded from publication for centuries.

Both tropical hell and biological Eden, the Amazon rainforest has long been known to have a unique soil ecology. In temperate forests soil is the bank of biological wealth, since it absorbs decomposing foliage dropped by trees and other plants. In tropical forests, this foliage breaks down too quickly to sink deeply into the soil. In the Amazon, “90 percent of root tips may be found within the top 10 centimetres of earth” (86), the foliage of the living forest being the nutrient bank of the system. This makes the Amazon’s ecosystem incredibly fragile.

Though widely published, this scientifically accepted understanding of the Amazon is only partially true. It ignores the dynamism of the forest’s terrain and diversity of its plant ecology. Such reductionism suits Western marginalization of the cultures that dwell within the Amazon, another more modern example of how scientific fact can be bent to satisfy colonial and industrial narratives.

Davis lived among the Waorani, a people of the Amazon in modern-day Ecuador who were not peacefully contacted by the outside world until 1958. Acephalous (without overt political leadership), endogamous (marrying only within the community), and hostile, the Waorani are excellent hunters with a deep understanding of their local horticulture. This allowed them to develop hallucinogenic preparations of ayahuasca. The Waorani are practitioners of limited slash-and-burn agriculture. Other Amazon cultures historically practiced more extensive agricultural cultivation.

In 1975 Davis traveled to the Northwest Amazon of Colombia and visited Federico Medem, a friend of his old professor. He recounts Medem showing off his prized possession, a shaman’s necklace, “both the penis and crystallized semen of Father Sun” (95). With Medem, Davis learned of yage and ayahuasca for the first time, and began reading about Amazonian cosmology.

Rivers are centrally important in the religions of many Amazon cultures. In their creation myths the first people bear yage, coca, and manioc into their lands on the backs of cosmic serpents that form the rivers. Today these “peoples of the Anaconda” are a network of tribal groups spread across regions of the Northwest Amazon. They practice linguistic exogamy, ensuring against incest through the rule that everyone must marry someone who speaks a different language. This makes ritual gatherings of the people incredibly important.

In 1995 this culture was slowly but surely being exterminated by Catholic missionary work. However, in 1986 Colombian legislation secured for the peoples of the Colombian Amazon legal rights to 250,000 square kilometres of land, establishing 162 Resguardos, titled lands encoded by law in the 1991 Colombian Constitution.

In 2006 Davis returned to the Northwest Amazon, guided by Martin Von Hildebrand (99), the anthropologist central to the establishment of the Resguardos. They were also accompanied by a shaman of the Barasana tribe, one of the peoples of the Anaconda. Davis found the traditional Barasana culture very much alive. The war in Colombia allowed the indigenous culture of the Northwest Amazon to be forgotten, and it revived itself within its titled lands. This is a victory of cultural preservation in the modern world. Davis notes, “In the thirty years or more since my first visit, the only thing that had disappeared on the Río Piraparaná, as Martin said, were the missionaries” (101).

Barasana culture is deeply symbolic. Their monumental architecture is the maloca (longhouse), “which is both a physical space in which the people live and a cosmic model of the entire universe” (103). Infused with cosmological referents in its construction and use, the maloca “envelops the community, securing its eternal presence, celebrating its mythical origins” (105). The people also believe “the earth itself is protected by a universal maloca that hovers over the land, anchored by the sacred sites” (105). These sites are natural elements like mountains at the periphery of the Barasana landscape. The Barasana’s agricultural techniques are similarly infused with religious-symbolic significance. Hunting, fishing, and the foods that people eat are highly regulated by this religious system, which creates “a land management plan inspired by myth” (111). This system is aware enough of the landscape to avoid, for example, spawning habitats in rivers and over-hunting of ecologically necessary animals.

The chapter closes by describing a Barasana ritual involving a shaman and a kumu, or priest. Barasana ritual expression reveals their “most profound cultural insight, the realization that animals and plants are only people in another dimension of reality” (114). This culture’s respect for ecology, wisdom, metaphor, and peace is exactly what allows them to thrive in the simultaneously delicate and hostile Amazon.