About the Shamans
The Shamans’ Videohistory Project works in the Colombian Amazon with elder practitioners of traditional indigenous medicine (we know them as shamans) of the Cofán, Inga, and Siona people to document their life stories. The Cofán shamans call themselves “Curacas” while the Siona and Inga shamans call themselves “Taitas.” The word “shaman” is actually from Siberia, but has been used generically by anthropologists.
For thousands of years, these indigenous people have lived in harmony with their environment, drawing sustenance, shelter, and medicine from the natural world around them. They happen to live in one of the world’s most biologically diverse places of the planet: the Piedmont of the Colombian Amazon.
The practitioners of traditional indigenous medicine are the spiritual leaders who keep the ancient ways and the wisdom of their elders. The founder of modern ethnobotany, Dr. Richard Evans Schultes, wrote that they hold centuries of accumulated knowledge. He also stressed time and again that when he was in the forest, the indigenous people are the teachers.
But unfortunately, these traditional medicine practitioners — and their communities — are fast disappearing.
The Siona people are formally considered to be en route to extinction. The Cofán in Colombia number at most a couple of thousand. The pressure to assimilate and abandon their indigenous identity and culture is constant, not to mention the other pressures and threats in the region.
We let them disappear at our own peril. It is well-established by now that a forest without the protection of its indigenous people is essentially two-by-fours on their way to your living room. The Director of the Royal Botanical Garden at Kew wrote, “The most efficient way to conserve rain forests is to have them cared for by natives, who will use them with little or no destruction of the ecosystem.”
It is also pretty clear by now that indigenous people without a forest are statistics on their way to the despair of urban slums.
The fact is that no one knows the jungle and its animals, plants, and spirits like the traditional healers. Indeed, they are the key to maintaining the relationship between the people and their forest. And no one knows the wonders of this world better than the elder shamans. Yet due to the lures and pressures of modern life, few young people are willing to follow in their footsteps; imagine the tragedy if these elders leave no legacy behind for their grandchildren.