But the lesson of Tanya’s story is not only one of death or sadness or laughter; it is also about the role of money. The Shaman's son went to get western medicine, needing money for gasoline for a motor-powered canoe that could take him to a city in a few hours - a trip that previously took days without gasoline or money.

His lack of money and his reliance on it devastated him when he failed.

Which brings us to the question of money. Was the presence of money and the things it could buy - faster transportation, western medicine, an evil? Or is it good that these things are available, but he did not yet understand the system of money, the cost of medicine, the cost of gasoline, and how to get and save money for emergencies like the snakebite?
 
Money is not good or bad in the Rainforest. The issue is how it is used and how it is perceived. At one point the village people lived in a gift-giving economy - no money was used. Then local currency entered the village and caused a shift. However, the amount of money was not large enough to cause a profound change or bring a western business view of money with it.

But then people began to work at tourist lodges or go into the city to work and earn money – dollars as well as local currency. So a gradual erosion of the innocent gift-giving society began to happen. Villagers went to work in various places and a new attitude emerged on how money was to be used. The emergence of that attitude was one of the forces behind Tanya's agro-forestry project in the village.

Tanya realized that money was now in the village and that if some counterbalance to its eroding force were not created, it would eventually destroy the cultural traditions of the people and their heritage would be lost forever. What was needed was a way to bring money into the village that would foster the community and at the same time stabilize their culture. This and other modern encroachments upon the village was the impetus behind the sustainable agriculture project Tanya launched. 

It wasn’t about money, it was about balance.

A few years ago, I was visiting the shaman and his wife, Lukela, in their village. Lukela seemed unusually sad during this visit, her eyes dimming with a hint of grief as she told me that she might be not be in the village when I next came to visit.  She was the elder of the village and literally gave birth to the village through her many children and grandchildren.  She had no teeth and the nine children she gave birth to over the years had twisted her body.  She was caring for abandoned children from families who had had crises so there were many children running around in their tambo. 

In previous visits Lukela had said that she might not be in the village when I returned.  Usually she said this because she was upset about some interactions in the village that were not to her liking, changes she was seeing.  She would not speak directly about these matters, it was the way of her people. Consequently, I did not take her ”leaving” too seriously and she began to feel better through our laughing together. We joked about men and raising children. Making jokes, as the village people do, is a form of medicine.  She seemed in good humor when I left. 

But this time it was serious.  About 9 months later I learned that she had died from a snakebite. This was very unusual to happen to such an ancient woman of the jungle.

When she told me that she would no longer be in the village, she asked me to take care of her children. (Her "children" were essentially the whole village).  I did not know what ” take care of her children” meant  until I returned. When I did return the whole village was grieving.  People were crying, one daughter was very ill, another could hardly speak as she, only twenty one years old, was the one who held her mother in her arms as she died, everyone was despondent and aimless. 

The Shaman himself was devastated because he could not save her.  His son had tried to get into town to get western medicine, but could not get gas for a motor-equipped canoe as he had no money.  So he paddled by canoe for two days straight downriver to the Amazon River and finally to the town with no food or water.  While he was in town trying to find someone to help, someone from a neighboring village who was visiting a relative told him his mother had died. As in many cultures, a woman is not noticed until she is gone. We cried, we mourned, we held each other in sorrow and in her memory. 

This was a healing time and I listened to many stories: the daughter who held her as she died; another daughter who was in a town down river and could not get back in time to be with her mother; the son who could not bring the medicine in time, and perhaps the saddest story of all, from her husband, the Shaman, who could not save her.  We all told stories of her passing and of her life. I was with everyone and we were all crying.  I brought with me on this particular return trip people who had been to the village before and knew several of the villagers intimately, they were healers in their own right. 

We stayed together and talked and nurtured each other until laughter returned.

“Of course, many people in aid and development community have seen the imbalance and they are working on mitigating its damage. But we cannot return to the original or primitive balance - it is gone forever. We can reach a new equilibrium by empowering the people in these native villages to control their lives and destinies. My project in Cuarto is one of many attempts to find the new positive equilibrium. It is in this spirit - to learn with the people the new equilibrium and our place in it - that my project proceeds.”

Tanya’s project, based upon re-balancing and re-enlivening the native culture, seeks to create a new positive equilibrium through the re-harmonization of her people with their forest territories in a changing world. It also recognizes the naiveté of modern people - of us -, who come to help. It comes with the understanding that when you realize that you are in a cathedral like the Amazon forest, you don't shout, rather you are respectful, and that if you have not prayed their before, you sit and watch and see who worships and how they worship. And critically, it recognizes that if you learn to take your time before making judgments, like deciding that "these people are poor and need my help", you and they can find balance.

It is based on agro-forestry, using their knowledge of the forest and the balances within it to create not only a cash crop-living for the village, but to enter and enlarge the circle of harmony within the forest. It seeks to help heal the damage that has been done to the forest and to create a new cycle of sustainable living for the Cuartanos that will rejuvenate the icaros, and ripple out through the forest as harmony, and through the western development community as a model.

The Shaman calls forth the essence of plant through the icaros, which the Shaman sings. Each plant has a madre, or what we would call a spirit. When someone is ill these songs rebalance the body, mind and spirit. The plant energy, summoned by the Shaman through the song, mirrors the human energy to facilitate re-alignment. The wisdom of the icaros and the practice of singing them not only heals individuals, but it is part of the way the Shaman maintains the balance of the rainforest with its people and the spirits that live therein, called Sacha Runa. The Cuartanos' belief system is to bring their mind, body and spirit into alignment and into balance with their surroundings, the rainforest. The Cuartanos deeply understand that they are dependent upon their forest and that the forest depends deeply upon them. Like the rainforest, they are entwined together forever. The Shaman is the keeper of this wisdom, he or she reminds his people of this interdependence.

Tanya explains that the ancient craft of the Shaman focuses on this balance, not individual power or wealth, but this healing ability can be used for good or ill will. She says that unfortunately some Shaman forget that they are in service, not in power. They use this craft to cause harm vs. balance. She says that the people call this poison darts (similar to a curse in other cultures). Just like us, some healers misuse their abilities and succumb to their egos and/or desire for wealth and personal power. The advent of western ways has brought new imbalances into the forest that may mislead the Shamans and the people. These imbalances encourage them to seek wealth and power at the expense of balance - and ultimately silence the icaros. And, she says, we westerners often do this completely innocently and with the best of intentions.

We are losing the forest's wisdom to corruption – to tourism money, to drilling for oil, to cutting down trees, to mining, to all of the things we do that diminish the forest and the culture that sustains it. We are at a point where we can’t go back...there is all that modern stuff there now. There is no pure Cuartano culture anymore. Modernism has been introduced, some good, some bad. And its introduction - often done with the best of intentions- in one part of the culture affects the entire culture and the forest. Everything is a tangle, like the rainforest. When you introduce money into a gift-giving culture like that of the Cuartanos, it impacts the people's belief system and their practices - everything that underpins the harmony. The result is that the introduction of money can introduce a deformity in the culture and in the balance. One of these deformities is often the loss of the icaros and the healing plants that inspire these magical sounds.

Today Tanya wants to talk about the icaros, the songs of the plants, their role as a gateway of understanding of the concepts of balance and imbalance in the forest. In later blogs, I will relate her stories that explain how erosion of balance occurs, and how the indigenous people forget how to bring back the balance in their lives.

"The Amazon is more than a medicine chest, it is a cathedral. In the Amazon there are plants with the divine nature to heal and inspire. These uniquely endowed plants teach their magical sounds or songs called icaros, to the curanderos (Shamen). The curanderos of the Amazon are the keepers of these sacred plant treasures, their healing remedies and the spirit of their icaros. Not all plants have icaros, only teaching plants have icaros. These healing plants live in a vanishing rainforest; their ancient wisdom and medicinal gifts will soon vanish if something is not done to preserve and sustain them now. As we cut down the Amazon and bring our western ways into these territories, we not only destroy indigenous homelands and plant medicines but, also extinguish the sacred and holy contained within these ancient forests."

Tanya points out that scientists can analyze the healing plants of the Amazon for their chemical parts and create products from this analysis, but that misses the magic of the relationship with the plant, where a deeper healing power lies. She notes that each powerful healing plant has unique energy, or frequencies. This energy can be called forth by a Shaman through an icaro. Icaros may be learned through a deep relationship with a plant, and through the guidance of a Shaman. The Shaman acts as a conduit to the healing nature of a specific plant.

She emphasizes that is not always necessary to ingest a plant to receive that energy. What is important is to learn how to be in a relationship with the beingness of the plant's life force. This takes a deep attunement to nature, our own nature as well as the nature of our surroundings.

When I talk about Itu, I understand that his physical manifestation and his spiritual manifestation are one in the same. If you ask about the "shaman", the question assumes a separation of the two, man and shaman; spirit and body.

In our modern society we often think that the spiritual and physical are separate, and consequently modern peoples often reside more in their intellect than in their body. For the shaman and his people human bodies are like the earth, with a divine source that keeps it alive. In the Amazon, having your spirit fully present in your body is normal but this is a unique experience for modern Americans.

When I am in the Amazon, I need to be fully in my body, I need to feel – I don’t mean emote –“feel” is not something you can easily grasp with your intellect. It is like when you drink a fine glass of wine, you have a sensation. You may describe it later with your mind forming words, but you feel it with your body.

For these natives the body is constantly attuning itself to its natural surroundings, the rainforest -- it is like singing along within a group, trying to stay in harmony or balance. We forget that in our western lives and we forget it when we visit or work with people for whom it is second nature. Understanding this is critical to understanding people who are one with nature. And understanding that, is critical to successfully working with them.

Imagine it is night in the jungle and you are alone. There are sounds you have never heard before and you are very tired because you have been walking all day. That was the scene the night of the day I met the tree. It was sweet, not scary. My mind could not grasp what was around me, the experience I was in. I was, at that time, a very analytical person; my mind was always at work.

But that night, I could not grasp what was around me. I was in the jungle with singing night birds and mosquitoes and there is a very unassuming man with me who has beautiful brown eyes and who radiates kindness. When I am with him I feel that am very safe. But I want to know why he is always smiling. He catches my thought and answers with laughing eyes.

I thought I would be afraid; I was not. (I feel fear in the US cities, but not in the Amazon, how strange) I wanted to know about the plants so I sat in the darkness and listened, feeling, unafraid.

The man with the beautiful brown laughing eyes takes a stone from his pocket. This sets off my mind. This is the early days of my being there and I know that there are no stones around here, I want to ask the question, "where did the stone come from?" But my body senses that he is engaged with this stone – like someone engaged with a computer. He is in conversation with this stone. I am sensing the conversation with the stone – like being with a holy man in prayer. Asking him about the conversation with the stone would be like asking a holy man in prayer what he is doing.

He then puts the stone down, complete. He takes the tea he made from the tree we met during the day and drinks a little bit of it. Sighing happily with its sweet taste. I am offered some, but decline. (I am a little bit cautious because of the movies I have seen about Shaman in the rainforests, and witches too, and my rationale mind and fear may get in the way). It does not matter to him, this is just tea, tea that you might have with a friend. Yet this tea is for “un-visible” friends too.

Having drunk the tea for all of us, he begins to sing an “icaro,” an enchanting song, calling forth sacha mama, the mother of the forest. The night symphony grows louder and more harmonious. My rationale mind falls numb and asleep, my body becomes enlivened, attuned to the night, awakes. I feel joy, my eyes too become bright. Sweetly I am now being introduced to the mysteries of the forest. I smile with relief as I become one with the night.

Itu lived and still lives in a world where the senses must be keen – more so than the mind, what we call mental prowess. Imagine you are in a jungle with animals and bugs and a life force all around you all the time, much of which can be dangerous. If you try to think about it and analyze it, you will focus on one little piece of it in front of you and fail to notice the hundreds of other dynamics whirling all around you. And you will die. To be safe and at home in the jungle, as Itu and his people are, you must be in harmony with the power and the living things around you. You must feel as well as understand that you are a component of it or you will not survive.

Itu grew up on a tributary of the Amazon near the Ecuadorian border. His mother was a lowland native. His father was a highland native. His father was an ancestor of the Inca race --specifically the Ketchua people. When the Spaniards came, the Ketchua fled to the lowlands because the Spaniards would not go there. There the Ketchua encountered lowlands people whose feel for the jungle was a survival trait and whose beliefs and customs were different, especially the matrilineal tracing of family lineage.

When Itu was a young man, he learned his healing craft from his mother’s uncle. Healing was important because even as Itu was a child, his tribe had to contend with many other tribes who fought each other and even children could get killed.

Itu grew up in an environment in which all of the beings – the plants, trees, animals, bugs - are all equal to humans, and can be equally benign or equally dangerous. He learned the skill of the "poison dart"...a process whose outcome depends on how one views reality. Itu never uses this power; only “bad healers” would use this. He uses his powers only for good.

Healers who practice the poison dart can focus negative thoughts on another and make them sick or die - something hard to grasp with the rational mind.

In our society our psychologists understand that a person in authority can say something mean or derogatory to us and impact our outlook and our functioning for life, similar to the poison dart. But in the jungle this action is more powerful and can be done with thoughts as well as words. It is part of sensing the reality and dynamics of other people and beings. It is a power we are born with, but we deny it and remove it from our belief system. Itu and his people incorporate it into their belief system and their survival. It is important to know what is causing an illness (or imbalance) in the body, spirit and mind. For then it can be healed.

Itu left the tributary a few years ago when his father became ill. He founded the village I now live in in a propitious bend in another tributary of the Amazon in what we think of as another country. The tribe followed him and soon a prosperous village of over 100 people had grown.

It did not take long for the loggers and miners and tourists to discover it.

“The Shaman put me in his dugout canoe and took me to meet one of his plants. I was taken down the river and then the canoe was beached along a stretch of forest that to me looked no different from other parts of the forest. The shore and the forest were wet, muddy, hot, and every bug in the world and probably most of the snakes were there. But the shaman pushed forward, cutting vines to clear a path, carefully so nothing was harmed. I was scared to death.”

“Thick trees, vines, ferns, everything overgrown and intertwined. But the shaman gently created a trail, knowing exactly where he was going, and took me to a specific plant – a kind of a tree - whose name I still cannot pronounce. There I witnessed the love affair between the shaman and the plant.”

“Gently they talked and he relayed the conversation to me. He told me this tree was sick because it had been cut with a machete. He felt its pain and sympathized. This tree was not just a plant, it was a teacher, one of his teachers. The shaman and the plant were completely connected in a kind of harmony I did not understand but I saw and felt.”

Tanya says that that it was at this point that she began to understand and to learn. The shaman knew that she had started to open to the potential and the experience of relationships with plant and began to explain their medicinal power to her. She was ready to understand the secret – that the healing power was in the relationship between the shaman and the plant.

“The medicinal plants have a spiritually harmonious relationship with the shaman. That is the secret – that you can have a relationship with a plant- often an ancient tree - and you must have a relationship to use its powers to heal. Not all plants can be your teacher. Some plants can be teachers, others just acquaintances. And, as in any relationship, there is a first impression. That impression is important, but equally important in the forest, is your commitment to stay and learn.”

“I don’t know of any pure culture in the Amazon right now, one that has not been touched by the outside world. The death of culture is assimilation. We are seeing the death of belief systems, not death of the people. But it is death just the same. Is not death the loss of your soul?”

That night Tanya had a dream that explained to her how she could learn about the plants. What she didn’t know was that the dream actually told her that she would learn more about herself.

“I thought this was bizarre. I awoke with a feeling of true knowing, but not quite sure how to formulate the words. The depth of this knowing was very hard to comprehend rationally. The essence was simply to be in relationship with the plants. That they would teach me, they would sing to me in time. That the healing remedy came from this relationship and these songs. I thought this was nuts. According to my scientific mind you didn’t have relationships with them, fall in love or become intimate.”

"I went back the next day to the shaman’s tombo with my translator. He was there. I didn’t know it, but this was unusual. I was not paying the shaman, or doing anything for him. There was no reason for him to be there for me.”

“But he is there and the villagers where saying that this is unusual – normally he stays away when a new person comes, and here he was back here for me.”

“Most of the people of the village were shy, especially around me. I looked different. I brought this strange goal-oriented attitude with me. I caused tension that everyone in the village felt. I didn’t know it at the time, but the way you feel affects everybody in the village. They did not feel good with my get-the-job-done attitude. I was strange with my recorder and note book. What I didn’t understand was that they are a polite people and they were giving me the answers they thought would make me happy.”

“But I was not getting the answers and I had mosquitoes, chiggers…bites of all kinds. The dream told me to slow down and ask to meet the plants, so I decided to ask. That was the right question. The shaman heard me and at that point I started relating to what was actually there.”

“It is hot in the Amazon. It is slow. There is no such thing as a goal,” Tanya continues. “I didn’t understand. I had my tape recorder and notebook and I had an assignment to record medicinal plants. I was on a mission. I was asking about plants, sitting in the tombo of the shaman, his home. There were no chairs, no table, no such thing as time. People walked in - his family, friends, others - they brought children, babies, relatives. His wife was cooking on a fire, babies were crying, people held them. They and he held other conversations. All this is going on and I am there with my recorder and my book asking about plants. I couldn’t stop thinking about the idea that I had one week to record 15 plants. And I was very hot and very unhappy, and every bug on the planet was biting me.”

“I was being ignorant and rude, but he was polite. He put up with my questions. For some reason, he let me continue, although I am sure he felt I would never learn. The chickens ran around under the floor. Chickens have fleas - at least they do in the Amazon. The fleas found me. I was angry, bitten, sore, tired and frustrated. All I got was the name of one plant and seemed like I was there for a day (it was really 2 hours).”

“This was my introduction. I was mad and I felt like these people were not cooperating. I hiked back to my lodge…all I wanted was a bed, mosquito netting, good food. I went to sleep that night very discouraged…how would I ever get this done? I finally went to sleep.”

The village Tanya has been in for the past 13 years is on a tributary of the Amazon River. It was founded by a shaman who came from another river. His father became ill and for personal and tribal reasons it was not safe for him to stay in his native village. He left his people and traveled hundreds of miles to a place on the river shore that was safe where he made his home, and eventually grew a village.

“I first came to Cuarto as a volunteer researcher,” Tanya recalls. “My assignment was to record medicinal plants. I had agreed to work for a small lodge that was interested in the medicinal practices of these people. They wanted to learn about the plants that the Shaman used for healing. I had no interest in plants but I did have a keen interest in traditional cultures. I was trained as a cultural anthropologist so I found this volunteer situation interesting. I was asked to record their medicinal plants within two weeks by the lodge owner. I did not realize the enormity of the request. I thought I would have a list of plants from this region in a week, possibly two, enjoy living with the tribe briefly and then return home. So I carried my tape recorder around and began to ask questions. I was told that the shaman who founded the village would be the best source of information. Shamans are the keepers of plant medicine”

“I was in for a surprise. The shaman would not look at me,” she continues. “The translator, another man, acted as my go between. I recall the shaman sitting in his tombo swatting flies, seeming as if he was not at all interested in my questions. I was dripping buckets from the heat; bugs were biting hungrily at my legs and I was perturbed that he was not taking me seriously. After all, I came a great distance. I had hiked to his village, used my own money to get there. This was important, at least to me. "

"Later I came to understand. He did hear my words and was not being rude in any way -the Cuartenos are quite well mannered, but he could not answer my questions. It was the way in which I was asking that created the distance from the true answers. I had so much to learn, I did not, at that time, fully digest how much I needed to learn. I was being analytical, asking about the plants as things. He was in a world of the mystical and the sacredness of his medicinal plants. The plants were not things, they were his friends. He sang to them. He loved them. They sang to him and they loved him. I had no comprehension of this relationship, and what was worse, I thought I had a deadline.”

The village I will call Cuarto is small, perhaps 150 people, who enjoy a rich life fed by fish from one of the Amazon’s many tributaries, supplemented with game, yucca, plantains, and beans grown in tiny plots nearby. They live simply in open, palm-roofed structures, called tombos. For centuries the Cuartanos came into the world, matured, fought, loved, married, and died in a web of life that extended from the village into the forest, touching every plant, insect, bird an animal in some way. Until the white people came, they did not know they were poor.

Today, the residents of Cuarto are suffering from modernity, from the exposure to our societies. They have been acculturated to us, dislocated from their natural co-existence with the rainforest, lost in an in-between world and buffeted by forces continents away. The consequences are tragic… their culture lost, their children immigrating to the city, their forest stripped for natural resources. They have been marginalized, turned into strangers in their own land. And often, those that try to help them do more harm than good.

The story of the woman I will call Tanya and the village of Cuarto is not just about the people and environment of Cuarto. They are the story of what is happening throughout the Amazon and many other places where modernity is overtaking indigenous peoples. It is also the story of how quiet, time and patience can open modern people to an understanding of how to cooperate with indigenous people to let them shape their future, and in some ways, ours.

The word for what is happening to the people of Cuarto is “ethnocide” – the death of culture.

While we often worry about the fate of animal species, we don’t always devote the same level of concern to humans, because we often see them (not us, of course) as the problem. But we lose track of the loss of human cultures because they are harder to measure, to track and record. Cultures must be felt and understood as much as they are seen and heard. The people of Cuarto are not dying – there is no body count, no painful video footage of graves. They are not being killed; they are being assimilated, assimilated into a modern world of ordinary sameness.

What is lost is their knowledge, wisdom, cultural traditions and the innate ability to care for the rainforest. Theirs is a heritage of wisdom about their environment and a much better way to live in harmony. Without that, they cannot survive as who they are and we lose something extremely valuable; we think we know how to take care of this environment, but we really don’t and they can teach us. But not if their culture is gone.

News from the Amazon is an occasional feature about a small village on the Amazon River, its people, the NGOs, tourists, loggers, government agents and others who have appeared on its borders and sent ripples through its life.

But mostly it is the story of an American woman, once a highly placed executive in an international corporation, who changed her life about a dozen years ago. She traveled from a position of corporate privilege to that of a shaman, a healer and a friend of the people of the village and the plants and animals around it.

Eventually, she became an interlocutor between them and the world of modernity crushing in on them.

Today she funds and manages a project in the village to provide a sustainable income in harmony with their environment. Moving back and forth from her tombo in the village to her house in California, she raises money, quiets crisis, and heals bodies and spirits in both worlds.

To protect the dignity and privacy of the village, she has asked me not to name it. I have also changed her name – Tanya for these stories - and left unsaid the country of the people who adopted and now love and trust her. As we journey through the Stories from the Amazon, I will also change the names of the characters - all of whom are real – to keep that promise. However, the pictures posted here are real.

Anyone wanting to get in touch with the project to support this work, please email me through Social Edge and I will forward the mail to her.