On October 20th, I had the privilege of attending a film screening with OU’s Latin American Sustainability Initiative. The film was Karuara, People of the River, a nine-year project highlighting the Kukama people of the Peruvian Amazon and their resilience in a changing landscape. It centered on the birthing of a young child by a local mother, intimately symbolizing the pertinence of the preservation of a traditional culture with the ideal of stewardship at its core. And largely, it brought to light the incredible role of a group of indigenous women doing work to keep the blood flowing to the lung of the planet, the Amazon rainforest.
A quote that stood out from one of the featured women: “Existimos y resistimos y por eso estamos aquí.” We exist and we resist and that’s why we’re here. These people, the Kukama, have a nearly primordial connection to the waters. They settled the banks of the major headwaters and tributaries of the Marañón basin in Peru hundreds of years ago. It is a spiritual entity to them, one that they respect and regard as higher than themselves. They need to take care of the river for it to provide to them. They fish for sustenance, and in one scene of the film, a member of the Kukama community discusses the necessity for a ritual to ask the river’s permission before fishing it. So of course the companies and governments polluting the Amazon River and its counterparts without care for the ecosystem are effectively working directly against the people who rely on it.
But the Kukama would not just sit back and let their rivers and way of life come to be destroyed–they’re fighters. And in an interesting clash between modern systems of economics and governance with traditional indigenous values, the women of the rainforest gathered to make this issue a legal one, led by the activist Mari Luz Canaquiri. River personhood is a growing movement in which communities with great care for their waters obtain a legal status and rights for those waters. When given the same legal rights as a person, a river can be defended in court as a victim to careless and intentional polluters. It becomes easier for a corporation to be held accountable for their crimes against the ecosystem. This has a special significance to the Kukama, whose beliefs include one that there exists a community just like their own under the river, where little people live and work under the flowing current. This belief clearly demonstrates a product of religion that contrasts sharply with a system sustained by an expansive set of unhealthy relationships–between a developing society and their environment, and between those exploited and their exploiters. Because the whole of society will not simply respect the needs of the Kukama (and won’t learn from their wise teachings on sustainability and the importance of a strong connection to the ecosystem), they are forced to work from within the system to obtain protections that never should’ve not existed.
And it was the women of the community who stepped up, and the women who are featured at the center of a movement to preserve the culture through their roles as mothers. This contrasts with the patriarchy that dominates so many “developed” societies and reemphasizes our need as a world to listen to those indigenous women that we have a lot to learn from. Another lesson to be pulled from Karuara is on language. That title, Karuara, is a Kukama word for “people of the river.” There is no one word in English or Spanish that encapsulates what that means. What that means to the community, spiritually, and their responsibility–they are “of the river,” so they must live with it. And living with it means that when it is under threat, they protect it. It is not exactly known how many people speak the language–likely around 250–but modern ways and encroaching urges towards development say to abandon it. If abandoned, without the words to express it, the relationship between the people and their rivers would float away under a layer of plastics, contaminated by chemical spillage and the products of mining, logging, unsustainable agriculture, and irresponsible production. The language must be passed down to preserve a culture with strong values of stewardship so that we do not forget to give back to the land that we take from.
Not every traditional belief must be amplified and followed, but all must be respected. We all don’t need to blow tobacco smoke on the heads of our babies, but we should not let a legal system oppress such practices. There is a moral argument and a tension here. Religious values and beliefs and modern science. One should not take precedent over the other, but they must be equally considered. Science and modernism should not erase traditional beliefs but should work in conjunction with them. Human knowledge has been building, and we know more now that we ever have. But those old ways remain critical to preserve in order to understand how we got to where we are–how we can fix our mistakes, and keep strong the relationships that are worth conserving.
One cannot understate the importance of understanding cultures to the environmental movement. There are people who knew long before modern science what we needed to do to live sustainable lives. It’s all about relationships–how you treat the river is how it will behave. And that links back to that theme of maternalism present in the film, and that theme of teaching the young right links to the importance of preserving and passing down those traditional beliefs. The connections are nuanced and important, the interdisciplinarity expansive. Environmentalism and social justice are one and of the same. For environmentalism to prosper, feminism and the rights of the indigenous must rise. And vice versa. Communities must unite under the boot of the global issues that we face, and be led by, listen and learn from, the voices that have been long oppressed.
