Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Indigenous peoples in Colombian Amazon have suffered a long history of disrespect, loss of their territories, and imposition of Western culture over their ancestral traditions. The Association of Indigenous Communities of the Yapu River (ASATRIZY) called us (a group of Western academics) to collaborate to respond together to this challenge trough the novel approach of Intercultural Dialogue. This approach proposes an interchange between two epistemologies in the process of building knowledge. At the same time that we offered our concepts and methodologies, the indigenous counterpart offered theirs. It is a process of mutual learning where both sides are nourished by the contact with the other, and new knowledge arises. Our first learning was that health had a broader implication than the absence of illness, it involves the life as a whole, then Nature and land can also be sick because the practices necessary to maintain the balance are gone as ancestral traditions are forgotten. Finally, people's health is affected by a negative feedback loop. A weak relation between land and culture is a source of illnesses. The way to reestablish the balance is the fulfillment of ancestral rules in two levels: the personal and the communal; this rules are defined in the myths of these groups and are often expressed in ritual contexts. ASATRIZY has developed its government and proposed a scholar system to teach this framework to their children and thus foster the good life in their land.