“If there is no hope with the State, it means that indigenous wisdom must be reactivated.”
Gil Inoach Shawit
The Amazon Anthropology Group began a virtual event series on the covid-19 emergency and indigenous peoples of the Amazon regions. During the second seminar on March 7th, co-organized by Geography of Philosophy Project postdoctoral fellow Emanuele Fabiano, more than 140 people attended the event via Zoom as guests from Awajún and Wampis villages discussed looking at the emergency from the indigenous perspective.
In the last few weeks, the coronavirus pandemic spread rapidly in the Peruvian Amazon. The reasons for this are many. In some cases, the increase is because several of its inhabitants who were in other areas of the country, where the number of cases is greater, began to return to their places of origin in a state of national emergency and obligatory quarantine. Despite the fact that at the beginning of the health emergency, the Awajún and Wampis villages decided to control the entry into their territory, the number of infected cases is rapidly increasing, especially in Condorcanqui province.
The voice of Gil Inoach Shawit, an Awajún lawyer active in the protection of the rights of indigenous peoples in the defense of their territories, is firm when he talks to the participants of the seminar “Desafios del Pueblo Awajún frente a la pandemia.” His words, however, are full of concern for the situation, a concern fueled by the awareness that the institutions are unprepared to face the emergency in indigenous contexts.
“To the lack of political will of the government, we have to add the enormous importance of the indigenous reality,” says Gil, “the budget for Lima is centralized, while the indigenous peoples are in the background. In its decision making, the government is acting with a colonial vision. What could happen is that in the communities there will be massive deaths as happened in the past when people died from measles and the bodies were left unburied.”
The exclusion of the indigenous voice in decision-making about the measures needed to confront the pandemic affecting the Amazon regions, after a month of silence, has now become a central theme in the public debate. As Gil states: “In addition to a lack of criteria for the distribution of aid, there is a lack of knowledge about the country and its different indigenous realities. At no time have I seen indigenous leaders sitting at the table where decisions are made.”
There is fear that the exclusion of the indigenous voice will condemn these peoples to live again the experience of an epidemic. In the near past, epidemics had, in turn, affected the Amazon. It forces indigenous communities to think of strategies that dispense with the State while, at the same time, allows them to reactivate a rich local knowledge. When their children have fallen ill in cities, families from the community sent remedies prepared with plants. Several people have been healed this way, and many prefer it because hospitals are now places marked with death.
The Awajún and the Wampis people understand that they have to fight against the virus with their own weapons. This means using their knowledge: “Our people already have experience of other diseases, experiences lived in the past, and from generation to generation they have passed on to us the knowledge to confront it.”
Full flier details above. This event took place on March 7th, 2020 in Spanish. Follow GPP on Facebook and Twitter for more details on future events. Thank you to the Grupo de Antropología Amazónica at PUCP and special attendees.
