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Posted in Blog on Jun 18, 2024.
Author: Luci Attala
This April I flew to Colombia to meet the Kogui, one of four Indigenous groups that live in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, to discuss the design of a collaborative transdisciplinary conservation project they hope to create. I met with Arregoces, the Cabildo of the official representative body of the Indigenous government that represents the Kággaba people before the Colombian State (Organisation Gonawindua Tayrona or OGT) and Mamo Shibulata, one of the senior Kogui spiritual elders. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Kogui methods can restore degraded land at pace, and, as Arregoces told me
‘The Kogui people have decided that it is time to share this ancestral knowledge that they have maintained and used for millennia to care for nature and the territory. Nowadays, the damage to territory, water and all species must be repaired with ancestral knowledge, with the territory's norms, with the practices and techniques that the Mamos [spiritual leaders] know, maintain, and live’ (personal correspondence, Arregoces 2024).
The Kogui know that life is organised by an ‘original Principle’ (or ‘Mother’s thought’) and that environmental restoration requires ‘replanting’ the ‘Mother’s thought’ back into the fabric of the place so that the region’s thought strengthens, and the territory is ‘reminded’ how to be itself again. Life or forms are shaped in accordance with material connections to the original intelligence of a region and severing territorial connections cause it to deteriorate and weaken. Repair requires nurturing strategies that are achieved through physical actions, such as making offerings and spiritually guided planting that permit the original order to be restored – rather like a care plan for someone who is ill. The invisible intangible order that organises the material world is held in a ‘seed bank of thoughts’ and, therefore, caring for the planet requires a process of reconnecting territories to their original thought through a combination of tangible and thought actions that the rest of the world does not understand.
These are complicated concepts to grasp and, consequently, the project we were co-designing required not only time to learn Kogui methods and measure the environmental changes occurring on a piece of land being healed, but also to understand what actions do and how techniques are achieved. Most importantly extensive time for dialogue is necessary to understand how to incorporate these methods into non-Indigenous conservation processes properly and to interrogate the assumptions that imagine Indigenous methods are incompatible and dependent on holistic philosophy rather than evidence.
A few days before travelling to Colombia I had a startlingly different, oddly coherent dream that went like this:
I was arguing with some people who wanted to build a greenhouse high on an exposed area of a steep mountain. As we walked to the exposed area. I said this place was too far from anywhere and it would attract snakes. An unknown man walked with me, saying that he heard my worries. He put his hand on my back. Then, as I predicted, a huge prehistoric snake emerged from a crack that opened in the bare rock. It was a monster marked with bright earthy colours and a diamond pattern – moved across the valley and towards a space where children were. Everyone ran to kill the snake. I ran too and met the snake who turned into a young woman. She said, if you have come to this exposed high place, it must be because you are hungry, and she gave me a basket of what looked like bread. Then she was above me – like I was in the valley, and she was huge at the top of a mountain. She reached both hands down. I reached up and we laced our fingers together, prompting us both to cry – her eyes forming into pools that filled and spilled over. I watched the tears pour down and I felt them fall onto my upward looking face. I felt overwhelmingly relieved, realised she was there to help me and woke up.
Despite being a universal human experience, the purpose of dreams is not established - Freud thought dreams reveal unrealised desires; Jung had other ideas about collective symbols. Some say dreams are therapy to sort out anxieties. Regardless, they are difficult to validate or share reliably and the academic community, has not arrived at a consensus on what dreaming is. Certainly, in many circles, dreaming as a route to knowledge is discounted, even ridiculed. This, of course, is countered by those who know the world in dreams is as real as the markets.
However, increasingly, Indigenous scholars assert that dreams are essential sources of information and an important methodology that provides ‘revealed knowledge’. Borrows (2010), for example, explains that his parents taught that dreams were among the most important experiences he would have on Earth because they could provide guidance and direction.
‘Listening to our dreams, we have a gift to help people. And it is our job to determine what the ancestors are trying to communicate’
(Borrows 2010)
I can’t say if my dream is one of the most important experiences of my life, but it certainly changed things. And luckily for me I had a spiritual leader to interpret mine.
The day after I arrived in Santa Marta, I had a meeting with the octogenarian spiritual leader, Shibulata who, to my surprise, already knew my dream. He explained it originated because his ancestor was communicating with mine – specifically my original mother (humanity shares 10 original parents who continue to inhabit the world as physical features like mountains). He named the snake based on my description and said her appearance was reminding me of the work I had to do - work our ancestors were supporting. He explained that work and taking the two small stones I had brought from Wales as a gift or offering for him, he ritually received them, placed them on the earth to introduce them to the mountain we were standing on and told me to take them back to Wales. Their purpose – to form a mechanism by which the territories would connect.
Other than pandering to my vanities, there was lots to understand here. Certainly, the dream was palpably different to any other I have had, and now this exchange suggested I was talking a language the Kogui understood. The dream brushed aside any doubt about whether the project should go ahead. The ancestors had spoken. Now we just had to work out how.
Borrows, J. 2010 Drawing Out Law: A Spirit’s Guide University of Toronto