Whenever people highlight the poverty of Amazon communities, Shakira Andy makes an effort to correct them.
"For me and for our communities, good living and wealth is biodiversity,” she explains proudly. And by that measure, “the Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon are not poor -- we are rich."
Shakira, who belongs to the Kichwa people of the Ecuadorian Amazon, has made it her mission to protect that wealth. At 26, she has established herself as a leader in the biocentric restoration of Indigenous territories in the Napo province.
The Indigenous Peoples biocentric restoration project revitalizes Indigenous Peoples’ intergenerational knowledge at the community level to restore degraded lands, maintaining centrality of the environment and understanding relations and interactions at the ecosystem level.
“First, we implement the schools of life, where we exchange ancestral knowledge, from Indigenous elders to youth, and from Indigenous youth to elders,” she explains. “We talk about biodiversity, food, the past and the future. And then we apply that knowledge in the recovery of the territories.”
More than just caring for the environment, she says the process is about rescuing that ancestral knowledge of Indigenous Peoples’ unique food systems and territorial management models that work in harmony with nature.
“Our territories have been degraded mainly by monocultures,” she explains. Now, they seek to heal them with traditional knowledge and practices like the chakra system, Ecuador’s ancient agroforestry system. “We hold community councils, we tour the forests to identify what is missing – and we look for the seeds there, because if we bring them from another place, it will not be the same."
The plant nursery they built doubles as a classroom, where they learn about the food and medicinal plants of their territory.
Shakira, who is a tourism engineer by trade, sees ending the massive exploitation of natural resources – including mining, monocultures and the use of chemicals – as an opportunity to build a more sustainable future in the region. Part of this, she says, is creating new sources of income and training people to use native plants in new – and old – ways. One example is bamboo, which they now use to make handicrafts, build houses and cook, like their ancestors did.
“We are the seeds of the forest that we are growing,” she says. “This forest already existed before us. And our children will take care of it in the future. But the forest also needs us now.”
The Indigenous Peoples Biocentric Restoration Project in Ecuador is being implemented by various Kichwa communities with the technical support of FAO, GIZ and the International Bamboo and Rattan Organization, INBAR.
