CODEAMA (Amazon Conservation and Development Foundation) is a local NGO dedicated to sustainable development in the Amazon region of Ecuador. Based in the city of Puyo, CODEAMA works with local governments, rural communities, schools, and individual landowners to promote best-practices in conservation of forests and watersheds, as well as sustainable agriculture and community health. This small grant will support work conducted jointly with the State Department of Intercultural Healthcare and local Indigenous communities in the region of Pastaza, in Amazonian Ecuador. CODEAMA will facilitate the production of several video resource packs on the subject of community health and the use and management of medicinal plants.
Updates from CODEAMA:
“Video en las Comunidades” (Ecuadorian Amazonia)
The use of video among indigenous people in Amazonia is well documented (Turner, 1991) and has proven an appropriate and useful tool to support inter-communal and cultural communication.
Learning to use a camera and edit short films about the history, culture and life of their people creates possibilities for a renewed encounter between the young and the elders, among others. The adoption of this aspect of modern technology bears a novel meaning in the mind of the new generations to reevaluate their cultural legacy.
Our primary goal is to use video in support of the revitalization of ancestral medicine in Ecuadorian Amazonia. Audiovisual material allows making information on healthcare more accessible to oral cultures and communities providing easy identification of medicinal plant species and practical information on how they can be cultivated or harvested and turned into herbal remedies to treat the most common ailments and illnesses in the village, among other possibilities. Video is also useful to help local people become more aware of the social and ecological determinants of the health situation in their territory, and empower them to make decisions on in the face of those new challenges.
Examples of films made and in process:
1) “Gathering of Indigenous Health workers”, featuring group discussions around intercultural healthcare and practical demonstrations of herbal remedies during a training workshop in a Shiwiar village.
2) “Plants for Health: herbal remedies for diarrheal diseases, respiratory infections and intestinal parasites”. The film is shows how the plants may be cultivated, harvested and prepared to treat some of the most common health problems in the village.
3) “Cultivation and conservation of medicinal plants and herbal medicine making in rural and indigenous areas”, provides information on different techniques for sustainable harvesting and agro-ecological cultivation of medicinal plants.
4) “Ayahuasca – Source of Indigenous Wisdom”, a documentary meant to better inform professional health agents working in indigenous areas on one of the central pillars of ancestral medicine in Ecuadorian Amazonia.
The films are distributed to local indigenous communities and organizations and through the Departments of Intercultural healthcare of the Health Ministry in Ecuador.
The Small Grant we received from the ISE gave us the opportunity to introduce video making among a group of Amazonian Kichwa people, in the Pastaza province, in Ecuador. It supported the purchase of video equipment, the training of a young Canelos-Kichwa leader in the use of video camera and editing techniques, and the distribution of edited videos to local villages and institutions.
Luis Fernando Canelos (23), from the village of Canelos (Pastaza), produced a short film on the history and life of his people: “Canelos: Historia y Vida”. The film was made for the descendants of a group of Canelos-Kichwa who were taken away by the Spanish rubber baron Máximo Rodriguez to extract rubber in the southeastern jungles of Peru in the early 1900s.
These people never returned to their home and settled in the state of Madre de Dios. Last May, the film was taken to the village of Puerto Arturo, one of the two settlements displaced Kichwa now live in Peru, an hour upstream from the jungle town of Puerto Maldonado, on the Madre de Dios River. The images of the video had a profound emotional and cultural impact on the Canelos-Kichwa of Puerto Arturo.
We are grateful to the ISE for its generous support in facilitating this activation process of cultural revival and social empowerment through video in Ecuadorian Amazonia.
Didier’s participation in the 12th ISE Congress in Tofino, Canada, and the work being done by CODEAMA, was highlighted in the Special Issue of the ISE Newsletter (March 2010).