Dialogues with the Plants

Tutumberos community, Amazonas, Peru 2021. “This is what our world used to tell,” so expresses Victoria Chamik between each song. Victoria is a woman of Awajún origin from the Amazon region in northern Peru. “I’m going to sing you a song I learned the day I lost my parents. This is to say goodbye.” The Awajún are the descendants of the Jíbaro people who maintained a particular relationship with death. According to their cosmovision, the Being is divided into two spirits, iwaji who disappears from the material world, and iwakani, who remains on earth. This is why the Awajún consider that the trees, plants and animals of the Amazon are actually the spirits who stayed to protect the balance of the forest. The elders and indigenous leaders of the Peruvian Amazon are disappearing and along with them, a living memory of the forest and its biodiversity is vanishing. The environmental and social crisis has impacted the indigenous communities, putting at risk the transmission of knowledge that allows us to relate to the complexity of their territory.

Calleria Community, Ucayali, Peru 2023. Language is a system of symbolic signs that serves us to communicate and to configure our thinking, in relation to how we perceive and relate to a territory. The names of plants in indigenous languages reveal secrets. A word can be a concept, a plant name can be a recipe, knowledge of how to use it. Thus, for hundreds of years, indigenous peoples have kept their knowledge and their way of relating to the forest through language.

Community of Brillo Nuevo, Loreto, Peru 2022. Portrait of Elber Manuel Ruiz smoking tobacco in the forest at night. Elber inherited from his ancestors the ritualistic habit of smoking natural tobacco, which initiates long and deep conversations between wise men and women. But also, according to Bora cosmology, tobacco is a way of communication with the beings of the forest, protective spirits of biodiversity.

Yolanda Ruiz, Bora leader, in front of her maloca, a place where they practice rituals of their culture but also a meeting place for wise men and women.

Community of Brillo Nuevo, Loreto, Peru 2022. Detail of Yolanda Sanchez caressing the edible caterpillars growing in her botanical garden. Yolanda is a Bora indigenous woman and guardian of the last Maloca of the community. When her husband, the last curaca, Manuel Ruiz, passed away, she took over and with the help of her sons and daughters, maintains the traditional house, the Maloca. In addition, Yolanda takes care of a botanical garden where her husband would find medicinal plants when he was treating a sick member of the community.

Portrait of Nelita Rodriguez, an Iskonawa woman who, at the age of 10, was displaced from her territory and taken away from her uncontacted tribe. Since then, she has been forced to live in Shipibo territory and learn their language. Nelita is an early contact indigenous person and also one of the last four Iskonawa to speak their original language.

Portrait of José Luis Flores applying ambil or ampiri, a paste made from tobacco leaves that he himself prepares in the community’s maloca. According to the Bora worldview, this tobacco paste is what awakens knowledge and the power of speech.

Yarinacocha lake, Pucallpa, Ucayali, Peru, 2020. Portrait of Rusber Rucoba lying among the leaves of the matico herb. Rucoba is a Shipibo-Konibo traditional healer volunteer. Matico leaves, also known as “Roca-roca Noi Rao” in his native language, is the most important medicinal plant in the Amazon region to cure respiratory problems. The names of plants in indigenous languages reveal secrets. A word can be a concept, a plant name can be a recipe, knowledge of how to use it. Thus, for hundreds of years, indigenous peoples have kept their knowledge and their way of relating to the forest through language.

The plants don’t abandon us and we don’t abandon the plants,” says Ronald Suarez, president of the indigenous organization Coshikox. A group of Shipibo-Konibo searching for medicinal herbs in the jungle. According to their worldview, the spirits of the Amazon rainforest only come out at night to haunt the trees and make themselves heard as powerful sounds.

Pucallpa, Ucayali, Peru 2020. Before sunrise, Adelina Pinedo (54), a Shipibo-Konibo healer, prepares the fire to boil medicinal plants such as matico (Piper aduncum) that she will use to make her traditional vaporizations. In most indigenous communities, women take the initiative to preserve the plants and, above all, ensure the transmission of their recipes. Adelina for example, inherited from her mother and grandmothers.

Portrait of Eric Ruiz, a Bora Indian, with a traditional maraca for rituals. He inherited the management of the Maloca, a place where wise men and women gather to share their knowledge about plants and biodiversity. Currently in Peru, there is only one last Maloca of the Bora culture. Eric now manages this place together with his mother Yolanda.

Pucallpa, Ucayali, Peru 2023. The hand of Nelita Rodriguez and her granddaughter. Nelita is an Iskonawa indigenous woman who aged 10 years old was forced to leave her territory and was put in a situation of initial contact. Today, Nelita is one of the last 4 Iskonawa to speak her original language. Her culture, language and history are at risk of extinction.

Cantagallo Community, Lima, Peru, 2020. Portrait of Sanken Runa covered with a banana tree leaf in the Shipibo-Konibo urban community in Lima. Runa is a medicine woman, she inherited her knowledge from her father who passed away in 2017. Like many indigenous people of the Amazon, Runa migrated to the city along with her knowledge and applies it whenever she or any of her family members are sick. Upon learning her story, I made her a portrait with the only tree leaf we could find in the city of Lima, so that she could wrap herself in it, to represent how the indigenous people find refuge in their plants and how they relate to Nature.

Brillo Nuevo, Loreto 2022. Detail of the back of an indigenous man being treated with vaporizations of medicinal plants from the Amazon. Faced with the lack of access to public health care and medicines, the Bora indigenous people are self-organized in terms of access to plants as alternative and palliative medicines to treat symptoms such as fever, muscle pain or stomach infection.

Brillo Nuevo, Loreto 2022. Portrait of Yolanda Ruiz, a woman leader who for many years managed the Maloca, meeting place of wise men and women Bora, with her husband Manuel. When he passed away, Yolanda was very saddened. That is why her children treated her with the tobacco plant. According to Bora cosmology, the tobacco leaf has beneficial properties to redress sorrowful souls.

The use of psychoactive plants is closely linked to indigenous animism, which attributes souls to plants. Beyond being considered living beings, plants occupy a central place and role in indigenous society.

Brillo Nuevo community, Loreto, Peru 2022. According to Awajun cosmology, human beings have two spirits: the first is the Iwaji, which can be found in the iris and pupil of the eye. The other, is called Iwakani and is part of the shadow of the body. The Iwaji fades away when a person dies. But the Iwakani stays and becomes something known as Iwanch, a wandering spirit that shapes itself in various guises in the forest and protects it.

Yarinacocha lake, Pucallpa, Ucayali, Peru 2020. Celinda Cahuaza, a Shipibo-Konibo healer, standing on the shores of Lake Yarinacocha with the Yuna Rao leaves on her body. Celinda Cahuaza inherited the knowledge about medicinal plants from her indigenous healer father. The Yuna Rao plant she is using, is a well-known and important medicinal herb in Shipibo-Konibo cosmology. Its name translates as “Herb that Heals” and is used for fever symptoms. Celinda agreed for a portrait with her special plant in the Yarinacocha’s shore as it grows near the lake.

Forest defenders and indigenous healers risk their lives to safeguard the ultimate spiritual connection to the medicinal plants of the Peruvian Amazon.

The plants breathe, feel and communicate with each other, their environment and animals, using light and other chemical processes. “How do healers manage to find the exact properties, when there are 80 thousand species of higher plants in the forest? There is one chance in 6.4 billion to find the right recipe,” says anthropologist Jeremy Narby. The Ashaninka and Bora healers maintain that their knowledge about the specific use of plants, alone or mixed, is born from dialogues with themselves. With the spirits of the plants.

Through their recipes, they use the psychoactive chemical that leads them to different states of consciousness. Over hundreds of years, this has provided them with key information on how to survive in the vast territory of the Amazon.

However, extractive activities are destroying their world. In Peru, more than 203,272 hectares of forest have been deforested in the last two years, 37% more than in 2019 with growing numbers. Drug traffickers, illegal loggers, miners and others have taken control of natural resources. Since 2020 alone, 20 leaders and defenders have been killed. The indigenous people of the Peruvian Amazon are disappearing and, along with them, vital knowledge about the use of the rarest plants is vanishing.

The moment we become aware of the physical and spiritual connection of indigenous peoples to plants, we can all become involved in their protection. I trust that photography is a legitimate means to make their sensitive world known, to raise their voice and bring their point of view to the world. An archive to celebrate them and raise awareness for future generations.