Shamans and Apprentices Program

What is the Shamans and Apprentices Program?

The Amazon Conservation Team has established a highly successful Shamans and Apprentices Program designed to enable elderly shamans to work with chosen members of their communities in the transmission of their healing knowledge.

How does it work?

ACT works with traditional healers in supporting the apprentices chosen to participate in a training program whereby shamans spend the time required to work with young students in the transmission of their wisdom. Because many of these students and shamans often have to work in the fields to support themselves, it is very difficult for them to dedicate the time needed to learn. Therefore ACT provides sponsorship or stipends to support their training. The support, which varies from tribe to tribe typically includes funding to:

• participate in monthly health brigades to remote communities where apprentices accompany and assist shamans in providing health services to communities;
• adhere to the very strict diets apprenticeship requires;
• travel to and from their mentor’s village;
• participate in shamans and apprentices meetings exchanging knowledge;
• purchase/commission their traditional attire and other paraphernalia needed for healing rituals;
• maintain their medicinal plant garden (where they plant the medicinal plants they learn in ceremonies);
• participate in training courses that will augment the possibilities of diversifying their sources of income such as sustainable agriculture, etc.;
• support themselves as they take time from their daily work responsibilities to learn;
• purchase of notebooks, cameras, etc., needed to keep records of their mentor’s lessons.

The apprenticeship program provides selected youth with a space where their culture is treated as a source of pride and where the values and traditions that the students have already developed will be encouraged. It provides them an arena where their culture will be treated as a source of pride rather than shame, where the values, family ties, and traditions that the students have already developed will be encouraged, not derided or dismissed. The basic technical skills acquired will allow survival within a larger market economy while enhancing the contributions to their own communities.

Why is it important?

The Amazon teems with more varieties of plants and animals than any other place on earth. It is also home to ancient cultures and civilizations that have lived in and shaped the Amazon basin for thousands of years, sharing a spiritual, life-sustaining relationship with the land.

Today, however, the Amazon faces an unprecedented human onslaught driven by ignorance, overpopulation and greed. Large-scale resource extraction and massive alterations of the Amazon’s landscape have resulted in dire environmental problems while decimating the region’s few remaining indigenous groups.

Tragically, those cultures threatened by the Amazon’s destruction are the ones that have been able to master the utilization of its forests on a sustained basis. Clearly, cultures which have survived in the same difficult environment for tens of thousands of years have much to teach western society about sustainability.  In addition to their management and conservation of strategic ecosystems, Amerindian peoples can contribute valuable insights through their traditional health practices, their integrated vision of nature and sense of life, and the cognitive systems they apply in order to recognize, employ, and replenish highly useful biological resources.

Indigenous knowledge has been a precious resource since the inception of our species. The indigenous knowledge of the “New World” has been particularly important to western society since the first encounter in 1492, and may be even more valuable in the future. Despite the significant scientific and technological progress that they have brought, western models of political and economic development have spawned enormous problems. Poverty, inequality, urbanization, violence, pandemic neuroses and depression are but a few.

Over time, Amazonian Indians built up vast, invaluable storehouses of knowledge about their environment, land use and resource management techniques. This knowledge is the key to preserving the Amazon’s unique ecological niche for indigenous peoples and for all humanity, but it is in mortal danger of becoming extinct. The social disruptions of the past century have all but obliterated the transmission of wisdom between the generations, and well-meaning but misguided missionary and government educational programs have only hastened the process of tribal assimilation into the dominant culture.

ACT believes that the loss of indigenous peoples impoverishes the world at large beyond measure. The benefits from their survival extend well beyond their own welfare. This is not a simple economic equation; rather, cultural diversity supplies the wellsprings of our common human heritage, from which is drawn the sustenance of our past and future evolution as a species.

For centuries, the indigenous peoples of the Amazon have passed on their wisdom from one generation to the next. Now, their communities are almost always located within a vortex of conflict and commercial interests where missionary activity has deflated the power of traditional religious leaders.

Furthermore, the introduction of western materialism and culture have eroded traditional arts, and deforestation has devastated wildlife with the consequent loss of hunting skills. In some areas, members of devastated populations have had to migrate to urban regions in order to survive. These ancient cultures are clearly at risk of disappearing. Without a collective memory, indigenous people will be doomed to a marginal existence.

Photos©ACT: Teaching about plants; Searching for plants.