#kichwa

Kimmerer's daughter tells the story of an old woman who was their neighbor in Kentucky, who yearns for the home she used to live in before she moved out to care for her son, who experiences medical difficulties. But she gave up her life and her home to do so, and couldn't drive back to her old home. It's such a sweet chapter on community and of yearning for home and connection, but one of the descriptors of that yearning-- "the taste of exile" in your mouth just hits such a deep hurt in me.

This year, I am working on reconnecting with my ancestral heritage of being a Peruvian Lamista, who are an ethnic group in Peru from the Amazon Rainforest. From a young age, I was cut off from learning Spanish, much less Kichwa, which was our ancestral language before colonization. Many Peruvians were first forced to speak in Spanish, and then, in later years, it became culturally old-fashioned and crude to speak in the original language. When I told my abuelita about my pride for our heritage, she was a little disgusted at the idea of being Amazonian rather than Spanish. The colonizers did a good job of scrubbing our existence to fit their needs.

But for me now, centuries post colonization, decades after immigration to a new land in the hopes of a better future, it feels like there is a deep hole in the fabric of my personhood. I've never lived in a home for more than 2 years, I was brought up in an extremely isolationist family, wasn't taught Spanish, and moved out of the state I was brought up in about 3 years after college and I still can't go back.

It does feel like exile, to know that if I move back to my family's ancestral home in the Amazon, I still will not be able to lay down roots with how different my lived experience is now. I can't return to the state I used to live in, because I experienced too much trauma there. And despite my love of the place I live now, there is a deep fear that I can never lay down roots here because of the housing crisis we are experiencing on top of a number of other humanitarian concerns from living within the United States.

Most of what I've done to center myself is make home the people and environment I'm surrounded with. Fully tasting exile in my mouth, I spread my arms wider, let my tears fall, and hold fast to connection and love to try to fill the hole in my heart.

But like Hazel in this chapter, a tiny part of my brain tells me that the days of feeling home are out of reach for now. Maybe not forever, but for now, they're "gone, gone with the wind.”

If you'd like to read the snippet of story in the book, I have it below ❤️‍🩹

A Kichwa tribal leader has been shot to death in an area of the Peruvian rainforest that's seen high tensions between Indigenous people and illegal loggers.

Quinto Inuma Alvarado was attacked as he was returning from presenting at a workshop for women environmental leaders in the San Martín region of the Amazon on Wednesday, his son, Kevin Arnol Inuma Mandruma, told The Associated Press in a phone interview. Peruvian police confirmed his death.

...

Quinto Inuma had received numerous death threats over illegal logging, said Kevin Inuma.

The loggers "told him they were going to kill him because he had made a report," he said. "They've tried to kill him several times, with beatings and now gunfire."

...

Last year, an Associated Press investigation revealed Kichwa tribes lost a huge chunk of what was almost certainly their ancestral territory to make way for Peru's Cordillera Azul National Park, which straddles the point where the Amazon meets the foothills of the Andes mountains. The trees in it were then monetized by selling carbon credits to multinational companies seeking to offset their emissions.

URGENT! New oil spill in Ecuador on the banks of the Coca river, in what appears to be a new rupture of the @OCPEcuador pipeline. Over 27,000 Indigenous Kichwa living downriver still suffering impacts of massive April 2020 oil spill. Government & courts did nothing. This is the result. [source]

wituk face painting: an act of resistance

One way the people of Sarayaku foster their connection to the forest is through Wituk painting, in which lines, dots, or intricate designs are applied to the face using the pigment from Wituk fruits. The ancestral practice stems from a legend that says in ancient times, human beings and animals were one; there was no distinction.