2.1.3 Human Sustainability is a “Return to the Maloca”: Combining our Ancestral Wisdoms with Occidental Knowledge

Although, we have organized ourselves to defend our territory, autonomy, self determination, continuing with the effort of our ancestors, in this direction, we can’t ignore the external fact that threaten to alter our social organization and coexistence systems with nature. By recovering from our own Cosmo vision the concept of human sustainability, we are returning to our path and “Returning to the Maloca”. By returning, in the path we come up with the statement that the coexistence with other socio cultural systems have allowed us to profoundly enter their logic and even incorporate some of their practices and values, although, this has not given sense to our lives. Mainly, the spiritual emptiness that we currently live is the great result of the abandonment of the teachings and practices that guided our ancestors for centuries.

During more than 500 years of direct and indirect coexistence with agents of the occidental world, we’ve learnt much, to the point to which we have behaved like the hunter of wild boars in the tale of the Ayereo, of the lowlands of Bolivia. They tell the tale “of a man who liked to hunt wild boars. Each time, his desire to hunt and catch them grew; he entered each more deep into the jungle. He didn’t know this was a tactic of the animals to attract him and convert him into one of them. One day, the wild boars made him enter so profound into the jungle that the man came back with his body full of hairs” (14). Some of our attitudes on the social and economic areas reveal that we are trapped very much into the “stone” jungle and have become “modern men” and possessors of all human miseries.

To “Return to the Maloca” then becomes a timely and crucial thing. It means to go back to think and act in a sustainable way, identifying thus, what makes us strong and what weakens us, as indigenous peoples. We have grown further away from our main principles and specially, when we find ourselves in urban centers; we become baits and fall easily to the traps of economic power and individualism. With these traps, we’ve become suicide agents of our own social and cultural systems. The shame of being what we are generates changes in ourselves, as persons and we seek to make this to others too.

Estranged from our own socio economic and cultural system, in which it is not allow for a person to work for the benefit of another one, currently we’ve experienced such a social relationship manner, where much of our youths, with the only aim of earning a salary, leave the community life to become “development” agents. To Return to the Maloca is crucial because we’ve seen that almost every one of us in the Amazon produce something for the market economy and negotiate directly with it, be it through the sale of our products or of external ones. This market economy has broken the reciprocity system- production, distribution and consumption-, and has altered the use of natural resources and the social mobility mechanisms, and specially changed eating patterns.

To Return to the Maloca means to search and rescue the teachings that equilibrate the quality in the simplicity, a trademark of the healthy existence of our ancestors, this means, to take advantage of what the occidental world offers, without abandoning our values and socio cultural practices. To know that production and consumption are the axes that articulate within the social organization process, which are used to strengthen the exchange networks of the members of the group. Each family nucleus in each community represents small units of production and consumption. However, what we need has not been produced, rather we guarantee the supply of a daily food basket of basic products through exchange networks, kept through the reciprocity system. To “Return to the Maloca” is to say that in spite of all the changes, this system still prevails within the peoples, even between those who live in urban centers.

To Return to the Maloca is understanding that it is not possible to discuss relationships between social actors that are present in the market, without making a difference between them. We have our own assimilation and participation dynamic in our traditional commercial exchanges, and with this viewpoint, we approach market economy, be it with labor or as input producers. However, the market logic to which we have been included is not that of reciprocity, but of exploitation. Therefore, we are trapped by a consumption pattern, from which we have little chance of escaping and having a technological disadvantage; we throw our hands to those things closer to us, which are the natural resources and our own daily life. Both of them have become now a currency. The natural resources have become scaling up sales, and our daily lives are exploited as entertainment for “solidary” tourists. In this way, we open our communities to commercial activities such as eco tourism, whose most drastic result has been the abandonment of our daily tasks of continuance, to become labor for the entertainment market.

Our communitarian lives have been thought of as lazy and this laziness is the cause of our material poverty. Therefore, something crucial was to turn us in the smallest possible space, into productive humans, which should urgently participate in the market and not in just patterns of social equity- more fair-, since it was the only thing that offered the greatest advantage and in a short time, the possibility to attain the greatest incomes and then we would have been rich, and logically, come out of the misery in which were found. To participate in the international market was the great exit, even for many communities, which had never managed bills, and their relationship with the local commerce was, until then, sporadically and based on a barter system. Evidently, to attend such demand, technical assistance was needed and thus, we were invaded by a group of people who had never been with us and who passed to “teach” us all. The famous productive communitarian projects multiplied themselves as well as the commercialization cooperatives. The result of all this process is today, that we have a greater dependence on manufactured products; dependence on external resources for all kind of community activities, and without a doubt, the weakening of our sustainable patterns. Unfortunately, our “allies” were looking at us, but they didn’t saw us.

To Return to the Maloca is to return to being ourselves, to value even more the ancestral wisdoms and harmonically relationships with the environment. It is to feel the pleasure in the dance that binds together the spirit and body, is to protect our wisdoms, technologies and sacred places. It is to feel that the “maloca” is within every son of the Sun, the wind, the waters, the rocks, the trees, the stars and the Universe. It means not to be an individual but rather a collective person, living in a circular time of the great return, where the future is always behind, it is the upcoming, the present and the past in front of us, with the teachings and individual lessons of the process of immemorial life. This is what COICA is currently making visible, through the Amazon Indigenous Agenda, returning to our great maloca, which is the Amazon and the peoples that we conform it.