Yanesha Knowledge: Forest Protection Across Generations
Location:
Comunidad Nativa Santa Rosa de Pichanaz, Amazon, Peru
Art Medium:
Mini-Documentary
Partner:
Colectivo Ecológico Amazonía Regenerativa (CEARE)
Artist:
The Challenge
The Yanesha community of Santa Rosa de Pichanaz sits in the Peruvian Amazon, but the daily living knowledge of Yanesha culture, the Yeñoño language, the cooking traditions, ancestral games, medicinal plants, fishing and farming techniques was thinning generationally. Elders held the knowledge but had few structured spaces to pass it on; younger generations were growing up admiring modernity and losing fluency in the practices that had sustained the forest and the community for centuries. For Yanesha, conservation of the forest is inseparable from conservation of these practices.
The Action
• Sessions with four Yanesha elders that surfaced their relationships with land, modernity, and pollution, and mapped the everyday practices most worth recording for the next generation
• Sessions with the local primary-school children that elicited “letters to my grandparent” naming the specific skills the children wanted to learn, from net-fishing with a tarrafa to making masato, which then guided the documentary’s content
• Filming of a short documentary capturing two female and two male elders practicing the everyday traditions the children had named
• A large community cultural celebration in which the documentary premiered, elders were formally honored, traditional foods were cooked together, and ancestral games and dances were taught by the elders to the youth
The Impact
• A mini-documentary of four Yanesha elders practicing daily cultural traditions, now archived for future generations and being shared with regional institutions for further screening
• A community event of ~120 people, including the cornesha (highest authority of the Yanesha nation), three community chiefs, five bilingual teachers, and Yanesha Communal Reserve leadership, with 50+ youth in attendance
• Eleven elders, six women and five men, formally honored with diplomas written in Yeñoño, the first time many had been publicly recognized for their ancestral knowledge
• Formal interest from the Yanesha Communal Reserve leadership to replicate the cultural encounter as a recurring annual event across the nation
Photo Gallery
