Mocoa, Colombia: One Year After the Landslide

“…This magical land of water and rainforests is a giant water factory, much threatened by reckless development which is poorly planned and badly executed. The indigenous people who make their home have cautioned about deforestation, against building a road that caused enormous damage, resulting in landslides that killed well over a thousand people. Despite repeated warnings that were ignored by “experts,”  on April 1, 2017, a disastrous avalanche destroyed much of the village Mocoa taking with it hundreds of lives mostly children and displacing thousands of families…”

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Storytelling empowers indigenous people to conserve their environments

Oral histories

Indigenous storytelling is a powerful tool for preserving biocultural diversity, says Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares, an environmental researcher at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Having heard stories in Bolivia, Costa Rica, Kenya and Madagascar, he has now proposed that storytelling could transform how conservationists work with native peoples. The Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) embodies this philosophy. ACT partners with South American indigenous communities to preserve rainforests and traditional culture.

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Aluakumá, the Big Bat: Oral Histories in a Waurá Community

Oral Histories in a Waurá Community: In the village of Ulupuene, which partners with ACT, two elders and community leaders passed away: the regional “keeper of songs and dances,” Yakuana, who took with him a vast wealth of knowledge about Waurá cultural practices; and most recently, Aluakumá (“Big Bat”), a village elder, shaman, and healer. Both men were revered, and their kin expressed that they had lost more than just a loved one—they had lost an unrecoverable repository of cultural knowledge.

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Why We Invested: The Amazon Conservation Team

When thinking about where and when to invest, we look closely at windows of opportunity, during which our engagement can have an outsized and catalytic impact. Such a window presented itself to us this spring in Colombia. In fall of 2016, President Juan Manuel Santos and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) signed a…

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Modern maps through traditional skills

For generations, indigenous people will talk about ‘their’ Keeng Kumu. His passion and talent have increased in value, through the enhancement and addition of modern technology. His passion for drawing maps of indigenous areas was supplemented with targeted training and resulted in a professional knowledge exchange.

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Better Protection for Chiribiquete, Northwest Amazon’s Most Important Protected Area

On July 12, 2017, the Colombian National Land Agency approved the expansions of the Puerto Sábalo Los Monos Indigenous Reserve by 413,110 hectares and of the Monochoa Indigenous Reserve by 154,790 hectares. The twin expansions effectively connect the largest national park in the country, the Chiribiquete National Park, with the largest reserve, the Predio Putumayo Indigenous Reserve, creating a vast conservation corridor in the Amazon region linking near 10 million hectares of protected lands.

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