Sachamama Center for BioCultural Regeneraciion (SCBR)
Territory of action:
Webpage url:
www.centrosachamama.org
Social Networking:
Issues of interest:
food sovereignty, climate crisis, critical anthropology
Banners:
Marching for our Land and forming strong Organizations
Objectives:
SCBR is bringing together an expanding collective of scholars, activists, healers, artists, and shamans that cross the North-South divide. The Center’s mission is to integrate politics and spirituality, activism and scholarship, biocultural regeneration and fair economic practices, with the goal of nurturing intercultural dialogue. SCBR’s mission is to strengthen the ancestral legacies and other practices of the Kichwa-Lamistas in dialogue with them as well as to regenerate the pre-Colombian Amazonian Black Earth of millenial fertility, collaborating with the local Education Board of Lamas to teach this heritage of the pre-Colombian ancestors to the to the new generation in order to slow deforestation, improve the local agriculture and help solve the climate crisis.
History:
The Sachamama Center is one of the two founding centers of the international project Annapurna Pluriversity: Collaborative for Abundance, Creativity and Resilience. The Center is a non-profit organization whose mission is to work collaboratively with the Kichwa-Lamista communities in their bio-cultural regeneration with the goal of nurturing intercultural dialogue. Please go to the Sachamama Center webpage for more information.
Achievements:
In several indigenous communities in the region of Lamas, Sachamama Center is engaged in regenerating or recreating a pre-Colombian type of soil discovered in the last 20 years or so by archaeologists. These soils are still fertile today. The reddish clay of the Amazonian soils is notorious for its poverty in nutrients, those being stored mostly in the canopy of the forest. Slash-and-burn agriculture (sometimes also called ‘swidden agriculture’) has become an important cause of the loss of tropical forest. Although it permits the forest to regenerate it is very inefficient and environmentally unsound under the present land holding patterns. The burning sends most of the nutrients up in smoke as well as sending a great amount of CO2 into the atmosphere. Swidden agriculture is the third cause of CO2 emissions in the Amazon basin. Additionally in the region of Lamas the population density has become much too high for this type of agriculture to be sustainable and it is leading to the highest rate of deforestation in all of Peru since the length of rotations no longer permits a healthy regeneration of the forest.
Teams of US and Brazilian archaeologists in the 1990s began excavating sites in the Amazon region where one finds what Brazilians call terra preta de indio (Indian black earth). These soils are still fertile today, some of them being used currently for fruit tree commercial plantations as well as being sold as potting soil. Carbon dating of the oldest patches of terra preta gives an age of 3,500 years. The key to the astounding longevity of the fertility of these anthropogenic soils is a mixture of bio-char (see below for this term), micro-organisms, organic matter, and a great quantity of broken ceramics. Nutrients stick to bio-char rather than being washed away by the torrential Amazonian rains, the micro-organisms give life to the soil and the broken ceramics allow a postive echange of ions that incrtease fertility..
At Sachamama we are attempting to re-create this black earth of the Indians using bio-char produced with a variety of agricultural biomass such as dried coconut shells, rice husks and wood chips. Bio-char is the result of a kind of cooking of the biomass with no oxygen. This method is called pyrolysis. This method sequesters C02 out of the atmosphere. We mix this bio-char with locally available organic manure such as cow dung, crushed sugar cane and the like to which are added micro-organisms gathered on the floor of the rain forest that have been fermented as well as ceramic shards found by archaeologists. The local Kichwa-Lamista have a tradition of making offerings to the spirit of the earth with such ceramic shards.
This experiment is very young, being only two years old, and it is only with the passage of time that we will know with greater certainty whether we have been successful in regenerating the pre-Colombian black earth of the Indians. Meanwhile, we hope that this experiment with a pre-Colombian technology will offer an alternative to slash and burn agriculture and with it to the very high rate of deforestation in this region as well as a high rate of C02 production.
Project: Ecological Literacy through Pre-Colombian Amazonian Permaculture
Center Sachamama is collaborating with the Local Education Board in Lamas to implement a pilot program of teaching Ecological Literacy through the creation of chacra-huertos in schools. This project is in its pilot phase. However we have started creating chacra-huertos in two native community schools as well as in the High School in Wayku, the indigenous section of Lamas. Professor Pramod Parajuli of Prescott College AZ is the director of this project. He is an educator and anthropologist and award winner of an urban gardens program with the shcools in Portland, OR.
Challenges:
Project: Ecological Literacy through Pre-Colombian Amazonian Permaculture
Center Sachamama is collaborating with the Local Education Board in Lamas to implement a pilot program of teaching Ecological Literacy through the creation of chacra-huertos in schools. This project is in its pilot phase. However we have started creating chacra-huertos in two native community schools as well as in the High School in Wayku, the indigenous section of Lamas. Professor Pramod Parajuli of Prescott College AZ is the director of this project. He is an educator and anthropologist and award winner of an urban gardens program with the shcools in Portland, OR.
Other narratives:
Sachamama Center has begun this project in August 2010. Many young Qichwas have shown themselves desirous to speak with their grandparents and other elders and record their life experiences, memories, songs, legends, knowledge, etc. to write them down in their language, namely Quechua. The idea is to produce books in Quechua following the model of the publishing venture of Sarita Cartonera in Lima. This people’s publishing method was taught to us by its founder Milagros Saldarriaga Feijoo who came to Sachamama to lead a workshop in August of 2010. Those books will be the first publications in the local variant of Quechua, spoken by the Qichwa-Lamistas. They will be distributed to bi-lingual teachers, to native communities and to whomever shows interest. The Quechua is being edited by Genaro Quintero Bendezú, MA (Quechua and Linguistics) of the Ministry of Education in Lima. Our hope is to sponsor once or twice yearly presentation of books produced by Qinti Qartunira together with books written by local authors in Spanish. This project is being directed by Barbara Galindo Rodrigues, MA with Girvan Tuanama Fasabi and the help of Abby Corbett.
On August 18, 2011 the first Qinti Qartunira booklet was presented by Felipe Cachique Amasifuen at the Congress of the World’s Indigenous Peoples and Education in Cusco, Peru. On September 2nd, 2011 this first publication was presented at Sachamama Center and distributed to bi-lingual teachers.
This project is part of the international project “Cultural Agents” directed by Professor Doris Summer of the Romance Languages Department at Harvard University; She translates “Cartonera” as : “Pre-Text”. The word ‘cartonera’ derives from the book covers that are made with recycled carton.
www.culturalagents.org/int/partners/kinti.html
Qinti Qartunira has its own web-site:
