The Ashaninka of the Amônia River, A Collective of Regeneration & Resistance Confronting Unprecedented Ecological Catastrophe
The Ashaninka presence in South America has lasted over 4,000 years. Despite a long history of colonial struggle, the Ashaninka of the Amônia River in the Brazilian Amazon have ingeniously strengthened their world by restoring their ecosystems and through cross-cultural alliances. A compelling example of what is possible, they’ve fostered sustainable economies to reverse the destruction of their environment. Today, their territory is facing heightened threat and unprecedented ecological imbalance due to extractive interests.
It was late afternoon when I woke up to our boat being beached again in the middle of the Juruá river. Feeling quite groggy from the heat, I rubbed my eyes awake then slowly rolled my pants up to my knees to join the other passengers in the water. Our compact, twelve person commuter boat was aground, halted by the bottom of the river for the fifth time. Aboard there were mostly locals, four Brazilian military officers, my friend and I. We became more familiar with one another each time we entered the shin-deep parts of the river to move our boat to less shallow waters. However, when we returned to the boat this time the motor wasn’t starting, and we were stuck in the lukewarm river under the intensity of the sun’s sweltering heat.
As two of the men assisted our driver with the motor, I began to smell the dense texture of burning in the air and noticed a slow rain of floating black ash landing softly on the river’s surface. A fire had started close to us and was growing in force behind a small wall of trees up the beach from the river’s shore. Looking towards the horizon, one side of the river had a swelling chimney of dark smoke and the other side was laden with eroded, dry dead trees.
Earlier that morning we left a small dock in Cruzeiro do Sul at 2:00 am to embark on what would become a 17 hour journey down river through the Brazilian Amazon. Originally an estimated seven hour excursion, the severity of drought in the region substantially slowed down our trip. We were eager to meet friends at Yorenka Tasorentsi, an Indigenous Amazonian healing, cultural preservation and ecological restoration institute founded by Ashaninka leader Benki Piyãko, located in the municipality of Marechal Thaumaturgo in the state of Acre.
That week members of our community accompanied Piyãko, his team at Yorenka Tasorentsi and a local collective as they worked tirelessly on the ground with water backpacks and buckets to urgently put out a bombardment of devastating fires, which burned over 200 hectares (494 acres) of the local forest. The land of the institute which includes a five-year-old reforestation and food forest project lost between an estimated one to two million trees alone.
Ecological Crises: Unprecedented Drought, Fires & Catastrophic Floods
Approaching our September 2023 visit to Yorenka Tasorentsi, the Brazilian government had declared an environmental emergency in various regions of the Amazon rainforest including the state of Acre. Piyãko expressed that heavy rainfall was late that season with up to 90 days of little to no rain which was uncommon. In a live interview Piyãko did for Reddit he commented:
Today our greatest worry is to see the environment being destroyed in such a radical matter that impacts the daily lives of Indigenous people in this region. The contamination of the air, the waters and the forest. The destruction of all species of animals… that every day in this time of year the rivers are drying more than in the past. People are destroying the primary forests to replace it with pasture for cattle grazing. Due to the deforestation for cattle grazing, the fire that is used to clear the fields spreads to kill the forest.
As Piyãko shares, the severity of climate change in the region is largely attributed to land use change for agriculture and livestock farming which are the leading causes of deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions in Brazil. Despite optimism associated with a decrease in annual deforestation, the Brazilian Amazon is still burning at an alarming rate. According to data collected from mapbiomas.org, last year 270,552 hectares (668,549 acres) burned in the state of Acre alone. On a national scale, Brazil’s biome had 17,316,740 hectares (42,790,596 acres) of burned area during the same time period (see figures below).
Leonilson Silva, traditional medicine student of Benki Piyãko and core agroforestry specialist of Yorenka Tasorentsi, commented on the large scale consequences of the fires:
We are in a very remote place, where we don’t have the material to be able to put out fires, we don’t have an airplane to carry water, there’s no road to carry water into the forest and everything is done by hand carrying water from the coast (of the river). So if there is a fire of large magnitude it can wipe out the ecosystem of a land. It’s very serious what is happening here today in the Amazon.
The municipalities don’t receive enough money from the government on the issue, because it is a new thing that’s happening. When a fire breaks out, a large amount of smoke stays around the municipality, the houses… This is very toxic for human life and brings a lot of disease. When the forest burns there are many plants poisonous to human use, so when these plants are burned a lot of tree bark starts to decompose inside the forest. When the rain comes it throws everything in the river and contaminates the water. So today you see the river drying up, you see many fish, many chains of aquatic animals no longer existing here in the region.
Silva continued:
The government has to take a stand. This has to be seen as a priority so it doesn’t happen again in the future. It’s about making an investment, preparing what exists within the municipality, an environmental department, but it doesn’t have the equipment to put out the fire, even within the city itself. It’s very difficult for us to be here in a large forest with a population of 30,000 inhabitants and we see a department that doesn’t even have a bag to put water in.
The Amazon basin contains the largest remaining rainforest in the world with over 40% of the earth’s tropical forest area, embodying a vital role in stabilizing the Earth’s climate system. Across the Amazon forest, roots of native trees and plants absorb water from the soil which moves up their bodies and is emitted or “transpired” as vapor through their leaves. This water vapor rises, cools and turns into clouds which coalesce into the Amazon’s “flying rivers.”
Trees in the Amazon are synonymous with geysers that put water into the atmosphere and a single large, old growth Amazonian tree is estimated to transpire 263 gallons of water per day (Rasolt, 2023). According to Brazilian Earth System scientist Carlos Nobre, the amount of water transpired by the Amazon forest per day equates to 20 billion metric tons, which makes the Amazon’s “invisible” flying river the largest river by volume in the entire world.
These aerial rivers travel throughout South America providing precipitation, forming terrestrial rivers, wetlands, mountain snow and ice all to cycle back into the Amazon’s ecosystem and counter global warming. However, increasing droughts, temperature stress, logging and widespread slash-and-burn practices have decreased evapotranspiration, threatening the survival of large areas of the Amazon and the livelihoods of the estimated 1.5 million Indigenous inhabitants living inside of it (Drüke et al., 2022, p 2).
A few days after I left Yorenka Tasorentsi in late September of 2023, a large fish die-off surfaced in the local river. The institute’s Founder, Benki Piyãko shared a video on Instagram saying:
Similar to the experience we had around six years back. The same issues arose when there were a lot of fires. A lot of the rays, catfish, and large fish died, you know? So now from yesterday to today we observed that the beach is teeming with (dead) fish… The heat was not normal, it was the most intense in history in this region. You all might well know when water warms up, when the forests and lands heat up, the rain that follows is polluted affecting the oxygen level in the water. Even we humans who breathe this air can feel the utter change in the climate. It completely affects our breathing too. We’re going through this moment and it’s very concerning.
The aforementioned 2023 drought in the Amazon was exceptional with a portion of the Negro River, one of the major rivers of the Amazon rainforest, at its lowest water levels in 120 years (since records began) due to lack of rainfall (Rodrigues, 2023).
Compounding upon the severe consequences of deforestation from agribusiness is an unusual warming of the North Atlantic Ocean. This region is known as the intertropical convergence zone and acts as one of the main meteorological systems near the equator that generates rain formations in the tropics (Rodrigues, 2023). The warming of this area has drawn storms away from Northern Brazil, which was noted to have contributed to the severity of the drought that was further exacerbated by the El Niño climate pattern, which occurs every two to seven years (Rodrigues, 2023).
A study published by World Weather Attribution affirmed that increased global temperatures due to burning fossil fuels and deforestation were the primary factors which caused the Amazon’s record-breaking drought, not the El Niño weather phase which started earlier in the year (Clark et al., 2024). However, El Niños are characterized as bringing more heat in their second year, which compounds upon concerning data that predict cycles of increased droughts in the Amazon.
Additionally, deforestation and fires eliminate native root systems that are essential to feed underground aquifers and absorb water to reduce warming. The remaining grassland or savannah states after these events make the forest’s soil less permeable, which makes it easier for even short bursts of rain to cause flooding, flows of debris and mud.
Only months after the devastating fires in the region, the Government of Acre declared another state of emergency on February 25th, 2024 for 17 municipalities, including Marechal Thaumaturgo, due to severe flooding of rivers and streams. Water levels in certain areas rose over 30 feet from less than one week of rain. Approximately 20,000 people of river communities were affected, including more than 370 Indigenous families with an estimated 2,000 people who lost their homes and their belongings. This catastrophic flood displaced families from their sources of food and electricity and destroyed regional agroforestry systems, completely submerging fields, killing livestock and flooding fish ponds.
The Amazon’s ecosystem is currently oscillating between two extremes with record breaking drought and extreme floods. The intense flooding may be misperceived as a solution to the severe drought and threat of large scale fires in the dry season, but as illustrated above, floods can have disastrous effects.
Typically after the wet season ends it is the perfect condition for planting and grazing animals. However, when prolonged severe flooding occurs it destroys crops, displaces communities from their homes, contaminates water supply, remaining fish populations become scarce and more. This impacts the quality of health in rural communities and compounds upon the socio-ecological burdens they face to sustain their ways of life, including the ongoing threats imposed by unyielding, extractive development and market interests.
Colonial Consciousness and Brazil’s PL 2903
In the post industrial era, Brazil sought to increase its standing among the world’s economic leaders and its military government viewed turning the Amazon into cities, farms and mines as an “imperative to national security” (Brice & Smith, 2021). During this time, Brazil’s dictatorship built military bases, power plants and a network of roadways through the jungle to aid development. Government campaigns against the forest and its original Indigenous inhabitants encouraged citizens who lived in cities to move to the Amazon to conquer the “green hell,” stating that the Amazon was a “land with no men, for men with no land” (Brice & Smith, 2021).
The period of time from the 1970’s — 1985 has been referred to as a golden era called the ‘Brazilian Miracle,’ which marked a time of a 10% increase in economic growth based on an imported model of progress from the global north. This began a deforestation cycle, of which most small farmers who migrated to the Amazon could not survive, opening land to be purchased by big farmers to amass soybean and ranch empires for domestic and international markets, contributing to poverty in the surrounding areas of the forest and global warming (Brice & Smith, 2021).
The seeds of consciousness planted against the Amazon during this time lay at the foundation of contemporary issues and violences facing Indigenous nations who live in the Brazilian Amazon. During prior Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration (2019–2022), various protections for the rainforest were dismantled including lands within demarcated Indigenous territories and under conservation.
Then on May 30th, 2023, Brazil’s Congress approved controversial bill PL 490/2007, which includes the “Marco Temporal” timeframe thesis that would dispossess Indigenous peoples from their lands. This bill has additional clauses to allow the government to eliminate Indigenous reserves, explore energy resources, set up military bases and expand roads in Indigenous lands without consultation with Indigenous peoples and more (Human Rights Watch, 2021).
Throughout the remainder of 2023 this bill, now changed to title PL 2903, continued to move through the process of becoming law. It was defined as unconstitutional by Brazil’s Supreme Court then to later be approved by another vast majority vote in favor of the bill by Brazilian Congress in September. In October, Brazil’s current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva partially blocked portions of this bill to protect Indigenous lands and other clauses affecting Indigenous rights. However, on December 14th, 2023 Brazil’s Congress, which is dominated by ruralist agribusiness and mining interests voted to reject Lula’s veto, bringing closer into law what is being referred to as “the most serious and vicious attack on Indigenous rights in decades” (Brown, 2023).
The passing of PL 2903 would undergird ongoing threats to develop the Amazon through foreign investment, which include plans of constructing various highway projects throughout the forest. Each highway project carries the potential of a “fishbone effect,” which pertains to the development of smaller roads stemming from each highway. This would increase deforestation and further obstruct ecosystems which keep the Amazon forest alive and resilient.
Additionally, the proposed highways further threaten an increase in the dispossession of land and acts of violence towards Indigenous inhabitants and local forest collectives by land-grabbers, drug traffickers, ranchers, loggers and more. PL 2903 is a living example of the continuation of historical prejudice and unrelenting genocidal threat towards Indigenous collectives, like the Ashaninka of the Amônia River.
The Ashaninka of the Amônia River, A Collective of Regeneration & Resistance
The Ashaninka of the Amônia River are a compelling example of an Indigenous collective who have constructed strategies to strengthen their worlding practices despite a long history of colonial struggle. Through the guidance of their shamans and obtaining territory where their visions and thoughts could materialize, the Ashaninka of the Amônia River achieved social renewal through their ingenuity in creating a space of autonomy for the continuity of their people, and the other-than-human relations which sustain their world and beyond (Comandulli, 2019, p. 142).
Throughout history, Ashaninka territories in Peru and Brazil have been “surrounded and targeted by extractive industries” (Comandulli, 2019, p 143). After a long period of enslavement and massacres the Ashaninka experienced through debt peonage by the rubber industry, Brazil’s state campaign in the 1970’s to develop the Amazon forest drew extractive logging to their territory, causing severe damage to the environment and Ashaninka livelihood in Brazil. In the late 1980s, a life-threatening invasion of illegal occupation by loggers provoked the Ashaninka of the Amônia River to fight for their rights and the right to their land. In 1992, the Ashaninka of the Amônia River finally received the demarcation of their territory (Fortes, 2019, p. 17).
After the demarcation of their lands, the Ashaninka of the Amônia River created a cooperative inspired by their traditional exchange system, to market their products and no longer depend on patrons to supply them with goods (Comandulli, 2019, p. 153). The main product was Ashaninka crafts, which included production that did not damage the forest (Comandulli, 2019, p. 154). The Cooperative initially grew crops to sell in town, but the collective stopped producing crops for outsiders because food production was increasing deforestation and they chose to focus on their own subsistence activities “based on their own rhythms” to provide for their needs (Comandulli, 2019, p. 154).
Eventually, the Ashaninka of the Amônia River established the village of Apiwtxa on two former cattle pastures to more effectively guard their territory and improve natural resource management (Comandulli, 2019, p. 155). With the collaboration of strategic institutions and tools like ethno mapping, they developed their territorial and environmental management plan (Comandulli, 2019, p. 155). Through this process and the creation of the Association of the Apiwtxa village, the Ashaninka of the Amônia River established a series of rules for community life based on collective agreements and a shared governance system (Comandulli, 2019, p. 155). This system served to address one of their main concerns, which was to reverse the destruction of their environment “so they could live and keep alive the other-than-human beings that compose their world” (Comandulli, 2019, p. 155).
The Ashaninka of the Amônia River acted upon this by investigating how to restore and strengthen their landscape and create alternative sources of food to alleviate pressure on existing resources. This included reforesting the former cattle pasture of Apiwtxa by establishing an agroforestry system focused on producing fruit and native trees to provide food, timber for their own construction, building fish ponds to conserve the local river, restoring the turtle population and more (Comandulli, 2019, pp. 155–156).
Today, the Ashaninka of the Amônia River are actively engaged with sharing their methods of ecological restoration and socio-political engagement through cultural exchanges, courses and workshops with other Indigenous and non-indigenous communities with the aim of looking after their shared space.
However, the dramatic changes in climate are significantly affecting their environment including the predictability of local natural cycles which sustain their food sovereignty, quality of life and survival. The Ashaninka observe “bioindicators” such as the behavior of animals, plants, celestial bodies, wind and rain which mark stages in seasons for activities like planting certain crops, harvesting and hunting specific animals (Comandulli, 2019, p. 147).
Prior to the recent unprecedented drought, large scale fires and overwhelming flood, the Ashaninka of the Amônia River had expressed grave concern about the irregularities in these relationships. “Benki and Arissêmio (Ashaninka shaman) state they are no longer able to see important stars as some of them are changing position, because the earth’s axis is changing due to instability engendered by human action” (Comandulli, 2019, pp. 147–148).
For years, Ashaninka leaders like Benki and Moisés Piyãko have traveled nationally and internationally to exchange knowledge, further investigate the challenges facing their communities and express “the power of ancient Ashaninka narratives in understanding the present, in their critique of the Western world, and their proposals for transformation” (Comandulli, 2019, p. 149).
This outreach provides opportunities for collaborations to develop between worlds, which is further supported by the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute.
Yorenka Tasorentsi, A Bridge Between Worlds
“Communities of resistance should be places where people return to themselves more easily, where the conditions are such that they can heal themselves and recover their wholeness.”
Thich Nhat Hanh
The Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute was founded by Benki Piyãko in 2018 through the purchase of degraded land previously used for cattle ranching located up the river from Apiwtxa. In order to safeguard the Ashaninka territory and respond to the current planetary changes, the Indigenous-led institute was created in a neighboring municipality to holistically address ecological, cultural and social issues, while creating a globally adaptable model for conscious and sustainable land stewardship (yorenkatasorentsi.org).
Referred to as an Ãtawiyari, which is a person of the most advanced spiritual knowledge, Benki Piyãko was raised within a worldview which understands that in order to have life, everything needs to be whole and connected. Nothing is disconnected.
The institute itself is positioned in a socionatural territory composed by relations amongst people and other-than-human beings, where the the Indigenous and non-indigenous meet and form their lives outside of the binary of “non-modern and modern” (de la Cadena, 2008, p. 5). Yorenka Tasorentsi is a place where worlds overlap, and visitors have the unique opportunity to engage with and learn from Ashaninka cosmology and stewards native to the Amazon forest, heal by being with the land, and partake in traditional medicine practices shared by Benki Piyãko and his students.
To date, Benki and his team have manually planted over 2 million trees and are actively working to rehabilitate various animal species native to the territory, in addition to creating sustainable business opportunities for the local community. The institute is an inspiring agroforestry enterprise whose aim is to contribute to the restoration of the rich biodiversity of the Amazon forest, by building an integrative ecosystem which encourages the production of local resources, and serves as an education center, meeting place for community and inter tribal gatherings, as well as a site of cultural heritage and traditional knowledge.
My visits to Yorenka Tasorentsi were times I experienced a way of being outside of the conditioning of Western modernity and its separation of “man” from nature. In an underlying search to heal from a paradigm entrenched in what often feels like a tsunami of devastating socio-political, environmental and spiritual ailments, my heart yearned to connect with and be steeped within a knowledge system that honors the interconnected nature inherent to life.
However, I must express that my experiences are not a romanticization that bypasses the confronting histories and complex realities Indigenous collectives hold. While at the institute, you interface with and learn about the various dynamics within the territory, and can see first hand the many levels of community engagement the institute is committed to through its mission.
During our September visit, every day it wasn’t raining a new fire had started in the distance around us. I witnessed Piyãko and his team return from working to put out fires in neighboring areas during the season’s record-breaking heat. I saw them meet with community leaders, including the State of Acre’s Department of the Environment and the municipality of Marechal Thaumaturgo in order to establish the infrastructure needed to enhance their capacity to face future periods of drought and fires. In addition to this, Piyãko, his family and staff worked throughout the time we were there to provide a safe, hospitable and healing experience to our group of international visitors.
While at this frontier, I both grasped and grappled with the understanding that no translation would be sufficient enough for me to truly know the spiritual practices or world that was so generously being shared with me.
That equivalences through the knowledge of my Western lens had the risk to create erasures where unmistakable differences between our worlds existed. Our worlds were included in one another’s, but they could not be reduced to one another’s. Instead, my visits were an opportunity to listen, explore those differences through cultural exchange, receive cherished healing, and connect to the spirit of the forest and our shared destiny as human beings on this precious earth.
I was humbled by the mental fortitude and resilience the Ashaninka collective held amidst the severity of compounding circumstances. After over a week of little to no sleep, fighting devastating fires, tending to the land and back-to-back meetings, Benki and his team would lead healing ceremonies, sit with us all night to the morning sun, singing their prayers and spending time with our group to ensure everyone was taken care of with a good feeling in our hearts. This example continues to serve as a guiding light I return to amidst all that is unfolding in our world.
The expression “só alegria,” which translates to “only joy” was a healing sentiment I took in while present at Yorenka Tasorentsi. Só algeria is rooted in the understanding that the feeling of joy gives one the vitality to carry on and face life’s challenges. However, this saying was not shared as a means to avoid constructive emotions, or feelings, which aren’t joyful. In my experience, the spirit of só alegria was found in a myriad of expressions at the institute. Whether it was experienced through music, taking time to be with the stars, celebrating a child’s birthday or planting trees, I received só algeria as a life-giving practice which helped to make the impossible feel possible, again and again.
One could say that we are very much in a renaissance of re-indigenization as societies reach for guidance to address the socio-ecological and spiritual crises of our age. As we walk the bridge between worlds, heal and build relationships with Indigenous collectives like the Ashaninka of the Amônia River, it is imperative that we co-labor to question the edges of what we think we know, in order to foster the spaces necessary to redress the appropriation of and attempts to erase Indigenous collectives, their knowledge and ways of life.
Yorenka Tasorentsi is an invaluable place to experience and support an embodied accompaniment of this mission and so much more. All situated in a vital ecosystem in need of critical attention and support, to ensure its survival for future generations and the well-being of life on earth.
The Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute is entirely self-funded and all ongoing efforts to support this collective, and their work with neighboring climate impacted communities is done by the generous contributions of donors. You can make a one-time or monthly donation here. If you have further questions, ideas and suggestions to contribute to their work email: contact@yorenkatasorentsi.org.
Please contact tiffanyraether@gmail.com for all re-publication requests.
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