Welcome to Green Narratives Learning Modules, a deep dive into the Amazon, its peoples and their cultures, knowledges, and stories. This space is meant to help students from around the world understand the histories of colonialism in the Amazon and its layers of violence, the entangled relationships Indigenous Amazonian peoples have between their lands, their bodies, their communities, spirits, and minds, and the assertions for sovereignty, self-determination, justice, and peace, which also serve as solutions to the socio-ecological crises our world is facing.
Why a website?
As with most Indigenous peoples, the majority of information from Amazonian cultures has been shared orally for time immemorial. As Amadou Hampaté Bâ, a great Malian intellectual said, “Every time an elder dies, a whole library is set alight” (Open Democracy, 2020). The death of a people is tied to the death of their history, culture, and language, and as Western disease killed huge swaths of Indigenous peoples, their culture became more and more eroded and erased.
To combat erasure, Indigenous Amazonians have begun writing books, poems, and music. They’ve made art and schools and used a variety of tools and resources to document their traditional knowledge. From Living Schools to podcasts and an entire university. The swath of knowledge that is being documented by Amazonian communities is almost unending.
However, many of these resources are very hard to find in the siloes that exist in Western media and education, and the lack of exposure to traditional Amazonian knowledge can perpetuate colonial myths and legacies of the Amazon that result in Othering, apathy, and general disinterest about the lungs of the planet.
This website is meant to collect and disseminate information, stories, and art by Indigenous Amazonian communities and individuals in order to positively influence our perception of the Amazon, and showcase the significance in preserving and protecting this region (and all regions) against extractive industry that destroys land and people.
Edge Emotions
These learning modules will likely challenge your worldview. They will gently but directly point out how extraction produces (and reproduces) violence. They will point out how the Global North (which likely means you, me, and all of us) directly benefit from the theft of resources, life, and land from the Amazon and these communities. The modules may feel like yanking off a Band-Aid, they may make you uncomfortable, pushing you into edge emotions like fear, anger, denial, sadness, or stress. As written by Edgar Villanueva, I invite you to sit with the discomfort and understand that I am motivated by love.
When you begin to feel these edge emotions, I invite you to sit with them. Bring them to the table, share a meal, ask them why they’re here and what you can learn from them. I know it sounds silly, but society has taught us to fear these feelings, to suppress them. However, if we do this, we’ll never be able to understand why they are here and what they are trying to teach us, we’ll just avoid anything that brings them up. Edge emotions like fear and sadness are just as present in our lives as joy, and if we want to see the world in new ways, if we want to learn to re-relate and re-connect, we will have to learn to sit with these emotions. We must learn how to move beyond the self-protective defense mechanisms of denial, numbness, righteousness, apathy, and other obstacles that are put in place to avoid edge emotions and the depths of pain. The humanity that has been made invisible must be made visible again (Villanueva, 2018).
Throughout this curriculum, when you start to feel these edge emotions, when you feel tightness in your chest, worry, stomach pains, or anger, take a moment to set down this content and breathe. Ask yourself, “Why is this emotion here? How can I learn from this rather than immediately reacting or suppressing?” Sitting with discomfort is a part of these modules, part of the learning process. Don’t rush through these conversations with yourself. Remind yourself that pain is just one dimension in the full spectrum of the humanity within us. We can hold space for it, and we will still move beyond it. This process may be difficult at first, but through consistent re-framing, we can minimize the pain and create space for transformation.
Introduction to the Amazon
Now that we’ve framed where we are in space and time, we can begin an introduction to the Amazon. First and foremost, this is not to be confused with the company Amazon, an international corporation that has taken the language of nature, modified it, and sold it back to us as products for which we have no need but are convinced we cannot live without (Greenhorn, 2017). ****Amazon is the name to describe the lungs of the Earth, and on this website we will not use the word to refer to anything but this living, breathing forest.
The Amazon is a tropical rainforest made up of 7 million kilometers of central South America (Britannica, 2024), about 40% of the entire continent, and it is the most biodiverse place on the planet. It contains at least 1 in 10 known species on Earth and 20% of the world’s liquid freshwater, making it the largest store of freshwater in the world. Current assessments of species richness indicate close to 50,000 vascular plants, at least 2,406 fishes in the Amazon Basin, and 427 amphibians, 371 reptiles, 1,300 birds, and 425 mammals in the Amazon rainforest (The Amazon We Want, 2021). There is a clear link between the health of the planet and the health of the Amazon, given that is home to 13% of all trees worldwide (The Amazon We Want, 2021) and contains almost 200 billion tons of carbon, stabilizing the global climate (WWF, 2024). Through its local and global significance, protecting it is not just a regional concern, but a global imperative.
There are more than 3,000 Indigenous communities in the Amazon, many of which have been present for over 12,000 years. As an independent center of plant domestication and cultural & technological innovation, these societies developed (and still develop) adaptive technologies that optimize the health of the land and the people. Many of these technologies have long-lasting impacts which are incorporated into contemporary Amazonian landscapes, coining an entangle nature-culture heritage, in which the evolution of nature cannot be fully separated from the evolution of peoples. The technologies and societies of Amazonian peoples show an incredible example of stewardship and sustenance, where the unique stewardship of landscapes nurtured the sustenance (i.e food production) of human society. These technologies and ways of being, which are still practiced, can inspire sustainable solutions on how we can integrate human society with natural conditions (The Amazon We Want, 2021). As wonderful as this is, traditional Amazonian knowledges must be seen as not only holding solutions. Amazonian cultures are unique and sovereign way of beings that must be encouraged to flourish in self-determined fashions if we are to ever truly regenerate Amazonian landscapes. These peoplesʻ deep understanding of entanglement with Kawsak Sacha (The Living Forest) that guide their everyday living may be one of the only ways to re-discover sustainable ways of being in the Amazon, and their ways of knowing should lead this journey, rather than the West trying, and likely failing, to speak for them.
Activity
Please watch this short video about the Amazon and use the clicker in the upper left corner to see 360 degrees. Watch at 2x speed if needed
Reflect with a peer or in a journal
- How does this video make you feel?
- Do you feel connected to the Amazon? Why or why not?
Now, before we move into the Amazon, we’re going to begin by discussing how colonialism even came about in the first place.
Colonialism and the Worldview of Separation
In Decolonizing Wealth, Edgar Villanueva walks us through how Western ways of being diverged from Indigenous cosmology: “The Indigenous worldview fundamentally seeks not to own or control, but to coexist with and steward the land and nonhuman forms of life. As the philosopher Derek Rasmussen put it: ‘What makes a people Indigenous? Indigenous peoples believe they belong to the land, and non-Indigenous peoples believe the land belongs to them’” (Villanueva, 2018).
Between 1400-1700, Europeans began to live by the worldview of separation, which goes like this: “The boundary of my body separate me from the rest of the universe. I’m on my own against the world. This terrifies me, and so I try to control everything outside myself, also known as the Other. I fear the Other, I must compete with the Other in order to meet my needs. I always need to act in my self-interest, and I blame the Other for everything that goes wrong. Separation correlates with fear, scarcity, and blame, all of which arise when we think we’re not together in this thing called life. In the separation worldview, humans are divided from and set above nature, mind is separated from and elevated above body, and some humans are considered distinct from and valued above others- us vs. them- as opposed to seeing ourselves as part of a greater whole” (Villanueva, 2018).
This leads to hierarchy: dividing and ranking people, justifying inferiority and the need for domination, exploiting resources for the profit of a few. Villanueva writes that, “when this worldview of separation was used to justify oppression, slavery, and colonization by ‘scientifically’ claiming the inferiority of Africans and Indigenous people, among others, we got white supremacy. I use the term white supremacy instead of racism because it explicitly names who in the system benefits and- implicitly- who bears the burden. One tactic of domination is controlling the language around the perpetrator’s bad behavior. To call the phenomenon “racism” makes it abstract and erases explicit mention of the one who profits from the dynamic…
“White supremacy is a bizarre mythology created by people with pale skin. It asserts that paler people deserve more- more respect, more resources, more opportunity, for no reason beyond the utterly arbitrary and ultimately meaningless pigmentation of their skin. It says that pale people make the important decisions, while people of color pay the price. Pale people define what is normal; they make the rules. Whiteness is the default, the standard, the norm; when it goes without saying what someone’s ethnic background is, it’s because they are pale… the system as is rests on the historical and current accumulation of structural power that privileges, centralizes, and elevates white people as a group… White supremacy culture is defined by perfectionism, a sense of urgency, defensiveness, quantity over quality, worship of the written word, paternalism, either/or thinking, fear of open conflict, individualism, worship of unlimited growth, objectivity, and avoidance of discomfort” (Villanueva, 2018).
White supremacy and the worldview of separation are what instigated the entire domino effect of colonization. “In the last 500 years, European colonization of Indigenous lands prompted the violent transformation, and subsequent degradation, of ecosystems across the globe through deforestation, draining wetlands, damming, recreation, mining, commercial agriculture, shipping, petrochemical and industrial manufacturing, and burning fossil fuels” (Whyte, 2018). In the Amazon, European colonists, “explorers”, and missionaries set out to “civilize” the Amazon, destroying Indigenous homelands, building schools founded on the European premise of “God, Gold, and Glory”, and clearing land for development and extraction of minerals, metals, and oil.
Activity
In the following clip, Amazonian activist Nina Gualingá explains what extraction and development in the Amazon look and feel like from an Indigenous perspective.
Indigenous communities have had to take on a huge and unjust responsibility in fighting extraction for the protection of their homelands. From an Indigenous perspective, extraction and development for the Global North in the name of “progress” is not only unjust, but greedy, selfish, and self-destructive.
Activity
Potawatomi scholar Robin Wall Kimmerer shares her perspective on the Western culture of progress and development through a Potawatomi tale of the Windigo. Please scroll to page 303 and read through page 309
Reflection
- Take 2-5 minutes to write out what came up for you in this chapter. Write out key quotes, connections made, and anything else and share with a friend or peer
- Re-read the following lines from the chapter: “It is said that the Windigo will never enter the spirit world but will suffer the eternal pain of need, its essence a hunger that will never be sated. The more a Windigo eats, the more ravenous it becomes. It shrieks with its craving, its mind a torture of unmet want. Consumed by consumption, it lays waste to humankind… Windigo is the name for that within us which cares. more for its own survival than for anything else… They’re everywhere you look. They stomp in the industrial sludge of Onondaga Lake. And over a savagely clear-cut slope in the Oregon Coast Range where the earth is slumping into the river. You can see them where coal mines rip off mountaintops in West Virginia and in oil slick footprints on the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico. A square mile of industrial soybeans. A diamond mine in Rwanda. A closet stuffed with clothes. Windigo footprints all, they are tracks of insatiable consumption. So many have been bitten. You can see them walking the malls, eyeing your farm for a housing development, running for Congress. We are all complicit.”
- Go outside, go on a walk. Think about all of this. Digest it, think of examples of the Windigo that exist right in front of you, in front of your eyes. How many can you count? Who do you know that has been bitten, and how does their behavior show it? Kimmerer writes, “It is the Windigo way that tricks us into believing that belongings will fill our hunger, when it is belonging that we crave.”
- How do you relate to this quote? How have you used belongings to fill your hunger? Have you sat with a sense of unfulfilled belonging? What do you believe will bring feelings of increased belonging?
- How does the legend of Windigo relate to the big picture of Western culture from your own perspective?
- Do you think it’s possible for the West to overcome being Windigo and its endless wanting? How?
- Earlier in the book, Kimmerer writes, “I envision a time when the intellectual monoculture of science will be replaced with a polyculture of complementary knowledges” (139). Based on the legend of Windigo from Potawatomi culture and other legends you may know of, how do you see other ways of knowing and being leading us toward a more just and sustainable future? What does a true polyculture of knowledges look like to you?
Claims to Innocence
In Decolonizing Wealth, Villanueva also describes how colonial culture continued to make itself innocent during colonialism: “To lay claim to land that did not belong to them, settlers had to erase everyone and everything that came before. They rewrote history to legitimize their actions. They had to find a way to justify their atrocious behaviors, by claiming to be more deserving, more civilized, and superior to the original inhabitants… They systematically suppressed our Native governance and sovereignty. They systematically delegitimized and stamped out our traditional, holistic ways of understanding, learning, and knowing” (Villanueva, 2018). Innocence claims are an extremely common trend in colonial culture; as the writers of history, westerners will always find ways to look like the good guy, and if they can’t find a way, they’ll simply say “well, things are complicated and it’s not our fault”. Be wary of these patterns of innocence in the modern day as a way to perpetuate colonial practices that exploit people and the planet.
A Forest Called Amazon
In the short book, A Forest Called Amazon, Chief Ninawa Huni Kui integrates his perspective of the West as Wiindigo and shares his Indigenous worldview of the sentience of the Amazon and his community’s role in protecting it as an act of resistance to the attempts to undermine and delegitimize his culture.
Reflection
What makes the Amazon a sacred mystery?
What are the four attackers of the Forest, and how are they defined? How are these connected to the Wiindigo as described by Robin Wall Kimmerer? How do they delegitimize Indigenous ways of being?
Have you felt greed, indifference, vanity, and arrogance before? Please write about a situation in which you felt at least one of these feelings- where did these feelings lead you? What negative or positive situation did they bring?
Given what you have learned thus far in this module, take 2-5 minutes to do a stream of consciousness about what development and Western culture look like to you
Why is the Amazon important for planetary health?
Please draw your own creative diagram on how the health of the forest, the health of the planet, and the health of people are connected
Next up
In the next module, we will push into the the discomforts of colonization of the Amazon. This module will likely trigger those edge emotions that were introduced earlier, and again we invite you to breathe through them and learn from them. Afterwards, we will learn about the assertions of self-determination and acts of resistance by Amazonian communities to protect their homeland. After understanding the work of self-determination, we will dive into Amazonian worldviews of Kawsak Sacha, seeing the land as a living and sentient being.
Bibliography
Conservation International. Under the Canopy (360 video). Conservation International, 2017.
Greenhorns. The New Farmer’s Almanac, Volume III: Commons of Sky, Knowledge, Land, and Water. The Greenhorns, 2017.
Gualinga, Nina. We Canʻt Fight Climate Change Without Indigenous Knowledge. The Guardian & Instagram, 2021
Huni Kui, Chief Ninawa. A Forest Called Amazon. Gesturing Toward Decolonial Futures, 2023.
The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. Amazon Rainforest. Britannica, 2024. https://www.britannica.com/place/Amazon-Rainforest
Villanueva, E. Decolonizing Wealth. Berrett-Koeheler Publishers, 2018.
Wall Kimmerer, Robin. Braiding Sweetgrass. Milkweed Editions, 2013.
Whyte, Kyle. Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Injustice. Environment and Society, vol. 9, iss. 1, 2018.
World Wildlife Fund. Amazon. *World Wildlife Fund, *****2024. https://www.worldwildlife.org/places/amazon