Colonization

The Amazon has been facing colonization, extraction, and the erasure of Indigenous culture for the last 300 years. The Amazon began to first be infiltrated by European missionaries, explorers, and businessmen in the 16th century. The initial exploration of the Amazon has created lasting legacies and myths about the region, glorifying it as a “wealthy (metals, medicines, materials), marginal, distant, dangerous, and sometimes empty (as a result of depopulation) space, attractive for the appropriation and mobilization of knowledges” (The Amazon We Want, 2021). It was the most glorified “Other” in the world, a place of fantastical legends and magic, which prompted increased desire by Europeans to explore it.

Colonization followed the typical path of many other regions. In pursuit of “God, Gold, and Glory”, as it is often put, colonizers raided villages, took children to missionary schools for assimilation, rounded up the men for labor, and destroyed life as Indigenous peoples knew it.

Activity

Although not specifically about the Amazon and set in modern-day Bolivia, this scene from También La Lluvia depicts the lengths that Christianization went to erase and assimilate Indigenous Peoples throughout South America.

Disease and Decimation

Amazonian peoples met these colonizers with resistance, but decimation due to the amount of disease brought by colonizers made resistance futile in terms of numbers and weapons. The decimation of Indigenous peoples, where about 95% of the original population has been calculated to have died in the first 100 years of colonization from Western diseases (The Amazon We Want, 2021), spurred two coinciding events.

First, it allowed Indigenous Amazonian peoples to be much more easily colonized and assimilated into European culture. Missionary schools forced generations of Indigenous Amazonians into new identities and created ethnogenesis, in which the following generations of Indigenous Amazonians would be raised with both traditional and European/missionary ways of being. This has created centuries of conflicting identities and the division of Indigenous peoples (around the world) about how they should perceive and practice their own identities.

Secondly, “the demographic decline contributed to perpetuating the myth of the ʻgreat Amazonian emptinessʻ” (Amazon We Want, 2021). Similar to terra nullius or manifest destiny, this myth that the Amazon was empty and waiting to be “used” increased desire and motivation to explore and extract from the Amazon. By 1957, 87 ethnic groups had become extinct in Brazil alone (Amazon We Want, 2021).

Once colonization began, “missionaries became key to knowledge circulation and territorial control, being the protagonists in the opening of waterways, drawing of maps, and ethnographical and natural history observations. They were followed by naturalists motivated by curiosity and economic interests, sponsored directly or indirectly by hunger for overseas territories and raw materials. These fantastic visions of a place containing wealth, and knowledges about the material and cultural world are still very alive” (The Amazon We Want, 2021).

Activity

An obsession to explore and capture the magic of the Amazon has captivated the Western world for centuries. The Jungle Cruise, a Disney movie featuring a legend from the Amazon shows how Western media continues to influence our imagination and perception of the Amazon.

Reflect, either with a partner or in a journal

• What misconceptions about the Amazon are present in the Jungle Cruise trailer? How does it perpetuate discrimination or apathy about what happens in the Amazon?
• How does this brief history of colonization in the Amazon make you feel?

Resistance and Relentless Destruction

As missions filled the “empty” forest, industry quickly filed behind them. “Usurpation of land and extraction of natural resources was accompanied by the subjugation and exploitation of Indigenous labor” (The Amazon We Want, 2021). This report also writes that, “Indigenous peoples responded to the different forms of colonial domination through various forms of adaptation, resistance, and revolt. Their strategies included a combination of searching for refuge in inland regions, harassment of expeditions and boats of the settlers, destruction of colonial urban centers, and the formation of confederations among different Indigenous peoples, who succeeded in overcoming their inter-ethnic conflicts to carry out unified actions. On many occasions, they managed to maintain autonomous spaces free from colonial domination for relatively long periods, in some cases up to the first half of the 20th century” (2021). Raoni, a chief of the Kayapo people, did not encounter a Kuben (white person) until the 1950s, when he was around 20 years old (Raoni, 2017). This case goes to show that although not much time has passed since the Amazon has been fully colonized, less than 80 years, the destruction is inexhaustible. This clearly demonstrates a hypocrisy and contraction- if development has already destroyed so much in just the 70-100 years of being in the Amazon, why should we let it continue?

Activity

Watch El Abrazo Del Serpiente. This movie takes viewers through a period of colonization of the Amazon in which explorers work with the last member of an Indigenous tribe to find a sacred plant. The movie depicts the brutal and grotesque nature of colonization- from violent rubber tapping, to assimilationist missionary schools. This movie showcases the undeniable violence that European ways of being has inflicted on Amazonian lands, while showing the beauty of Amazonian cultures and philosophies. While watching, you are encouraged to take notes on what stuck with you and how the film makes you feel.

Reflect- journal about the following or discuss with a peer

• How did this movie make you feel? What parts brought up edge emotions and why do you think this is?
• Did you know about the violent and exploitative methods of colonization by Europeans? What stories do you know of colonization and in which parts of the world?

Shapeshifting

Since the initial colonization of the Amazon, colonialism has not gone away, but simply changed forms. “Decolonization” from Europe and the creation of independent States in South America has divided up the Amazon in ways that the entire region will never be able to be protected. Due to States’ reliance on capitalism, neocolonial industries (multinational corporations that use colonial tactics such as cheap labor and exploitation to gain profit) have replaced the profit-driven buccaneering colonizers with an even more strategic and insidious initiative to suck the life out of the Amazon in the name of money.

Nation states work together with neocolonial industries to pull money out of communities in the name of poverty and creating a rising GDP that meets the levels of wealth of other countries built on extraction and violence. Industry does the work of pulling wealth out of the ground and forever altering the real wealth of the land, with states working to minimize the outcry by surveilling activists and creating red tape. Third-party military police seal the deal by making disruptive activists and leaders disappear.

Activity

Please watch the following news clip and read the following article to further your understanding of these patterns.

NBC: Exposing mining in the Amazon for California energy

Reflect, either with a peer or in a journal

• Reflect on when you read “Shapeshifting” before watching the video and reading the article, what did you think? Had you already been exposed to these subtle systems of extraction? Did this shapeshifting seem like a conspiracy to you?
• How did you feel after watching the video and reading the article? Explain how these systems of extraction work in your own mind. Feel free to talk it out or draw out diagrams as well
• Angeline Robertson, a senior researcher with Stand.Earth says, “They’re trying to use the poison is the cure”. What do you think of this?

In the video, Pedro Bormes says that “The goal for Ecuador is to extract as much oil as possible. The irony is that the money isn’t even staying in Ecuador. The companies that profit are the Chinese oil companies. They are the ones making the money here”. The video also cites that 2/3rds of oil from the Amazon will go to the United States, and the US is the number 1 consumer of Amazonian oil. Robertson again speaks on how the oil economy pulls money out of the countries where the oil is originally coming from, leaving them more indebted than before.

• What does this teach you about the interlocking extraction of globalization and capitalism? Please take 5-10 minutes to journal or draw out how these systems work in your eyes.
• The same systems of extraction you witnessed in El Abrazo Del Serpiente are still present today and are fueling the status quo in the Global North. we are all complicit in these processes. what could and should we do about it?

Activity

In the Falling Sky, Davi Yanomami provides a succinct perspective of colonial culture from an Indigenous perspective. Please read pages 326-356

Discussion and Reflection

Please have a 20-30 minute discussion with peers about these chapters and your reflections. Here are some questions to guide you

• What did you think of Yanomamiʻs perspective? Have you ever thought of white people like this?
• If you had to name the culture that Davi is describing, what would you call it?
• Is this culture only tied to white people? Why or why not?

Yanomami writes, “I told myself that these white people must have built such tall stone houses after clearing all their forests and having started making merchandise in very large quantities for the first time. They probably thought: “there are many of us, we are valiant in war, and we have many machines. Let us build giant houses to fill them with goods that all the other peoples will covet!” Yet while the houses in the center of this city are tall and beautiful, those on its edges are in ruins. The people who live in those places have no food, and they looked at me with sad eyes. It made me feel upset. These white people who created merchandise think they are clever and brave. Yet they are greedy and do not take care of those among them who have nothing. How can they think they are great men and find themselves so smart? They do not want to know anything about these needy people, though they too are their fellows. They reject them and let them suffer alone. They do not even look at them and are satisfied to keep their distance and call them “ the poor”. They even take their crumbling houses from them.”

• How does Daviʻs perspective on poverty and inequality connect with you? Have you ever thought about homelessness and poverty in such a way? What does it teach you about individualism vs collectivism?

He also writes, “I can never think calmly in the city. It is a worrisome place. People constantly ask you for money for everything, even to drink or urinate. Everywhere you go, you find a multitude of people rushing in every direction, though you don’t know why. You walk quickly among strangers, without stopping or talking, from one place to another. The lives of white people who hurry around all day like ants seem sad to me. They are always impatient and anxious not to get to their job late or be thrown away they barely sleep and run all day in a daze. They only talk about working and the money they lack. They live without joy and age rapidly, constantly busting themselves with acquiring new merchandise, their minds empty. Once their hair is white, they disappear, and the work, which never dies, survives them without end.”

• Do you think this is true? How do you relate to this comment?
• How do you think the hyperproductive mindset of our culture influences our mental and physical health as individuals and as a collective? How does it allow extraction and exploitation to continue?

Activity

Please set a ten-minute timer.

Zoom out for a moment. Pretend you are an alien who has come to Earth to observe its creaturesʻ’ cultures. As you enter the atmosphere, you see vast swaths of green and blue. You also see huge regions that are majority grey and a big patch of grey in the middle of the blue. You camouflage yourself amongst the humans for one year to learn as much as possible about these cultures to bring back to your planet. What did you find? Please write a summary here.

Activity

Watch these quick videos from The Good Place. In the series, people are judged throughout their lives on the number of points they get from doing good deeds. Doing good things gives you positive points, and bad things negative. However, there is a realization by the characters that hardly anyone has gotten into the good place in hundreds of years. In the first scene, they are comparing how easy it was to get positive points in the past versus now. In the second scene, the Judge in charge of who goes to the good place and bad place goes down to Earth for the first time in thousands of years to see if the theory that it is now almost impossible to get in is true.

Reflection

• How do these videos connect to what you wrote as an alien? How does it connect to Davi Yanomamiʻs perspective?
• Why is it so hard to make good decisions in the current age?
• What can be done to remedy this situation?

Reflect on the following graphic

• How does this graphic compare to your findings from this module?
• Where do different cultures fit into this graphic? Where are Indigenous communities, the West, the East, and everyone in between? How would this graphic be combined with a world map? Get creative in highlighting these extractive systems, and focus on how they are tied to the Amazon.
• How do these understandings and history lessons make you feel, in your mind and your body? Did you know any of this before? How are you reacting emotionally? Feel into your “edge emotions,” those which are unpleasant and challenging, what are they saying to you? Sit with them.

Conclusion

I know this curriculum is hard. It does not cultivate innocence within us, it directly confronts that we are part of the problem. That is hard to sit with, but it is also the world we live in. To teach you lessons about climate change or colonialism that make you feel good, or like we are not part of the problem, would be failing you, because we are not outsiders. Regardless of where we are in the planet or our role, we are all directly part of the problem; we all play into the perpetuation of the graphic above and the perpetuation of destruction in the Amazon.

But all because we are part of the problem does not mean we canʻt help find our way out of it. Although we are complicit, we still hold power through our imaginations, our values, and our practices. By imagining, perceiving, and acting in pursuit of mutual flourishing of land and people, we can help create a better world. However, Vanessa Andreotti writes that, “if we try to imagine the future from where we currently stand, we will likely be limited by the harmful and unsustainable frames of reference that shape the present” (Toward Braiding, 2021). The conditioning of growing up in the West and its systems of extraction make us entangled in these harmful frames of reference, and detangling ourselves from this can take years, decades, and likely our entire lives. For this reason, while we work to imagine, perceive, and act differently, we must also prioritize uplifting Indigenous leaders who have already been seeing the world in radically different ways. These communities and activists are the ones leading the way to better worlds, and we must follow their lead and support their work if we are ever to truly dismantle the extractive systems we are entangled within.

Bibliography

Bollaín, Icíar. También La Lluvia (Even the Rain). Wild Bunch, 2010.

Collet-Serra Jauma. The Jungle Cruise. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, 2021.

Chief Raoni. Raoni.com, 2017. http://raoni.com/biography.php

Global Witness. Almost 2,000 land and environmental defenders killed between 2012 and 2022 for protecting the planet. Global Witness, 2023.

Guerra, Ciro. El Abrazo Del Serpiente (Embrace of the Serpent). Diaphana Distribution, 2016.

Kopenawa Yanomami, Davi. The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010.

Llamas, Tom. Crude Reality: The Story of Oil from the Amazon. NBC, 2021.

Marya, Rupa. Colonialism graphic. Instagram, 2023.

Schur, Michael. The Good Place. NBC, 2016.

The Amazon We Want; Science Panel for the Amazon. Amazon Assessment Report 2021: Chapter 9, Peoples of the Amazon and European Colonization (16-18th Centuries). Sustainable Development Solutions Network, 2021.