PATHWAYS TO INDIGENOUS ENTREPRENEURSHIP
December 8th, 2022 at 12:30pm ET
The future of forest economies will depend on communities that protect them. How are indigenous people participating in the capitalist system? In what ways do their operations resemble traditional entrepreneurs? What can they teach the world about their ways of value and exchange?
Laura Yawanawá
Yawanawá People
Laura Yawanawá is a Zapotec and Mixtec Indian from Oaxaca, Mexico. She holds a degree in international relations, focused on indigenous peoples political affairs. Laura speaks three languages fluently (English, Spanish and Portuguese). Previously, she served as the Executive Director of the South and Meso-American Indian Rights Center in Oakland, California. She has worked for the rights of indigenous peoples from all over Latin America for many years. Together with her husband Tashka, she travelled with a backpack all over Latin America, visiting remote indigenous communities to empower them with information to fight for their rights and self-determination. She co-founded organisations to support indigenous peoples, such as the Nawa Institute, and INIYA (Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Alliance). She also worked for the Climate Change Institute of the State of Acre, organizing workshops in indigenous communities about climate change, and environmental services. She comes from a matriarchal culture in the northern hemisphere. Seventeen years ago, she married a Tashka Yawanawá. Since then, they have worked together for the good of the Yawanawá people. She now serves as president-director of the Yawanawá Sociocultural Association/ASCY. She has considered herself as an instrument, helping to transform a community from a deeply male-oriented culture to one that is more open and inclusive of women.
Tashka Yawanawá
Yawanawá People
Tashka Yawanawá is Chief of the Yawanawá people in Acre, Brazil. As Chief, he leads 900 people stewarding 400,000 acres of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. The son of the former leader of the Yawanawá, Tashka grew up witnessing the virtual enslavement of his people by the rubber industry and experiencing the near annihilation of the tribe’s culture by missionaries. Since the 1980s, Tashka has actively fought for the rights of indigenous peoples. Realizing that he needed further education to improve the situation of the Yawanawá, he pursued higher education in the U.S. and abroad. He was directly involved in the creation of the Indigenous Lawyers Association and co-founded the Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Youth Alliance, through which he shares the experiences and knowledge of the Yawanawá with youth around the world, and works with projects that guarantee the preservation of different indigenous cultures. In 2001, Tashka returned to Brazil, and chose to use the knowledge gained from his experiences abroad to help his people transform their future. He became the youngest Chief in the history of the Yawanawá at age 25. In a short amount of time, Tashka and Laura have managed to double the extent of Yawanawá territory, reinvigorate Yawanawá culture, and establish economically and socially empowering relationships with the outside world. Tashka and Laura have two daughters – Kenemani and Luna Rosa – and divide their time living and working in the Yawanawá community and Rio Branco, Brazil.
Jimmy Piaguaje
Siekopai Nation
Jimmy Piaguaje is a young indigenous Siekopai defender from Siekoya Remolino, a community of 53 families living on the banks of the Aguarico River in the northeastern Ecuadorian Amazon region.
The Siekopai (which means multicoloured people) are renowned for their shamanic acumen and knowledge of medicinal plants, with uses for over 1,000 different plants. In response to the existential threats they face, Jimmy and a group of other young Siekopai leaders have developed a number of innovative projects, safeguarding ancestral shamanic knowledge in video format and running environmental workshops with Siekopai youth. Their next goal is to open an alternative school with an educational model based on their own cosmovision
Nice Machado
Movimento Interestadual das Quebradeiras de Coco Babaçu
The women of the Interstate Babaçu Coconut Breakers Movement, joined forces in 1990 to fight for their autonomy and quality of life and to protect the babassu forests where they live and work. MIQCB ‘s mission is to organize babassu nut breakers so that they are aware of their rights, in order to promote political and economic autonomy in defense of babassu palm trees, territories, the environment and the struggle to improve their living conditions and of their families, based on good living. The movement seeks the mobilization and participation of babassu nut breakers, extending achievements to more than 400,000 breakers, including young people and other members of agroextractive communities.
“With our strength and work, we feed Mother Palm. In return, she sustains us all. After all, the coconut that Mãe Palmeira generates and provides us with is transformed into food, income and shelter… We seek to strengthen a type of agriculture and extractivism based on agroecology and economic solidarity. In this way, we promote the conservation of the socio-biodiversity existing in the babassu forests and the improvement of the quality of life of all peoples and traditional communities.”
Angela Mendes
Memorial Chico Mendes
Angela is at the forefront of the launch of the new Alliance of Peoples of the Forest with indigenous leaders Raoni Metuktire and Sonia Guajajara, to join forces and coordinate the mobilization of traditional communities living in the Amazon. To adapt to new realities and challenges, Angela has shifted the goal of the movement as well as renewed strategies around who she brings into the movement. While in the past, the struggle was for the recognition and demarcation of territories as a conservation unit, today, the struggle is to preserve the conservation units and prevent setbacks, such as invasions and illegal deforestation, and the dismantling of environmental policies, which are being proposed by politicians at the National Congress. In this new model, Angela also integrates new actors including quilombo communities, riverside dwellers, and family farmers of the Movimento dos Sem Terra (Landless Workers Movement), who were not part of the Alliance before.
Kumiko Hayashi
The Roots Awaken (film)
Kumiko is a Japanese-American filmmaker and medicine woman born in Tesuque Indigenous territory in New Mexico. She has presented her work in conferences and gatherings around the world, including the ICEERS World Ayahuasca Conference in 2019.
She is a producer and cinematographer for “Women of the White Buffalo,” a documentary about Native American Lakota Women to be released in 2021. She directed her first feature-length film, “The Roots Awaken”, about her journey from the Andes to the Amazon rainforest, living with 15 Indigenous tribes transforming the environmental crisis through culture, ceremony, and community.
Charles Borges Rose
Instituto Fronteiras
Charles is a posthuman rights defender and activist with many years living and working in the Amazon with indigenous communities and grassroots organizations. In 2017, he founded Instituto Fronteiras, a local NGO based in western Amazon in the frontline of the Amazon rainforest deforestation frontier enabling indigenous and non-indigenous native communities to live sustainably in their own territories.
Benki Piyako
Ashaninka People
Benki Piyãko is an indigenous Ashaninka leader and shaman who works for the rights of indigenous peoples and the preservation of nature.
The Ashaninka are a thousands-years-old people, ancestors and precursors of the Incas. They live in the state of Acre, Brazil and also in Peru. With a population of around 120,000, they are the largest indigenous group in South America and one of the few tribes to have managed to preserve their autonomy and traditions. To this end, they have fought against all invaders throughout history. Deeply connected to nature, they have managed to preserve their ancestral knowledge.
