Decolonizing the western centric view of the cosmos and moving toward holistic perspectives is essential to the future of life on the planet
Boaventura de Sousa Santos & Maria Paula Meneses, 2019
Community-Based Research with the Shuar
Learning to relate to and communicate with the more-than-human world with the Shuar
Our collaborative goal working Queen's University is to explore and document
1) Plant Medicine
2) Traditional Farming Practices
3) Shuar Ancestral Stories and Customs
4) Human Stewardship for Amazonian Ecosystems
5) Singing “Anents” (Shuar Songs for Nature) to counter cultural genocide of their culture.
Our overall collaborative goal will be to directly support the Shuar communities’ vision for the future laid out in the Shuar 2021 United Nations Development Programme and PRO Amazonia funded “Life Plan” for sustainable economic development in the region created by the Shuar themselves. The focus of is for cultural knowledge and territory conservation in the region against state-backed neocolonial interests in the region (transnational Canadian mining companies). This research is working to support their vision for sustainable development by helping to create community-based tourism in the community of Buena Esperanza, conducting countermapping using their traditional knowledge and thus, being able to support further ancestral land claims over their traditional territory.
This work seeks to decolonize knowledge by de-centring Eurocentric knowledge production between the Global South and North
You can read the Shuar 2021 United Nations Development Programme and PRO Amazonia funded “Life Plan” for sustainable economic development in the region here: