I’m standing on the seashore in Santa Marta, a small port metropolis on Colombia’s humid Caribbean coast. Round me, brightly dressed households are consuming ice cream and grilled meat. Venezuelan refugees beg for cash, and shredded plastic luggage are snagged within the cactuses. Offshore, cargo vessels idle on blue-grey waves, maybe heading east in direction of the Atlantic, or west to Panama and the Pacific. The commercial port bristles with cranes and gantries. Wanting inland, my view is curtailed by palm bushes and crumbling condominium blocks. However someplace past the city sprawl, densely forested foothills rise in direction of the summits of a mountain vary known as the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. That is the explanation I’m right here.
I’m not the primary foreigner to have stood on this coast and imagined the forests and misty highlands that lie past. Close to me on the seafront is the statue of Rodrigo de Bastidas, the Spanish explorer who based this metropolis in 1525, laying declare to the ancestral lands of the Indigenous individuals who lived right here: a civilisation of farmers and goldsmiths referred to as the Tairona. Within the centuries for the reason that arrival of de Bastidas, Santa Marta has been the start line for explorers, conquistadors, settlers, farmers, miners, loggers, narcotraffickers and, extra just lately, vacationers. Of their numerous methods, all have gazed in direction of that hinterland and seen the gleam of treasure. Even earlier than my journey begins, I’m wondering if my presence right here can be a part of that extractive, questing lineage. I’m a journey author. I’ve come on the lookout for treasure, too.
I’ve come to Santa Marta searching for a means into these mountains, to study a tradition that has remained uncolonised. I’ve come to come across the sacred panorama that tradition has been defending. At the very least, as I sweat right here on this seashore, that’s what I believe I’ve come right here for. In the long run, this story isn’t about that journey in any respect.
The metropolis that de Bastidas based was one of many first Spanish settlements in what would later be named Colombia, and the second oldest Spanish metropolis in South America. It marks a cultural floor zero. That is the place the meteor hit. You’ll be able to nonetheless really feel its impression. From this level, the European invasion rolled throughout the continent, collapsing civilisations because it went and dragging silver and gold from the rubble, a strain wave of devastation that reached nearly in every single place.
All over the place however the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.
At first, the Tairona of the coast resisted the seizure of their lands, with a serious rebellion happening in 1599. However by the mid-Seventeenth century, that they had been overwhelmed. Within the face of slavery, genocidal violence and illness, the survivors of the invasion fled to mountain settlements, protected by dense tropical jungle and precipitous terrain. The Spanish noticed no have to pursue them, as riches might be discovered extra simply elsewhere. Stripped of its coastal territories, the Indigenous civilisation collapsed however, within the fastness of the mountains, descendants of the Tairona survived.
Over the centuries, these descendants separated into 4 tribes. The Wiwa, the Kangwama and the Arhuaco every discovered their niches within the vary, dwelling at totally different altitudes with various levels of acculturation to the settlers round them. The Kogi, in the meantime, dwelling nearest to the tops of the mountains, minimize themselves off from the world under and maintained nearly complete isolation. Extremely, that isolation endures at present. An uncolonised Indigenous tradition has thrived lower than 50 kilometres from one in all South America’s first colonial Spanish settlements, actually throughout the invaders’ sight. For all that point, two separate worlds have existed facet by facet.
Its foothills contact the Caribbean Sea and its peaks are topped 12 months spherical with snow
On maps, the mountains bear their Spanish title, Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. However within the language of the Kogi they’re known as Gonawindúa. Colloquially, they’re additionally identified to the Indigenous individuals who stay there as El Corazon del Mundo, which suggests ‘the Coronary heart of the World’.
Rising like a pyramid to a top of greater than 5,700 metres, the Coronary heart of the World is the tallest coastal mountain vary on Earth. It stretches 160 kilometres throughout the north of Colombia, with foothills that contact the Caribbean Sea and peaks topped 12 months spherical with snow. Between these two extremes exist vastly totally different ecosystems, starting from glaciers and misty highlands to steamy tropical jungle. It is likely one of the most biodiverse locations on the planet and a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. Due to its excessive elevation and adjustments in topography, the vary is a haven for greater than 600 species of birds, together with 36 discovered nowhere else, and 189 species of mammals. In 2013, the Worldwide Union for Conservation of Nature named the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta Nationwide Pure Park probably the most ‘irreplaceable’ website on the planet for endangered species.
The mountains are geographically and ecologically necessary however, for the Kogi, the Coronary heart of the World should even be understood cosmologically. In keeping with their traditions, that is the place all life started. They regard themselves because the ‘Elder Brothers’, defending the Coronary heart’s vitality by tending its sacred websites with rituals, prayers and choices to take care of the broader ecological and non secular stability of the planet. This stability is threatened by the actions of the ‘Youthful Brothers’, the title that the Kogi, and others within the sierra, name us, the foreigners who invaded their land. Given the harm of colonisation, it’s a beneficiant description. It paints us not as monstrous or malevolent, however as toddlers wrecking unfathomable destruction, unable to grasp the results of what we do – poisoning rivers, burning down forests, pillaging treasured metals and coal. For hundreds of years, the Kogi have gazed at their violent siblings under with a mix of alarm, bewilderment and dismay.
Like many individuals, I first encountered the Kogi in a documentary. Within the late Eighties, the tribal monks, or Mamos, made the tough resolution to finish their centuries of isolation – the one factor that had saved their tradition from destruction – and invited a journalist into the sierra. Alan Ereira, a British filmmaker, collaborated with the tribe over the subsequent 20 years to provide From the Coronary heart of the World (1990) and Aluna (2012). In these documentaries, the Kogi delivered a message to the Youthful Brothers, warning us in easy phrases what our plundering methods have been resulting in. The sacred rivers have been drying up. The glaciers have been melting on the peaks. The Coronary heart of the World was rising sick. Maybe it was even dying.
In Ereira’s guide The Coronary heart of the World (1990), he describes how his first expertise with the Kogi ended. After work on the documentary was completed, the digicam crew crossed a small bridge and:
[The Mamos] symbolically closed the bridge behind us. The Youthful Brother mustn’t return, we have been informed. The message had been given, nobody else ought to come. Solely I used to be to come back again, with the completed movie, in order that they might see that I had carried out what I had promised.
Ereira did what he promised, however ecological breakdown has solely accelerated within the years since. The warning, within the Elder Brothers’ eyes, has been ignored.
The movies have a fancy legacy. They’ve made the Kogi iconic amongst ecologically minded Westerners and, by means of elevated visibility and a global profile, have given the tribe a measure of unofficial safety towards additional encroachment from those that may search the Coronary heart’s sources. The Colombian authorities, aware of its picture, now has extra stake of their survival. However inevitably this new-found fame has attracted vacationers, in addition to anthropologists and non secular seekers of all types, who enterprise to the mountains within the hope of assembly an ‘untouched’ Indigenous tradition and being enlightened by its knowledge – or not less than taking some images. After all, this threatens the very isolation on which the Kogi have depended.
This isn’t a journey story – or, fairly, it’s a distinct sort of journey story
As a journey author, I’ve lengthy been fascinated by tales of the Coronary heart of the World. However I do know this fascination presents a deep dilemma: the prohibition towards outsiders visiting couldn’t be clearer. That is spelled out by one of many Mamos in Ereira’s first documentary:
[W]e need Youthful Brother to know that he can’t come right here once more, he can’t come again. We’re placing a barrier right here in order that he respects us. Perceive, we don’t need him arising right here and interfering with us. He has destroyed a lot.
However, because it seems, the Mamos didn’t shut that barrier utterly.
Since Ereira first visited within the late Eighties, a small variety of outsiders have been admitted to the sierra as friends fairly than gatecrashers: teachers, linguists and ecologists whose motives the tribe can belief. Official permission should be gained by means of the Gonawindúa Tayrona Organisation (OGT), which acts because the consultant physique of the Indigenous authorities. Its places of work are within the Casa Indígena (‘Indigenous Home’) in a suburb of Santa Marta.
That’s the reason I’m right here: to ask for the OGT’s permission to enter the sierra; to come across that sacred panorama for myself; to inform a narrative a few totally different means of being on the planet.
However the story I find yourself telling will likely be totally different. I don’t get to the Coronary heart of the World. I don’t climb the mountain. I don’t hack my means by means of impenetrable jungle with a machete, or hike up steep hillsides, to succeed in its unspoiled villages, or its locations of non secular energy, or the springs the place its sacred rivers begin, hidden excessive above the clouds in a land few Westerners have seen. This isn’t a journey story – or, fairly, it’s a distinct sort of journey story. Slightly than being about my journey right into a sacred panorama, it’s a few sacred panorama increasing past me.
The Casa Indígena is located in a district known as Los Naranjos, ‘The Oranges’, however there are not any orange bushes to be seen. My mototaxi drops me off in entrance of a compound with excessive partitions. Standing exterior is a gaggle of males, girls and youngsters all wearing white. The lads put on free cotton tunics and trousers, and the ladies put on cotton shifts. All have woven luggage product of cactus fibre slung round their chests. One of many males wears a conical white hat like a helmet. He’s a Mamo, a Kogi priest. His hat represents the snow-capped peaks of the sierra.
Contained in the compound, I sit throughout from the OGT spokesman Jose Manuel, a softly spoken man additionally wearing white cotton with two white luggage round his chest. Fluent in Spanish and nicely travelled, he’s an envoy, an middleman between the spheres of the Elder and Youthful Brothers.
He begins by explaining why his individuals first selected to make contact. By the Nineteen Sixties, the long-delayed tide of colonisation was lastly lapping on the foothills of the sierra. Colombian farmers had flocked to the area, burning again forests to create grazing land. As soon as the soil was depleted, a lot of them turned to extra profitable money crops: marijuana and, later, cocaine. Within the subsequent many years, narcotrafficking fuelled each side of a brutal civil warfare between communist guerrillas and Proper-wing paramilitaries, each of whom had established bases within the surrounding jungle.
Because the Youthful Brothers unfold additional and additional up the mountains, burning issues and preventing one another, the Kogi noticed that their continued isolation was threatened as by no means earlier than. ‘Maltreatment. Homicide. Enslavement. Sexual violence. Dispossession. Banishment.’ These are Jose Manuel’s phrases for what the tribe feared was coming. With out some type of illustration, his individuals would don’t have any voice with which to advocate for his or her rights and authorized safety. ‘The Kogi have been at risk of disappearing,’ he says.
If the physique of the world grows sick, the Coronary heart of the World grows sick
Step one was to study the language of the invaders. The neighbouring Wiwa spoke Spanish, so already had a foot in each worlds. Now some Kogi stepped throughout the linguistic divide. Early contact was fraught with problem, not least among the many Kogi themselves, as totally different communities scattered throughout a large space of mountainous terrain have been now offered with the problem of talking in a united voice. The OGT was based in 1987 as their mouthpiece. It’s the channel by means of which communication flows – in addition to requests to go to the sierra, akin to mine.
Once I ask Jose Manuel to explain the Coronary heart of the World, he solutions with an image.
On a sheet of paper, he attracts a wobbly pyramid divided into 4 quarters labelled ‘Kogi’, ‘Arhuaco’, ‘Kangwama’ and ‘Wiwa’. This can be a map of the sierra, however it’s extra cosmological than cartographic. Close to the summit he attracts 4 dots, related by meandering strains to 4 totally different dots on the vary’s base, alongside the Caribbean coast. He labels these dots ezuamas.
Ezuamas, he says, are sacred websites akin to springs and river mouths, related by a non secular present that flows invisibly by means of, and past, the sierra. The Spanish phrase he makes use of to explain this present – Mom Earth’s life-energy – is intocable, ‘untouchable’, however its existence is totally actual to the Kogi. The position of the Mamos is to protect the ezuamas and be sure that they keep wholesome, that the life-energy flows. However more and more, as proven in Ereira’s movies, the Mamos are involved that the websites are rising sick. The reason being environmental devastation, from the air pollution of rivers to the extraction of metals and coal. These will not be ‘sources’ within the Kogi’s eyes, however the dwelling organs of Mom Earth’s physique.
If the physique of the world grows sick, the Coronary heart of the World grows sick. Every localised level of injury impacts the system as a complete. In a suggestions system that’s intricately related, nothing is divisible from or unbiased of anything. Regardless of their obvious segregation, ensconced in a land above the clouds, the Kogi have by no means been remoted however fairly related to all the pieces in delicate, intocable ways in which outsiders can’t see.
‘Now the ezuamas are disappearing, the information is disappearing,’ Jose Manuel says merely. ‘We’re very unhappy about this.’
Regardless of these disappearances, the area is extra secure at present than it was when Ereira first visited. Many of the guerrillas, paramilitaries and narcotraffickers have moved on. The Indigenous peoples of the sierra have jurisdiction over their land, and officers like Jose Manuel – in his conventional white garments, however with a smartphone in his hand – act as two-way transmitters, conversant with each cultures.
We pause whereas an assistant brings us each a cup of Kogi espresso, harvested from wild vegetation within the tropical forests of the foothills. We sip in silence for some time. Then ultimately Jose Manuel involves the topic of my go to.
Patiently, he explains that I’ve come at a delicate time. Rising numbers of Youthful Brothers have been discovering their technique to Kogi land, and the OGT has determined that restrictions must be tightened. Prior to now, outsiders have come to the mountains to extract Indigenous information, eradicating it from its authentic homeowners with out permission. This can be a sort of theft, he says, like extracting treasured metals or coal. In an effort to obtain permission, I would want to jot down a proposal explaining what information I’m searching for to achieve, what I intend to do with that information, and who I plan to share it with. A choice would then be made within the mountains; the reply may take months.
Sadly, I don’t have months, solely weeks right here in Colombia. My request to go to the Coronary heart of the World is gently however firmly declined.
Back in my hostel in Santa Marta, within the moist warmth of a Colombian spring, I ask myself why I got here, what I needed to search out within the Coronary heart of the World.
Like others who got here earlier than me, I needed to study extra in regards to the Kogi, how they’ve survived for all this time. In crude phrases, I suppose I needed to grasp their secret. Maybe I additionally needed to assuage my ecological grief and concern. In a broken world that’s spiralling ever deeper into disaster, who wouldn’t desperately need to study – from a few of the few individuals who by no means forgot – the best way to keep extra related to the earth, the best way to stay with out destroying it? Who wouldn’t need to be admitted to the world’s coronary heart?
However I additionally got here as a journey author, on the lookout for a narrative. I got here searching for observations, descriptions and native color. I got here on the lookout for materials, and to take that materials house with me, to be refined right into a product that different individuals would devour.
The Kogi are taking the steps which can be wanted to safeguard their tradition
When foreigners first got here to those lands to extract materials wealth, the information of these they invaded was rejected and discarded. At greatest, that information was seen as ineffective; at worst, it was evil. Now that the simply extractable sources have been taken, one other market is booming in Indigenous knowledge. Lecturers and researchers want information. Others search non secular salvation. They arrive to search out information of medicinal vegetation and routes to the next consciousness; to study strategies for reconnecting with nature; to grasp totally different types of therapeutic and transformation. Given the depth of our appetites, no marvel the Kogi are cautious of anybody coming to take one thing away – even an concept.
On this context, I’m considerably relieved that my entry has been refused. Clearly the Kogi are taking the steps which can be wanted to safeguard their tradition. However earlier than I left the Casa Indígena, clutching my map with its scribbled ezuamas, Jose Manuel tells me I’m welcome to speak together with his brother, Simigui, who additionally works with the OGT. He doesn’t stay right here in Santa Marta however 80 kilometres additional up the coast, within the mountains close to Palomino, on the outskirts of Kogi territory.
The next day, I’m headed east to satisfy Simigui.
For the subsequent week, I keep in a village known as Rio Ancho, a brief mototaxi journey from Palomino, located on a rocky river that flows from the mountains to the ocean. Greenery surrounds it, and its roads are product of mud. Its homes have breezeblock partitions, and their home windows include no glass – partly as a result of glass is dear, and partly as a result of it by no means will get chilly right here, just a few levels north of the equator. My first impressions are of brightly painted partitions, amplified music, motorbikes, canines, many kids, and the ever-present crash of the river.
This can be a settlement of colonos, actually ‘colonists’, Colombian farmers who’ve moved to the area prior to now few many years. A lot of the unique forest has been cleared for crops and grazing land. However a number of Wiwa households stay right here, too – the individuals who first discovered a footing in each worlds – and 15 kilometres up the highway is the Kogi village of Tungueka. Rio Ancho can be house to a number of foreigners, together with gringas like Nina Dahlgreen.
Dahlgreen is a Dane who has lived right here for a decade, having fallen for a Colombian man when she was travelling. Her home is ethereal, with a large veranda and a backyard containing tropical flowers, banana bushes and coca vegetation whose leaves, when chewed or steeped in tea, are a drugs and stimulant. Subsequent door is a household of Evangelical Christians who sing joyous hymns, and a parrot that shouts ‘Hola!’ in a cracked voice. Dahlgreen rents me two adjoining rooms with a mosquito-netted mattress and a tin roof that thunders when it rains.
From her, I study that Rio Ancho is secure as a result of ‘just one paramilitary group is lively on this area now.’ They’ve a base someplace within the hills but in addition stay brazenly within the village, and each mototaxi driver, resort proprietor or property developer should pay them safety cash.
They’re shifting again down the mountains to resettle ancestral lands
‘Secure’ in Colombia may be very a lot a relative time period. On the freeway that runs to Palomino, she factors to a spot the place a physique was dumped simply a few months in the past – somebody who didn’t pay his dues. Typically, there are irregular focused killings by vigilante teams. Two buddies of hers, a husband and spouse who have been campaigning for land reform, have been shot useless a number of years in the past as payback for his or her activism. In Colombia, environmental defenders, and land activists, a lot of whom are Indigenous, are murdered at one of many highest charges on the planet.
Tungueka, the Indigenous village on the periphery of the Coronary heart, is a two-hour stroll away. Kogi individuals from the village are sometimes seen, distinctive of their white garments, shopping for provides in Rio Ancho’s bodegas, main mules again up the mountain or taking rides on mototaxis, their lengthy hair flying behind them. Dahlgreen says prior to now few years some have purchased their very own motorbikes. Residing in shut proximity to the Youthful Brothers, not like their cousins greater up the mountains, these Kogi have gotten ‘civilised’ – not less than, that’s the time period that the native colonos use. Once I arrived in Rio Ancho, I assumed that the incomers, whether or not peasant farmers or foreigners, have been encroaching on Tungueka, and eroding the boundaries of Kogi land. However the fact is extra stunning.
Removed from being an historical settlement whose lengthy isolation is underneath risk, Tungueka is just 15 years outdated. One other Kogi village close by was established solely prior to now 5 years. Throughout the previous decade, the realm round each villages has been reallocated as Indigenous land however, like all the pieces in Colombia, the scenario is difficult. Land on this area was initially granted by the state to poor farmers, a lot of whom then bought it on to foreigners for the next worth, which signifies that the reallocation of land again to its conventional homeowners just isn’t with out dispute. However the result’s that, seemingly towards all odds, the Kogi are shifting again down the mountains to resettle ancestral lands, successfully increasing their territory for the primary time in 5 centuries.
Tungueka consists of 100 conical huts, with mud partitions and thatched roofs, clustered round a bigger building known as a nuhue, a sacred ritual gathering place just for Kogi males. (Ladies, understood as being intrinsically nearer to Mom Earth, are thought-about already sacred.) Tungueka, I’ve discovered, is an ‘open’ village that accepts guests, and which appears to operate as a cultural interzone. Simply because the Kogi go to Rio Ancho to purchase merchandise which can be helpful to them, Colombian and international vacationers are allowed into Tungueka. There’s a small entrance charge, and a Kogi information provides a tour. Toddlers attain out pudgy fingers for biscuits, and ladies settle for luggage of rice, each of which guests are suggested to deliver as choices.
In The Elder Brothers’ Warning (2009), Ereira describes Kogi tradition as one in all silence and secrecy. ‘Communication with the skin world is taboo,’ he writes, ‘kids are taught to cover from strangers, and adults regard all outsiders as harmful.’ Clearly issues have modified within the 14 years for the reason that guide was printed – or not less than they’ve right here, on the outskirts of the sierra. The Kogi adults who go to Rio Ancho appear to be on pleasant or impartial phrases with the native colonos, whom kids see as a supply of biscuits.
Many features of my go to make me uncomfortable, particularly the distribution of items, with the colonial energy dynamic implicit on this alternate. It turns me into one other vacationer, gawking on the lifetime of an ‘genuine’ Indigenous village, at individuals going about their day, washing garments, and making ready meals.
However the Kogi of this area, on the border of a re-expanding area, additionally appear to train a excessive diploma of management. Entrance is at their discretion. Going additional up the mountain is banned. Behind the huts, the foothills rise abruptly in an imposing wall, dense with jungle and veiled by cloud – the start of the guarded sierra that’s firmly closed to me. Towards that backdrop, Tungueka seems much less like a village underneath siege and extra like an outpost in decolonised land.
A hair-raising mototaxi journey brings me to Palomino, 12 kilometres to the west, for my appointment with Jose Manuel’s brother Simigui. Palomino, like Rio Ancho, takes its title from a river. The river takes its title from Rodrigo Álvarez Palomino, a Spanish explorer who drowned in its rapids within the early sixteenth century, after serving to de Bastidas set up Santa Marta. To the Kogi, this river – known as Wazenkaka – is sacred. Palomino, the colono village that grew up at its mouth, had till just lately a violent, sleazy status as a battleground for armed teams. Although the violence has diminished, the sleaziness stays.
Right now, the village has been reinvented as a backpacker vacationer resort, squeezed between a freeway and a white-sand seashore. There are hostels and thatched seashore bars, ambient techno music thumping from behind bamboo partitions, and the tropical air smells of sewerage and marijuana. Posters promote full moon events, DJ units and magic mushrooms, in addition to ‘Indigenous excursions’ to Tungueka: ‘Expertise the Untouched Tradition of the Kogi’ says one. Pierced and tattooed foreigners browse retailers that promote ethnic souvenirs, and the entire place has an environment of lazy indulgence.
I meet Simigui in a café backyard shaded by banana bushes. He has travelled down the sierra for a few hours to be right here. In his vibrant white garments and tall straw hat, he’s immediately recognisable. His lips are inexperienced from chewing coca leaves, and in his hand is the poporo utilized by all Kogi males: a sacred gourd containing burnt seashells, the lime of which mixes with the coca to amplify its narcotic impact. Its software is believed to foster concord with Mom Earth. Utilizing a stick, he brings the powder to his mouth and wipes the surplus on the gourd, which is coated with residue from a few years of use. Just like the white hats worn by the Mamos, and the conical roofs of the huts, this thick pale-yellow crust represents the sierra’s snows. All through our dialog, he chews the small, bitter leaves as naturally as he blinks and breathes.
Whereas his brother spoke of how the Coronary heart of the World is being constricted, Simigui speaks of the methods during which additionally it is increasing.
He conjures the mountains as a node in an internet of connections that stretches between distant ecosystems
‘Restoration comes from the ocean,’ he says. Ever for the reason that Spanish invasion severed entry to the coast, the Kogi have been minimize off from a few of their most sacred locations. They’ve stored a connection to the ocean by ingesting the lime of shells, however sourcing these shells and transporting them again to the mountains was typically harmful. In 2013, with the backing of the Colombian authorities and worldwide charities, the tribe raised sufficient cash to purchase again a sliver of shoreline. The sacred website of Jaba Tañiwashkaka, 32 kilometres east of Palomino, was previously a degraded wasteland lined in tonnes of plastic trash; after a decade of restoration, mangrove forests have been replanted, and fish, caiman, crabs and capybara have returned. The ezuama on the mouth of the Jerez River is underneath a Mamo’s safety once more. After 500 years, the Kogi have regained the ocean.
Simigui tells me of the linea negra that’s central to Kogi thought. Like many issues within the Kogi world, this ‘black line’ will be understood each bodily and intangibly. In a single sense, it’s a line on a map, a border that skirts the bottom of the sierra, demarcating the normal boundary of Indigenous lands. In 2018, this was used as the premise for the Black Line Decree, during which the Colombian authorities gave formal recognition to the ancestral territories of the Kogi, the Wiwa, the Arhuaco and the Kangwama. However in one other, intocable sense, the black line is non secular. It binds collectively sacred websites on the periphery of the Coronary heart – ezuamas, such because the one at Jaba Tañiwashkaka – to make sure the continued move of life-energy between them.
To those explanations, Simigui provides an additional layer of which means. The black line, he says, will be understood not solely as a border, and a hyperlink between native sacred websites, however metaphorically as a connective thread reaching past the sierra to different factors on the planet – Europe, Africa, Asia. He conjures a picture of the mountains as a node in an internet of connections that stretches between distant ecosystems, and locations of non secular power, throughout the planet. ‘The sierra is the Coronary heart of the World,’ he says, ‘however she has arms.’
On this sense, the violence of colonialism didn’t simply break the road round Kogi territory, however a extra basic connection that when joined all issues to all issues. By reconnecting the mountains with the ocean to take care of contiguous ecosystems between glaciers, highlands, montane forest, jungle and tropical shoreline, the Kogi have taken on the duty of weaving the threads again collectively.
That activity, clearly, is immense. The harm continues to be being carried out. Maybe probably the most pressing indicators of this are the glaciers on the mountaintops – the everlasting snows which can be represented in every single place in Kogi tradition, from hats to huts to the yellow-encrusted gourd in Simigui’s hand. Right now, they’re quickly melting, inflicting landslides, droughts and vanishing rivers. The scientific view attributes this to local weather change, reducible to the parts-per-million of carbon dioxide within the environment, however Simigui’s rationalization turns this framing on its head. The sacred locations will not be sick due to distant local weather change; fairly, local weather change is going on as a result of the sacred locations are sick, the ezuamas having been uncared for and abused for too a few years.
This explains the deeper significance of reclaiming ancestral lands. The harm is bodily, however the restoration should be non secular. To the Kogi, saving the world begins precisely right here.
However, Simigui says, the Mamos can’t assist Mom Earth recuperate on their very own. There should be dialogue between the Elder and Youthful Brothers. ‘Reciprocity. Understanding. Steadiness. Concord.’ These are the phrases he makes use of.
After we shake fingers on the finish, he takes one of many cactus-fibre luggage from round his neck. A couple of stray coca leaves flutter down as he empties it out. ‘Un regalo,’ he says. A present. Then we stroll again to the road and go our separate methods.
After our assembly, I comply with a winding path away from the vacationer city. I’ve no vacation spot in thoughts, no mountain to ascend. Quickly the jungle envelops me: a dwelling mass of fern-covered trunks, palms, vines and leaves, labyrinths of entangled roots, issues rising on different issues. The cover whoops, whirrs and wails. Leafcutter ants march in every single place. At each flip, I scatter clouds of iridescent blue butterflies. I’ve by no means been wherever so astonishingly alive.
Within the jungle, the trail traces the contours of steep slopes, drops all the way down to the vast inexperienced river and steeply climbs up once more. I move a Mamo together with his poporo, a barefoot lady with a wrinkled face, and a younger woman who’s weaving a bag with white thread as she walks. I additionally move a celebration of vacationers carrying big inflatable tubes. They’ll use them to float down the inexperienced river in a leisurely flotilla, pumping out music and ingesting beer as they float towards the sacred ezuama at its mouth.
To the Kogi, Ereira writes, the top of the world will come when ‘Columbus reaches his closing aim’, penetrating the Coronary heart of the World and plunging the setting into chaos: ‘The snow will soften on the peaks, the waters will dry up. The stability of nature will likely be overthrown.’ For the primary time, I’ve a glimpse of what the Kogi are defending.
There are some locations we can’t go; some issues will not be ours to know
After an hour comes a break within the cover forward. There are distant plots of maize, cooking smoke rising from conical roofs. Above soar the summits of the sierra, so shut but unreachable. At first, I believe I’m seeing cloud within the whiteness of their peaks; on this dripping warmth, it takes a while to recognise it as snow.
That is as shut as I’ll come to the Coronary heart of the World.
There are some locations we can’t go; some issues will not be ours to know. After centuries of exploration, colonisation and exploitation, maybe we’re getting into a time when travellers (and journey writers) should recognise the extractive impulses that drive us forwards.
However as I go away, retracing the trail by means of the jungle again in direction of Palomino – and from there to Santa Marta, and my flight house to England – plainly one thing else is travelling with me as I stroll. I’m struck by a picture of the sacred panorama behind me increasing, its threads being rewoven by Kogi fingers, refilling the area that was left when the meteor hit.
