Wanduk Yachay. School of Knowledge and Secrets of the Jungle

Puyuk Runa, Amazonian Region, Puyo, Pastaza, Ecuadorian

Flavio Santi, Shuar-Ki Indigenous Leader, Founder of the Wanduk Yachay School of Spiritual Secrets of the Jungle and Pukuna Foundation, Conservation and Protection of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Late in the 19th Century, Ayuy Yu (Spirit of the Palm), Flavio Santi’s grandfather and leader of his clan in the Shuar tribe, made an ancestral pilgrimage from the Huasaga River in Peru along the forested mountains up through Ecuador to the Putumayo River in Colombia, at that time called Puturuna: ‘People of the Kapok’. Puturuna was an intercultural meeting place of knowledge exchange and spiritual teaching. Along this route, which could take years to complete, the generations of Ayuy Yu’s people had planted sacred wayusa plants, as guides, titles, and places of ceremony.

The Shuar people drink wayusa tea in the pre-dawn each day, to strengthen the dreams of the people, and of the forest. Some of these trees along the route are now 700 years old. On his return journey, Ayuy Yu found that national borders had been imposed, and he could not cross from Ecuador into Peru. He settled with the Puyuruna people in the forests of what is now Puyo, Pastaza (Ecuador), and there they founded a new intercultural meeting place, which to this day remains a melting pot of tribal diversity.

Ayuy Yu married a Kichwa from the Jumandi clan, thereby raising an intertribal family of ‘Ki-Shuar’ children, including Flavio’s father. In 1915 the oil company Shell made the first colonial incursions into the area, backed by the state military, and allied with Salesian missionary efforts. Ayuy Yu led the tribes of the area in a fierce resistance that eventually forced all industrial actors to withdraw in 1947. Ayuy Yu taught all of his grandchildren the traditional ways of his people and their forest, guiding them in the lifelong disciplines of ‘the gardener child’, ‘the sweeper child’, and ‘the firewood child’, that are the precursors to becoming a yachaj, or shaman, as an elder. Flavio’s grandfather impressed upon him that the forest cannot be bought or sold, but must be maintained, respected and protected. He told him he must be a guardian of these forests. Flavio has been a figurehead of the indigenous rights movement since subsequent petroleum interests caused the state to claim his grandfather’s territory around the headwaters of the Curaray river in 1997.

The coercion and oppression by colonial forces in the area has not abated since. Flavio has endured the theft and pollution of his ancestral territory, his community being razed to the ground by the military, illegal incarceration and interrogation, the division of his family and his people by the bribery of the oil companies, and the contamination of his proud and ancient culture. As a result of his consistent and uncompromising commitment to his people and their forest, he has also gained friends, and has visited the US a number of times to share teachings from his culture and raise funds for its protection.

All the funds he raises in the West he pours into strategic land reclamations within ‘Oil Block 28’, a vast area of 400’000 hectares of forest, and 15’000 indigenous people. Some of this land constitutes ancestral territory of the Ayuy Yu clan, and the only way to protect it under a dominant economic system that does not recognise traditional land titles, is to buy it back. With international support they have managed to do this for 1200 hectares of forest around the Llushin and Kuyuimi rivers, adjacent to the Sangay National Park, now protected as a registered reserve, named ‘Eternal Forest of the Children’ in honour of Ayuy Yu’s teachings. They have also purchased a 183-hectare tract of highland forest above the city of Puyo, which forms part of an essential forest corridor that is the last remaining sanctuary in this area of the spectacled bear, jaguar, and harpy eagle, as well as innumerable plant medicines. The next section of this corridor is a -110 hectare tract of thickly forested slopes and crystalline rivers, including sacred waterfalls where Flavio’s grandfather and his ancestors would drink plant medicines to give them strength on the journey to Puturuna. It also marks the spring of the Pindo river: water source for hundreds of indigenous communities downstream.

The site is currently owned by renowned ex-military “land-flippers” who scout cheap land to then sell on at a profit for industrial development. The state has been considering proposals from industrial interests to install a bio-fuel plant and an oil refinery in the area, so the site Flavio Santi, Shuar-Ki Indigenous Leader, Founder of the Wanduk Yachay School must be saved from these ends. Flavio has been offered a price of $ 345 000.*

The significance of the site is two-fold: 1) Ecological; and 2) Cultural, as it contains waterfalls, gold deposits and water sources, which are sacred traditional sites for the Ayuy Yu clan – “meeting places of the spirits”, characterised by sublime natural purity, where youth are taken to receive important teachings. For the Ayuy Yu clan this is a chance to save a handful of the 15’000 sacred sites that will certainly be destroyed or contaminated within Oil Block 28 in the coming years, as a new round of bidding for drilling rights was recently opened by the president of Ecuador, Lenín Moreno.

Due to the concentration of such sacred sites in this particular corridor of land, it is also their opportunity to claim cultural heritage protection status with UNESCO, and here found their School of Spiritual Secrets of the Jungle to share the teachings of Ayuy Yu with the indigenous youth, and the world. Their plan is to create a new model of development that empowers the elders and wisdom-keepers of indigenous communities to use their land for cultural education and traditional healing projects.

They are seeking support for their ongoing land projects, and initiatives to bolster economic autonomy within their community, including marketing medicinal products and wayusa tea in Canada. A central objective of their visit is to share the message of their territories, and form networks of solidarity with other peoples and fronts working to protect sacred territories. Flavio Santi, Ki-Shuar Indigenous Leader, Founder of the Wanduk Yachay School.

Alongside the work of Flavio, is also Samay Taki, who has been defending the northern Territories of Ecuador, and is reclaiming back a lagoon for her community Amarun Kucha.