Sustaining Matses Indigenous Medicine - Phase II

Acaté and the Matsés advance an extraordinary initiative designed to strengthen food security, climate resilience, women’s empowerment, economic development, medicinal agroforestry, and more!

The Acaté team and the Matsés have been hard at work advancing the second year of our integrated aquaculture (fish farms) project, last reported in our September 2023 Field Report. This initiative is one of our largest and most technically challenging projects to date, with far-reaching benefits.

We are pleased to report the successful development of over 30 integrated aquaculture systems of impressive scale in Matsés communities designed to enhance food security, reduce hunting pressures, create economic opportunities, and support a truly extraordinary medicinal agroforestry initiative. Each site integrates native fish production with agroforestry. The trees planted in the agroforestry areas serve four main functions. The first is nutrition for the Matsés, especially the children. The second is food for the frugivorous fish species. The third is the medicinal agroforestry component which provides both medicinal plants and training areas for apprentice traditional healers. The fourth is habitat and leaf-cone nesting sites over the water for the culturally and economically important kambo tree frogs.

By stacking functions in this manner, the Matsés are maximizing the use of the areas near their villages and enhancing its productivity. For example, the muck from the ponds increases the productivity of their staple crops planted near the ponds and increases the resilience to potential disturbances. For the Matsés communities, the direct benefits include enhanced food security, most importantly protein availability for children, increased economic opportunities, and easy access to plant medicines along with supporting a new generation of traditional healers. The indirect benefits include the recovery of fish stocks in the rivers, reduced hunting pressures on game species, and the reduction of the labor needed to meet their basic needs.

The project is immensely popular with the Matsés and has resulted in the establishment of the first Matsés Women’s Association, with active chapters in all nineteen Matsés communities. Matsés women are engaging in new community roles and governance, amplifying the voices of Matsés women in governance as never before.

Community-based fish farms are commonly undertaken projects for NGO and governmental agencies in the Peruvian Amazon. Examples, however, of successful community-based fish farm projects are hard to find. In addition to the multitude of on-site technical challenges that need to be overcome, failures result from poor implementation, inadequate cultural considerations and beneficiary engagement, and, particularly, from a lack of follow-through. The success of our initiative has reached the attention of several Peruvian governmental agencies, which have extended offers of collaboration. We have expanded the project to include the Kokáma indigenous people of the Marañón River, where the project leaders will help them replicate and adapt the project for their communities who face significant food security pressures and severe impacts of climate change.

For the Matsés, the goal for this coming year is to build a fish hatchery, centrally-located in the Matsés territory, to support the continued sustainability of the initiative. Acaté is working with an expert fish biologist to design and tailor its functionality to the remote setting of the Matsés territory. We are seeking funding to fully make this critical and exciting next stage a reality for the Matsés communities in 2025! To learn more about this exciting and impactful initiative, our full report follows below.

Background

The Amazon Basin holds one fifth of the world’s fresh water and harbors an extraordinary diversity of fish. Given the historical abundance and biomass of populations for many fish species, the need for fish farms in comparatively self-sufficient indigenous communities living along remote tributaries of the Amazon Rainforest may seem counterintuitive. Nearly all indigenous communities in the Amazon with sustained contact with the outside world have transitioned decades ago from traditional shifting settlement patterns to more fixed and permanent settlements that afford more access to infrastructure like schools and health outposts but creates real challenges for communities to meet dietary protein requirements. Global climate change, which is touching even the most remote regions of the world, has compounded the food insecurity through major shifts and unpredictability in rainfall patterns, challenging and bringing hardship to communities whose way of life and existence depends upon healthy forests and rivers.

Prior to first contact with missionaries in 1969, the Matsés moved their settlements every three years to a new locality where animal game was more abundant, allowing the rainforest to reclaim their farmland as well as for fish stocks in rivers to replenish. In this system, Matsés’ swidden agriculture, still practiced today, was superbly adapted to their former pre-contact semi-nomadic lifestyle. Steady access to abundant game balanced out the Matsés’ starch-rich, but protein-poor, polyculture. Major deficiencies and challenges, however, have arisen with their change to sedentary settlement pattern with fixed villages that support growing populations. These include:

1) Shortage of protein, for which children are most vulnerable and impacted.

2) Once fully-self sufficient, the Matsés are now increasingly drawn into the cash economy with the advent of the public education system, adoption of manufactured clothing, and the use of tin pots. All Matsés families today require a source of monetary income to support their daily lives. Outside of a small handful of village school teaching jobs, the sole opportunities to obtain it are by timber extraction or for the men to travel to cities in search of work.

3) Swidden farms inevitably being cut farther and farther away from villages. The Matsés require fuel, a significant cost to families, for their small outboard motor peque-peque canoes to efficiently access their farms positioned at distance from their village. Women are required to transport harvest increasingly longer distances as an inevitable consequence of swidden farms being cut farther and farther out.

4) With game animals increasingly distant from the permanent villages, men hike to hunting camps to smoke meat, and are absent from their village for 4-10 days. The women, then, are left in the villages with the responsibility of feeding their children, specifically through harvesting of swidden farm products, gathering wild fruits, and fishing. The latter requires a large investment of time, as the waterways along which most of the Matsés villages are located are small jungle streams with few and small fish. Fishing can become particularly challenging during the extremes of water levels in the rainy and dry seasons.

5) Last but not least, global climate change. Although the Matsés have not contributed to the drivers of global climate change, they tragically bear the impact of it. The Amazon region as a whole has been experiencing record draughts, stranding boats in large rivers, and killing fish. The smaller streams, called quebradas are now drying up completely and the larger streams where the Matses communities are located are being reduced to trickles during the low water period. While the average water levels have remained stable, extreme droughts and flooding periods have left the communities vulnerable.

The challenges faced by the Matsés are shared by many indigenous communities throughout the lowland Amazon Basin and highly relevant to conservation. It is critical to develop interventions such as this initiative to ensure food security and climate resiliency.

There are many examples of successful commercial aquaculture projects, including the export of fish for upscale restaurants around the world. Due to the pressing need and potential benefits, fish farms have also been community projects long advanced by conservation NGOs and governmental agencies in the Peruvian Amazon. Unfortunately the ground truth is that most community-based projects fail, not due to a lack of interest or commitment from the beneficiary community members, but due to poor implementation and particularly from lack of agency follow-through. In the case of Matsés, we are aware of at least five initiatives over the past two decades, the projects have ranging from blatant money-grab schemes from NGOs in which not a single action on the ground was taken, to a large scale well-funded initiative that resulted in construction of large building, now dilapidated, but no ongoing viable fish farms at the community level. In this backdrop, although Acaté has earned a reputation as an organization that can succeed in difficult projects through innovation and community engagement, even some of our partners were initially hesitant about launching a large scale fish farm project, aware that so many of these projects launched by other NGOs typically fail.

Fish farms have always been a high priority of the Matsés. The Matsés identified a large scale fish farm project as paramount for their food security and economic support and are highly motivated to support it. In response, in 2022, our organization made this initiative a multi-year operational priority. We, with the backing and encouragement of funding partners, are committed to providing the necessary support to successfully realize this vital project for Matsés food security, conservation, and economic development.

For detailed reporting on the first year and a deep dive about the construction of fish farms, please read our September 2023 Field Report.

Year 2 Report

Aquaculture systems are complex and many factors spanning numerous disciplines must be considered to achieve operational success. In the first year a technical specialist in fish farms trained Matsés project leaders, focusing on site selection and construction aspects. The Matsés are expert farmers so this training added on top of their already profound knowledge of their lands and soil types. Our focus in year two was to mature the fish farms built the prior year, further the training and capacitation of the communities, and to build additional aquaculture systems in the villages supporting the largest populations, such as along the Chobayacu Creek in the heart of their Ancestral Territory, which experience the most severe protein shortages and the problem of ever-increasing distances to the farming areas is most acute.

The changing climate has meant that the river levels are both higher and lower than historic extremes. This not only underscores the need for creation of fish farms for food security but also confers additional challenges in the construction. Some streams that were generally navigable year-round are now drying up completely during the low water season. To address this, we have been prepositioning materials in the communities upriver during the times of high water such that they’re available when needed. We have also taken advantage of the periods with limited rain to dig the ponds and tamp the clay down without having to deal with the thick mud. When the rain comes back is the ideal time for tree planting and makes for the highest survival rate of the seedlings and saplings. By adapting work schedules to the conditions, we have been able to overcome the challenges of the seasons and the changing climate.

To ensure the durability of the project in its second year we continued the training with the focus shifting to maintenance and problem solving. Aquaculture systems require a lot of maintenance in any climate and especially in the humid tropics where torrential rains are regular occurrences. These exceptional rains put a lot of stress on the dike systems and a good design is necessary to prevent overtopping of the dike. Periods of little rain and intense heat where the amount of water flowing out of the ponds and evaporating can exceed the amount coming into the pond. One of the key objectives was to ensure that the beneficiaries could maintain the ponds such that the water levels are stable. The water quality in the ponds must also be maintained for oxygen levels. By adding additional NPK fertilizer to the ponds the health of the microbial communities can be improved to maintain water clarity and oxygen levels.

The project beneficiaries being able to control water quality is another key component of successful maintenance. Training in dike maintenance and erosion control are additional important sub-components for the maintenance of water levels and water quality.

The maintenance and fish production training classes were carried out in all the villages by Acaté staff, and two expert fish biologists based in Iquitos. The training started with maintaining the levels of water in the ponds and making sure the pond is not overtopped during heavy rains. This involves cleaning out the tubes by removing all the accumulated organic matter. In addition, they assessed the areas where the terrain could lead to flooding and implemented measures to slow the water flow with swales or plantings. They worked on planting grass on the tops of the dikes to minimize damage should some overtopping occur. They also worked on solving the issues of low water in the ponds. This involved cleaning and maintaining the springs of wells that feed the ponds and checking for seepage or leaks in the dikes.

The advantage of having multiple ponds in each community is the ability to remove the fish from a pond for maintenance. This can be required if some water channels form under the compacted clay dramatically lowering the water level or if the pond must be made deeper and re-compacted. One of the innovations that the Matsés started employing is the use of palm wood steaks to control erosion by pounding the stakes, which resist rot, into the border of the ponds to stabilize the banks with the tops of the stakes catching the sediment. This really helps keep the water clean while the plantings grow.

Water quality in the ponds is critical to successful fish production with low water oxygen being the most common problem. One common solution is to add aquatic plants to the pond and certain plants can also help with water quality by adding the fresh leaves. Pond mucking is the most well-known maintenance chore and is key to avoid the buildup of decomposing organic material that can deprive the pond of oxygen the fish need. The Matsés communities will mature the muck to use it as a fertilizer for the associated agroforestry sites to supplement the nitrogen-poor “soils” of the Amazon.

The care and feeding of the fish were one of the top priorities for the training. For each pond constructed Acaté provided a scale to weigh the fish food and a hand cranked mill to grind corn. The fish have different nutritional requirements during their growth cycle, with higher protein required during the first months, and then a higher percentage of fruits and vegetative matter as they grow. One innovation mentioned earlier is pounding palm wood stakes into the ponds separated by a fixed amount to create pens for fish of a certain size. The fish have different dietary needs during their growth cycles and providing them with less-than-optimal amounts of food will slow their growth while overfeeding is both wasteful and can adversely affect water quality.

One of the major advances in year 2 has been increased production of fish food on the community level. We initially started the feeding program with commercial balanced fish food to ensure sufficient protein. The training showed the beneficiaries how to capture and weigh the fish to calculate the amount of food and the nutritional balance of the food depending on the age of the fish. The Matsés developed and transitioned from commercial fish food to their own protocols for fish food utilizing a diversity of available nutrient sources. For example, the forests adjoining the integrated aquaculture sites have an abundance of ant and termite nests. The Matsés have been using these nests as protein-rich food source for the fish fry in the stage where they require high levels of protein. food security climate resiliency Matsés fish farm women's empowerment The creation of a balanced fish food from the Matsés kitchen scraps has been another major advance. The areas around the villages where the Matsés can grow corn are limited and the Matsés value the mashed corn drink chicha. While the beneficiaries are willing to invest some of their corn crop as fish food, it is much better to develop sources of fish food from kitchen scraps and waste products. By using cassava, something they have in abundance along with fruit seeds, the Matsés have been able to make excellent fish food using waste streams. This mix can be sun dried and pelleted for storage when the palms are in season.

In another year the trees planted around the ponds will start producing, especially the macambo (Theobroma bicolor) making the feeding much easier. Another innovation has been the use of palm seeds, different types are available year round, and include aguaje (Mauritia flexuosa) and ungurahui palms (Oenocarpus bataua). The seeds are large and very hard making them impossible for small fish to consume but the Matsés are using their large wooden grain crushing basins to pulverize these seeds to create a commercial fish food equivalent. These palm fruits are an important part of their diets, and the seeds are normally discarded. The food can be dried and stored for future use. As a note there are palm fruits that have suitable seeds available year-round. The Matsés grow a lot of sweet potatoes but one of the downsides of having sweet potatoes growing near the homes is that the sweet potatoes attract spiny rats that in turn attract venomous snakes such as the common jergon (fer-de-lance). The sweet potato leaves make excellent fish food and are readily gobbled up by the fish, and clearing the leaves helps prevent snake bites. This is an excellent use of the leaves when the Matsés clear out the sweet potatoes which grow like weeds near their homes.

For each community, at the end of the training period all of the fish farms were verified as structurally sound and the beneficiaries fully trained in all relevant techniques for success. As of writing, over 30 (and counting) integrated aquaculture sites have been created. The ponds created in year one are now producing fish of harvestable size!

The exciting developments in creation of the first Matsés Women's Association and extraordinary Medicinal Agroforestry initiatives will be covered in upcoming GlobalGiving reports!

Next steps

As a result of this initiative, forty Matsés, who previously had little or no experience with fish farms, are now experts and highly proficient in building fish farms. The integrated aquaculture program this fall is being expanded to the Kukama-Kukamiria communities on the Marañón River. Matsés project leaders are now training the Kukama-Kukamiria! This interchange of knowledge and training is a key component in building real and effective federations to represent indigenous people. In addition, many Matsés learned how to build fish farms and by their own initiative are building additional integrated aquaculture systems in their communities. Over time, we expect that the number of sites built outside of the project will exceed the number built during the project.

The government of the District of Yaquerana has taken notice of the success of the project and offered logistical support with their boats to deliver fish fry. The Director of the Matsés National Reserve (SERNAP) is also impressed by the project and pledged to help some villages with fish stocking and use the project as a model for other river basins outside the Matsés Ancestral Territory.

A major remaining challenge has been supplying fish fry to the remote sites via chartered airfreight. Currently the fish must be brought from Iquitos by chartered float plane. These flights are irregular at best and the costs are not sustainable. The fish fry in the transport boxes have oxygen for eighteen hours, after this period the mortality of the fish expands rapidly. The fish packing begins at 2 am then the transport to the airport from the fish facility outside of Iquitos takes two hours. The health inspections can take another two hours. Then there are the flight delays. To date we have been lucky with our planning but as the number of aquaculture systems increases along with the demand for fish fry using air freight will become increasingly impractical.

To address this challenge, for the coming year we plan to build a simple, yet practical, fish production area in the Matsés territory centrally located that will provide fish fry of three different species in appropriate quantities to supply all the communities. When people think of a fish laboratory they might imagine an elaborate building filled with stainless steel contraptions and enormous tanks. This is not requisite or appropriate to remote and resource-constrained settings. In reality the most important element of fish production is having sufficient pond area for each species and to segregate different age fish.

The first step of this project will be building six ponds, two for each of the species. Acaté has identified an ideal site centrally located near the banks of Javari River to build the ponds and the breeding facility. This location, centrally located to all three river systems of the Matsés territory, will make it easier to bring the concrete for the slab, the fiberglass tanks, and the pipes from Iquitos. These ponds will include many of the same features as the over 30 ponds built in the course of the project such as protected areas for the fish to hide from avian predators and associated tree plantings to provide the right amount of shade. The work of building ponds has already started!

Fish larvae are very sensitive to water conditions and have very specific feeding requirements. The larvae will be grown in simple fiberglass tanks where the water is filtered and aerated to optimal conditions for the fish.

As the larvae grow they can be released into the outdoor ponds to continue their growth cycle until they are of the optimal size for transport to the beneficiaries. There are very specific procedures for the gravid females and collection of male gametes that will be included in the training for the Matsés. Over the last year we developed an effective fish ladder protocol to move the fish up river to the most distant Matsés communities. We have been creating custom holding pens using mosquito netting and moving the fish by boat at night for a maximum of eight hours. Then the fish are placed in the custom built pen and allowed to rest and feed until they are moved to the next stop. Even the most remote village only requires two or three stops depending on the water level. We will continue with this method only without the difficult air freight journey the logistics and timing will be much better. Over the course of the coming year we will continue to add and improve the medicinal agroforestry sites adjacent to the aquaculture sites built in year two as well as other maintenance activities and addition of trees and crops will continue in year three as needed to ensure maximum productivity from the sites.

We are grateful for our funders whose support and vision made this extraordinary work possible and look forward to realizing the full potential in the coming year!

If you missed it, take a look at our July 2024 field report on the launch of a pioneering mobile application built from the ground up for territorial protection and preservation of ancestral knowledge!

Also, Acaté was recently featured on CNN International and CNN Espanol, and CNN Espanol series Ancestral Guardians!

Links:

• Ensuring Food Security & Climate Resilience in a Time of Change
• Mobile App Launch for Matses Territorial Protection!
• CNN Espanol Feature

Acaté Publishes Pioneering Mobile Application for Territorial Protection and Preservation of Ancestral Knowledge!

Acate is proud to announce the launch of the Matsés Ancestral Territory mobile application, a new tool developed in collaboration with the Matsés people to empower them in the protection of their land and preserve their rich cultural heritage. This innovative app features an interactive map with thousands of locations documented by the Matsés themselves, bringing their history and traditions to life. The development of this app is timely due to the shifting and exceedingly complex situation of land tenure and management in parts of their ancestral territory. The Matsés currently control about half of their ancestral territory in Peru, and there are legal changes now being applied to the parts of their ancestral lands outside of their titled and concession areas. The app is also a major repository of the Matsés’ ancestral knowledge, presented in an appealing format for the younger generations.

The Android phone application can be downloaded from the Google Play Store (There is no Apple iOS version as no Matsés have iPhones):

Key features of the app include more than 12,000 georeferenced points that tell the living history of the Matsés people. The content covers everything from watershed historical events such as pre-contact battles with the Peruvian Army and the site of first peaceful contact with missionaries to the comical, such as the site of the Acaté canoe sinking while on the way to a meeting.

Almost all of the 12,000 points have associated media content to enhance the user experience. Matsés elders worked with Acaté and Matsés artist Guillermo Nëcca Pëmen Mënquë to beautifully illustrate key aspects of the georeferenced points in customized watercolor paintings. In addition, most of the points have audio recordings of Matsés elders describing the point and providing ecological and cultural lessons.

The points are categorized so the user can choose to display all the points from a sector of the territory or all the points within a certain category. The categories include lakes, trails, ecological features and ecotypes (such as flooded forest, aguaje palm swamps, white sand forests), hydrographic features, natural resources, areas with important biodiversity (such as endangered giant river otters), farms, historical sites, geographic characteristics, buildings, reference points, recreation sites, rivers and streams (with the Matsés names), and medicinal agroforestry sites.

Most importantly, this application is easily updated and allows Matsés users to add additional information. The user dialogue prompts the user to either tap on the map to add a point or enter georeferenced coordinates along with images, videos, audio files, and a description.

One of the categories of particular importance is the “Political Boundaries" option. This displays the various land tenure designations or current ownership situations within the Matsés Ancestral Territory. Tsusedpabon nidaid is the Matsés name for the entirety of their Ancestral Territory in Peru and Brazil and is approximately 1,870,000 hectares in area or almost the size of the US State of New Jersey or Slovenia. The Brazilian part of their territory is encompassed within the Javari Valley (Vale do Javari) Indigenous Reserve. In Peru, the current situation is complicated by overlapping jurisdictions, buffer zones, and zoning regulations within each area. The Matsés Communal Reserve in Peru is 513,000 hectares in total. This area is zoned into 98,000 ha where the Matsés could engage in commercial activities like livestock or agriculture and 355,000 ha where they have forestry permissions only. The far southern part of the Communal Reserve is a 60,000-ha extension that is zoned in four categories, conservation, forestry, pasture, and agriculture. The far western portion of their territory is now part of the Peruvian government's Matsés National Reserve, and the southern portion is now part of the Sierra del Divisor National Park. Each of these protected areas has a buffer zone that extends into the Matsés Communal Reserve.

Further complicating the situation, the Peruvian Ministry of Culture has now created new protected areas that overlap almost entirely the Peruvian Park Service’s aforementioned protected areas. Without a tool like the app, it would take a wall full of maps and a table full of documents and explanations to even begin to unravel and understand the bureaucratic morass of the land tenure situation.

As was the case in the formation of the Matsés National Reserve in 2009, the ground truth is that neither of the recent land tenure decisions were transparently approved with full informed consultation by the Matsés communities as required by Peruvian law. The general Matsés population, outside of individual elected leaders, was kept mostly in the dark or provided incomplete information. In the course of Matsés Indigenous Mapping Initiative, many Matsés were furious to learn for the first time, seven years after, that the rights to their birth lands had been formally ceded to the state with the establishment of the Matsés National Reserve.

At present, the rezoning or establishment of parks by the state in these highly remote forested areas may seem to inconsequential. The Matsés ancestral lands, however, are rich with untapped petroleum, carbon, timber, and settleable land. As the government slowly and deliberately removes the Matsés' traditional land claims, future governments would be able to block the Matsés access or pass control of these areas to extractive interests. In the Amazon, the uncomfortable reality of the ground is that there often exists a disconnected between protected status in law and actual conferred protection. When land is appropriated from the traditional homelands of indigenous peoples to create parks under national control, paradoxically, it can make the land more vulnerable to resource extraction. The laws of government may not be enforced or can be annulled or rewritten with a new administration in response to powerful industry lobbying. Globally, there is ample precedent of how the creation of state parks under the conservation banner of universalism and international collaboration have resulted in loss of traditional land rights and even in the displacements of entire groups. Having all these land tenure designations readily available in the app, along with the corresponding legal documents, will help the Matsés communities to understand what has happened to their territory and give them the opportunity to respond more effectively against the increasingly sophisticated threats against their territorial sovereignty.

Background

The app is the logical progression of the landmark Matsés Indigenous Mapping Initiative. Recognizing the critical need to demarcate their territories and retain their ancestral knowledge of their lands before it faded with passage of the elders, the Matsés indigenous people with the assistance of Acaté Amazon Conservation set out to map, for the first time, the Matsés ancestral lands in Peru.

Teams of Matsés elders and youth set out across their territory to locate and georeference with GPS units sites of historical events, natural resources, current and past villages, hunting camps, trails, rainforest habitat types and other sites of cultural and ecological significance. In total, after five years of intensive work, the Matsés recorded and georeferenced over 12,000 culturally significant data points.

In 2015, back when the Matsés Indigenous Mapping Initiative was first launched, few Matsés had a cell telephone. In the past few years this situation has changed quite a bit, although their territory today still, for the most part, lacks cell phone and internet access. The Peruvian Ministry of Education schools in Matsés villages now provide tablets for the students as they do for all communities across Peru, but Matsés-language specific content is lacking. To fill this void, Acaté Amazon Conservation created to date four novel mobile educational applications for the Matsés that are downloadable for Android phone platforms here at the Google Play Store. This includes a series of interactive ecologic applications as well as the first-ever dictionary phone app created for an Amazonian indigenous language.

We envisioned a phone app that would enable the Matsés to access all information from the Matsés Indigenous Mapping Initiative instantly and provide the capacity to update that application with their own observations and knowledge utilizing an interactive feature. An interactive mobile telephone/tablet application would confer many advantages to traditional printed maps. The Matsés territory is so vast and their cultural and environmental knowledge so rich and nuanced that it is not practical to represent in a usable format on a single or even a series of printed maps. Land use and knowledge is highly dynamic but printed maps are comparatively static, costly to revise, and to reprint with updates. If an app could be developed, then the user could record new geographic points and upload content, photos, and audio files associated with the new recorded points, which is far more advantageous to revising and reprinting printed maps.

Challenges

The Acaté team had developed successful interactive language apps but taking on the development of an interactive geo-referencing application for a remote and large indigenous territory was entirely new for us and, as can be appreciated, brought a host of complexities and challenges. To our knowledge, no such model existed for other indigenous communities and we would be developing it de novo and on the most shoestring budget.

We will just briefly touch on a few of the challenges for successful development of the app. One challenge was the very large size of the Matsés Ancestral Territory, of which only a fraction of this vast region is accessible by navigable waterways or marked paths. In addition to the sheer magnitude of the areas there were considerable difficulties consolidating and organizing all the data and then converting it to the native Android format such that it can be displayed on the app.

Importantly, given the remote geography of the Matsés territory, the application was built by necessity to function with limited or without any internet connection. If too much offline content is included the app becomes too large (“heavy”) and cannot be loaded on phones with limited memory (such as would be used regionally by the Matsés) but, if it is designed for efficiency with assets on the server, then the offline functionality becomes too limited. We strove to find the right balance, so the download size is reasonable, and the basic functionality is there without an internet connection.

Future Directions

The development of this app takes yet another step forward to support present and future generations of Matsés to protect their lands from extractive industry and future attempts to dispossess them. The Matsés are now sharing the app between their phones (as access to Google Play Store is limited in the territories) among their communities and will futher circulate the app in an upcoming assemblea gathering of representatives from all the Matsés communities in Peru.

Engaging younger generations is central to bridging the increasingly generational divide among indigenous groups that has occurred with increased exposure to the outside world. The app offers young Matsés an opportunity to continue their legacy and connection by adding their history and including their perspective of their territory through the app. Through engaging younger generations, the app helps inspire youth that their identity as Matsés can lie in both traditional and modern systems, and that to choose one is an artificial choice; one can thrive in the outside world yet retain a proud identity as Matsés.

We are grateful for our funders whose support made this work possible and look forward to continuing to enhance the application, which is being regularly updated on the Google Play Store. As far as we know, this is the first interactive map application for an indigenous territory, so the lack of a model to copy made it a real challenge for the Acaté team to design and program de novo, particularly for territory that is remote, complex, and with limited internet connectivity. With these challenges overcome, we hope that other indigenous groups and organizations will be able to use it as a model to create similar applications for other indigenous areas. The ICCA Registry and Digital Democracy created a mobile app tool for groups wanting to include their territories in the ICCA database. This app allows users to add their date for inclusion with the ICCA registry without having to use a GPS unit or GIS software.

If you missed it, take a look at our September 2023 field report on the launch of this large-scale initiative to support food security, sustainable income opportunities, and women’s empowerment! Stayed tuned for a forthcoming update soon on this extraordinary initiative!

Acaté Amazon Conservation is a non-profit organization based in the United States and Perú that operates in a true and transparent partnership with the Matsés people of the Peruvian Amazon to maintain their self-sufficiency and way of life. The Matsés safeguard a critical conservation corridor and shield some of the last remaining uncontacted tribes in isolation from unwanted encroachment from the outside world. Acaté works to protect their forests and way of life through supporting on-the-ground initiatives that are led by the Matsés indigenous people.

Operating on the frontlines of conservation, Acaté’s initiatives over the past decade have included the first indigenous medicine encyclopedia as well as projects with original methodology in sustainable economic development, traditional medicine, medicinal agroforestry, nutritional diversity, regenerative agriculture, integrated aquaculture systems, biodiversity inventory, education, native language literacy, participatory mapping, and protection of uncontacted tribal groups in isolation. All of our initiatives are developed with, led and implemented by the Matsés indigenous people. Donations are tax-deductible and go directly to fund these on-the-ground initiatives that operate with unparalleled transparency.

Links:

• http://www.acateamazon.org
• Launch of Matses Ancestral Territory App - Field Report (full)
• Gallery of Indigenous Art Showcasing Rainforest Biodiversity!