Sustaining Matses Indigenous Medicine - Phase II

Preserving Traditional Ecological Knowledge through Supporting Literacy

The fate of a culture is inseparably bound to its language. In Acaté’s latest field update, Dr. David Fleck reports on the milestone completion of eight reader books, illustrated and written by Matsés authors based on narratives provided by Matsés elders. More than doubling the amount of native language books available for Matsés children, each volume is designed to help Matsés students learn and practice reading while promoting the intergenerational transmission of traditional natural history knowledge.

As the Matsés assimilate to mainstream society, their traditional ecological knowledge, which is extensive and essential to their subsistence, is not being passed down to younger generations. Consequently, young people, who today spend more time in the classroom than in the forest, are not obtaining the knowledge required to hunt, fish, and utilize wild plants. At the same time, the modern school system, which is replacing traditional education, is of such poor quality that children are not learning to read at an early age and youths are not acquiring skills at a level that allows them to interact successfully with the national society or find good jobs when they seek employment outside of their territory. Literacy is critical for governance and defense of their territory.

Acaté’s latest project, entitled “Matsés Authors as a Key to Literacy and Intergenerational Transmission of Traditional Ecological Knowledge” reached an important milestone this month with the publication of eight readers that describe and illustrate Matses traditional ecological knowledge of plants and animals. The illustrated readers, written by Matsés authors based on audio recordings of narratives provided by Matsés elders, are designed to help Matses students learn and practice reading and to promote the intergenerational transmission of traditional natural history knowledge. The topics of the readers cover the natural history and ecology of rainforest mammals, fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, plants and invertebrates. The full pdfs of all eight readers can be viewed and downloaded on the October 2018 Field Report Page of our website.

The Work Process for Development of the Readers

The elaboration of the readers began with a data collection workshop. Four Matsés experts on natural history, two Matsés authors-in-training, a Matsés artist, and a linguist came together in Iquitos during the last two weeks of January 2018.

The purpose of the workshop was to interview Matsés elders about their knowledge of the natural history of animals and the utility of wild plants, to compile a database that the Matsés authors would use to write the prose for the readers. This was done in part by writing down short sentences for the first-grade level readers, and in part by making audio recordings of longer narratives for the more advanced readers.

An essential element of the readers is the attractive artwork, which entices the young readers to try to understand the accompanying text. During the course of the past 9 months, Matsés artist Guillermo Nëcca Pëmen Mënquë has produced 100 animal and plant portraits and 220 watercolor paintings illustrating animal habits and plant uses that illustrate the readers.

The Elementary Readers are designed for Matsés children in early primary school. Each species entry contains an illustration by Guillermo and provides information on their ecology in the rainforest, such as how they raise their young. 

 The Advanced Reader, which is piloted in this initiative with the Advanced Introduction to the Ecology of Mammals, is designed for 4th to 6th grade students and conveys a greater depth of ecological information. Patricia J. Wynne, staff artist at the American Museum of Natural History, collaborated on this volume to provide black-and-white drawings of all the mammal species. The following extract from the advanced reader exemplifies some of Guillermo’s and Patricia’s drawings.

 After the data collection workshop, the Matsés authors have been busy learning writing and computer skills, and composing the contents for the readers under the tutelage supervision of linguist David Fleck. The book-writing process also involved follow-up consultation with elders to fill in gaps in the knowledge and to check the final products.

Before finalizing the readers, all the manuscripts were field tested with Matsés children, and modified when children did not understand the message or had other difficulties. In what follows we present the Matsés team members who participated in this project:

César – natural history expert. César is considered by the Matsés to be the foremost expert on the behavior of all animals. He is particularly talented at relating animal behavior in engaging narratives; for example, rather than listing natural history facts about armadillos, he may include this information in narrative describing a typical day in the life of an armadillo. César is also an accomplished medicine man.

Salomé  – master craftswoman. Salomé was captured by Matsés warriors from the Kulina-Pano ethnic group when she was a young woman. The Matsés often comment that she has mastered the fabrication of traditional Matsés handicrafts to the point of surpassing the Matsés themselves. Salomé knows all the wild forest plant that the Matsés use, including some that most Matsés no longer know. Salomé is also renowned as one of the best female hunters among the Matsés.

Joaquin  – natural history expert. Joaquin is an accomplished hunter and an avid observer of nature. He is particularly talented at explaining animal natural history in clear terms, and pointing out interesting or comical aspects of animals’ behavior. Among his useful skills is identifying the local fauna in field guides, whilst older Matses have trouble recognizing species portrayed in two-dimensional images.

Marina – master craftswoman. Marina, like her mother Salomé, is an expert at fabricating all of the Matses traditional artifacts, and also at teaching others how to make them. She is an expert agriculturalist and, being the wife of a medicine man, is well versed in Matsés traditional medicinal knowledge.

Felipe  – author-in-training. Felipe is the son of a Brazilian woman who was captured by the Matsés in the 1960s, and works for Acaté Amazon Conservation as a field coordinator. To the skills that he has thus far learned while working with Acaté (use of word processing, spreadsheet, and cartography software, use of GPS units, map data collection, etc.) he has learned the various skills associated with books writing. As such, he is becoming one of the young Matsés who is most knowledgeable with respect to Western technology. In the process of participating in the project, the authors-in-training become human reservoirs for traditional ecological knowledge. 

Dina – author-in-training. Dina (daughter of Marina) is a schoolteacher in the village of Estirón. She has taken a leave of absence from her teaching job to participate in this project, and has quickly picked up the many skills associated with writing books, including collecting data, using professional audio recoding equipment, transcribing recorded narratives, composing prose, using a word processor, writing detailed instructions for the illustrator, and deciding the contents and layout of the readers. In fact, by her own volition Dina is currently writing a book about her grandmother’s (Salomé) hunting feats. Considering that one of the aims of this project is to provide the Matsés authors with skills that will help them obtain jobs, it is worth mentioning that upon learning that Dina was writing books, the Peruvian ministry of education sought Dina out and commissioned her to proofread pedagogical materials written for the Matsés. Also, she has been hired to teach some courses at the Universidad Científica del Perú’s bilingual education program (in Iquitos)! 

We will be sending the readers to the printer this week, and will distribute them to the Matsés schools before the start of the next school year. We would like to express our gratitude to the Liechtenstein Development Service (Liechtensteinischer Entwicklungsdienst), Nouvelle Planète (Switzerland), and Lotex Stiftung (Liechtenstein), who generously financed this project. The American Museum of Natural History Center for Biodiversity and Conservationfunded the artwork drawn by Patricia Wynne.

We would like to continue this project by training more Matsés authors and producing more pedagogical-ecological materials for the Matses children.

While this new collection more than doubles the amount of children’s literature written in the Matsés language, it is diminutive compared to the amount literature available to Western children. But Acaté plans to continue. Among the book projects for which we would like to obtain funding are:

1) publication of winning entries of a story-writing contest where Matsés children write original fact or fiction stories set in the jungle.
2) more ecological readers of the advanced mammal ecology type
3) a taxonomically-organized ABC book, and
4) an illustrated Matsés-Spanish dictionary.

We would also like to hire more Matsés youth to be authors, including recruiting the few Matsés who are currently studying in universities in Iquitos. In addition to the skills they would acquire by writing books (part-time), we would like to tutor them with their homework, to reduce the high rate of indigenous university students who flunk out due to the poor education they receive in high school at their villages. Other indigenous groups in Peru also have high drop-out rates, but for the Matsés it is the highest, at over 80%.

Acaté is an on-the-ground conservation organization that works directly in a true and transparent partnership with the Matsés indigenous people to maintain their self-sufficiency and way of life. The Matsés safeguard one of the great areas of rainforest on the planet, protecting a region of over 3 million acres in Perú alone and shielding some of the last remaining uncontacted tribes in voluntary isolation from unwanted encroachment from the outside world. Donations are tax-deductible and go directly to fund these on-the-ground initiatives that operate at the leading edge of conservation with unparalleled transparency.

Stay tuned soon for more reporting on our work including major updates on our sustainable economic development programs and launch of novel approaches for indigenous-led biodiversity assessments. If you missed it, take a look at our November 2017 field update highlighting the major advancements in our traditional medicine initiative!

Acaté is also proud to share the three extraordinary installments of reporting on Matsés ancestral transmission from our partners at Xapiri. Through their work with the Matsés in partnership with Acaté, Xapiri provides much needed economic opportunities for Matsés men and women through the sale of traditional crafts and seeks to ensure that the ancestral artistic practices are maintained and transmitted to younger generations. In May 2018, Jack Wheeler, Tui Anandi and Mike van Kruchten of Xapiri joined Acaté in our trip to the Matsés territory and spent a further several weeks visiting Matsés communities across their lands in Peru, meeting Matsés artisans and documenting the processes behind the art. Their reporting and beautiful photography provides an intimate glimpse into Matsés culture and daily life as never seen before! Click on the links below to access.

Matsés Ancestral Transmission Part I

Matsés Ancestral Transmission Part II

Matsés Ancestral Transmission Part III

Links:

• Acate Amazon Conservation

Advancing literacy for indigenous empowerment and transmission of traditional ecological knowledge

The fate of a culture is inseparably bound to its language. The present state of native language education in most indigenous groups of the Amazon is deeply problematic. Although access to bilingual education is recognized by national governments as a fundamental right of indigenous peoples, the challenges to the development and successful implementation of such educational programs are multifold. Smaller indigenous groups and communities with less external resources face the greatest challenges. Acaté Field Coordinator Dr. David Fleck reports on the progress of a new initiative designed to advance literacy as well as transmit traditional ecological knowledge across generations.

Bilingual education, in the context of indigenous people like the Matsés, whose children are essentially monolingual speakers, entails teaching in the native language in preschool and primary school. In addition to the pedagogical advantages of teaching reading, writing, arithmetic, etc. in a language that the children understand well, bilingual education also plays a very important role in the intergenerational transmission of traditional knowledge, raising the status of the language and culture, and elevating the self-esteem of the students.

The Peruvian constitution recognizes the rights of indigenous peoples to express themselves and to learn in their native languages. Indeed, the Ministry of Education has commendable policies for providing bilingual education to speakers of the 47 indigenous languages spoken in Perú. Unfortunately, the barriers to carrying out or implementing these policies effectively with each indigenous group are considerable. With few exceptions, it is not possible to state honestly that bilingual education in Perú has hitherto been a success. However strong the national mandate, the success or failure of transmitting literacy depends entirely on efforts at the local level. In general, the smaller the ethnic group the greater the failure. In the case of the Matsés, the Peruvian Ministry of Education has not published any pedagogical materials or books in the Matsés language except for four workbooks published in 2006 that were so poorly written that they are unintelligible for Matsés teachers.

Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) missionaries, who used to be in charge of Matsés bilingual education in the 1970s and 1980s (and contributed to Matsés education up to 2001), produced a fine series of readers and math books and a few collections of myths and other narratives. Other than their translation of the New Testament, there are no copies of SIL publications remaining today in Matsés communities. In addition to the lack of pedagogical materials and books written in the Matsés language, poor training of Matsés schoolteachers, frequently cancelled classes, multi-grade classrooms (where teachers have to instruct students in up six different grades at once), and a multitude of other resource and cultural challenges have contributed to the low quality of education that the Matsés receive.

We have already made several contributions to the stock of reading materials in the Matsés language. The Matsés, with support of Acaté, have produced a 1000 page encyclopedia of medicinal plants in two volumes entirely written by the Matsés in the Matsés language. With the collaboration of several Matsés authors, I have produced a dictionary, a book of their traditional life, an extensive history book, and two short readers. However, other than the readers, these books are meant for adults, so there is a special need for children´s literature that will motivate parents (and older brothers and sisters) to read with their children at home and to teach them to read in their own language. Early this year, Acaté announced the publication of a reader entitled: Onquiaid 200 ted: Aton Shubunouësh Bacuëbo Bëquiadte (200 Matsés Words: A Reader for Learning at Home). This 146-page reader includes 200 original watercolor illustrations of animals, plants, artifacts and other elements of the local environment and of Matsés culture painted by the Matsés artist Guillermo Nëcca Pëmen Mënquë. This was profiled in our February 2017 field report.

The present project is designed to train young Matsés men and women to become authors, and together with them and Matsés elders produce a series of readers and books in the Matses language that will assist in teaching children to read, and which will also be a vehicle for the transgenerational transfer of traditional ecological knowledge. As the Matsés assimilate to the national societies, their traditional ecological knowledge, which is extensive and essential to their subsistence, is not being passed down to younger generations. At the same time, the modern school system, which is replacing traditional education, is of such poor quality that children are not learning to read at an early age and youths are not acquiring skills at a level that allows them to succeed in the mainstream societies.

Four Matsés experts on natural history, two Matsés authors-in-training, and a Matsés artist came together during the last two weeks of January 2018 in Iquitos, Peru for the first workshop for Acaté’s latest project, entitled “Matses Authors as a Key to Literacy and Intergenerational Transmission of Ecological Knowledge".

The principal purpose of our recent 2-week workshop was to interview Matsés elders about their knowledge of the natural history of animals and the utility of wild plants, to compile a database upon which the content of the readers will be based. This was done in part by writing down short sentences for the first-grade level readers, and in part by making audio recordings of longer narratives for the more advanced readers.

In what follows we present the other Matsés who participated in the workshop:

Salomé - master craftswoman. Salomé was captured by Matsés warriors from the Kulina-Pano ethnic group when she was a young woman. The Matsés often comment that she has mastered the fabrication of traditional Matsés handicrafts to the point of surpassing the Matsés themselves. Salomé knows all the wild forest plant that the Matsés use, including some that most Matsés no longer know. Salomé is also renowned as one of the best female hunters among the Matsés.

César - natural history expert. César is considered by the Matsés to be the foremost expert on the behavior of all animals. He is particularly talented at relating animal behavior in engaging narratives; for example, rather than listing natural history facts about armadillos, he may include this information in narrative describing a typical day in the life of an armadillo. César is also an accomplished medicine man.

Marina - master craftswoman. Marina, like her mother Salomé, is an expert at fabricating all of the Matsés traditional artifacts, and also at teaching others how to make them. She is an expert agriculturalist and, being the wife of a medicine man, is well versed in Matsés traditional medicinal knowledge.

Joaquin - natural history expert. Joaquin is an accomplished hunter and an avid observer of nature. He is particularly talented at explaining animal natural history in clear terms, and pointing out interesting or comical aspects of animals’ behavior. Among his useful skills is identifying the local fauna in field guides, whilst older Matsés have trouble recognizing species portrayed in two-dimensional images.

Dina - author-in-training. Dina (daughter of Marina) is a schoolteacher in the village of Estirón. She has taken a leave of absence from her teaching job to participate in this project, and is learning quickly the many skills associated with writing books, including collecting data, using professional audio recoding equipment, transcribing recorded narratives, composing prose, using a word processor, writing detailed instructions for the illustrator, and deciding the contents and layout of the readers.  

1. Felipe is the son of a Brazilian woman who was captured by the Matsés in the 1960s, and has worked for Acaté Amazon Conservation as a field coordinator. To the skills that he has thus far learned while working with Acaté (use of word processing, spreadsheet, and cartography software, use of GPS units, map data collection, etc.) he will be learning the various skills associated with books writing. As such, he is becoming one of the Matsés who is most knowledgeable with respect to Western technology. It might be added that in the process of participating in the project, the authors-in-training will become reservoirs for traditional ecological knowledge.

Using the data collected in the workshops, the Matsés authors have been busy writing the contents for seven 50-page first-grade-level readers, and one 100-page advanced reader. Meanwhile, Guillermo has been producing the more than 250 watercolor paintings that the authors require.

As of July 25^th 2018, all the text and illustration for the seven elementary readers are finished and the graphic design is underway. The text for the advanced reader is currently being finished by Dina and Guillermo has 35 drawings left to paint. We expect the final manuscripts to be ready for printing by early September 2018, with the books distributed to the Matsés schools and families before the end of this year.

One of the expected benefits of this project is that it will give the Matsés, especially the trained authors, employment opportunities. This expectation was realized sooner than expected: When the Peruvian Ministry of Education learned that Dina was writing books for the Matsés, they commissioned her to correct pedagogical materials. Soon afterwards, she was also hired to teach a few courses for the bilingual education program at the Universidad Científica del Perú (in Iquitos).

This first stage of our project was made possible by the generous support of the Liechtenstein Development Service (Liechtensteinischer Entwicklungsdienst), Nouvelle Planète (Switzerland), and Lotex Stiftung (Liechtenstein).  The second phase of the project, for which we are seeking funding, would include a second advanced-level reader, a taxonomically organized word-book, and a collection of stories by children originating from a proposed story-writing contest.