Amazonian forest gardens (chakras) for crisis resilience and cultural resistance in the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon

Widely recognised as one of the most ecologically significant areas of the world, the Amazon region is under threat by interconnected crises: climate change, extractive industry and pollution, poverty, malnutrition. Crisis in the Amazon spells crisis for the rest of the world: playing a pivotal role in the regulation of global climate patterns, maintaining the Amazon rainforest's ecological dynamics is a crucial aspect of halting runaway global heating. Central to this is the safeguarding of rainforest biodiversity, to ensure ecological resilience to climate shocks. Having actively maintained and enhanced Amazonian biodiversity over millennia before the Spanish Conquest of South America, indigenous communities excel as stewards of biodiversity, yet they are still marginalised and discriminated against. Most approaches aiming to overcome this marginalisation and discrimination are aimed at improved inclusion into the national political, economic, education and health systems. While intentions may be laudable, many of these approaches are not indigenous-led, and may have consequences of eroding indigenous lifeways, ancestral practices, and the very worldviews which have supported indigenous relationships with the forest and its more-than-human inhabitants. Conducting collaborative research with indigenous organisations to support their self-organised strategies of resilience and cultural resistance, is not only a matter of social justice, but constitutes an active safeguarding of the Amazon's bio-cultural diversity in a time when the world needs them most.

At the heart of many indigenous Amazonian societies lies the chakra - the traditional forest garden, or more specifically a complex network of cultivated forest spaces. Recently, the chakra has been heralded as a solution to the dilemma between environmental and economic sustainability and initiatives are underway to promote the chakra as emblematic of sustainable production methods. This new market orientation, however, overlooks the spiritual and cultural centrality of the chakra to indigenous lifeways: as the basis for good health, a space where social bonds and community relations are created and maintained and where much intergenerational transmission of knowledge unfolds, including through songs and a very literal 'speaking with plants'. The chakra, as central constituent of many Amazonian lifeways, as sphere of interaction between human and forest beings, space of entanglement of 'culture' and 'nature', is an ideal entry point into exploring indigenous cultural resilience to and overcoming of crises through a revitalisation of ancestral knowledges and practices.

Arising from ongoing dialogue with indigenous organisations over several years, this project brings together a partnership of academic and indigenous researchers to understand and harness the potential of the chakra for indigenous communities' responses to the challenges posed by interconnected crises in the Amazon region. Concomitantly, the project seeks to strengthen indigenous communities' capacity for self-advocacy, to document, analyse and communicate in their own voices the issues affecting their lives and potential solutions thereto. Working together with three Napo Runa communities (Kichwa of the Upper Napo River) in Ecuador, and three Urarina communities of the Chambira Basin in Peru, the project uses participatory video and other methodologies which overcome literacy barriers and centre indigenous communities as key knowledge producers in the research process. Knowledge exchange events will foster cross-cultural connections. Led by a steering committee consisting of academic investigators and indigenous organisations, the project will produce video libraries, documentaries, scientific articles, a methodological toolkit and a policy brief to bring indigenous Amazonian research on cultural resilience to multiple audiences.