Underneath the concrete of the drained Parque Aquatico, we approached the market painted aquarium blue; the descent beneath the waters below the river preceded us, a marker for what could have been. Unfiltered tilapia schooled behind glass, murals adorned in vibrant feathers and spotted prints, it was perhaps the only Amazonian art collective in a country overflowing in Andean cooperatives. Despite its familiarity to me, a traveler of the Napo, its compilation felt wholeheartedly sacred and scarce. Walnuts and achiote, so many abundant treasures that seldom migrate to the large cities, embrace another symbol of aversion towards the lost continent. This quiet morning, the stalls were mostly shut behind metal grates, except for the tiendas of a few generous women showing us ways to weave the pato into a necklace. A series of reproduced warrior spears perched in a bucket of lentils, so many hours of labor contained within the hands of tourists, a facsimile of a nation once violently at war with colonization. For an uncontacted community, when brute force of colonization and religious assimilation are no longer effective, trade becomes the most seductive mode of integration. Shiny new iPods, plastic phone cases, the techno-aesthic of a modernizing world is inexorably presumptuous; a condition in which a weapon transforms into a coat rack. Moreover, spaces for trade.
Speaking with the Shuar bookkeeper of the Bioparque Etnobotanico, she reassured me that I wouldn’t need to read Achuar literature, that all the spears and scars of the Shuar cosmovision would suffice. We are one people after all, despite a violent dispossession between them. Rummaging through the piles she hands me a book on Shuar architecture. Well, they are the same, so many people tell me - despite this aching feeling that sameness is a narrative written by cultural victors, particularly in their territory. The Shuar nation outnumbers the Achuar 10:1, and whose voices speak on behalf of whom I can’t quite parse from this perspective. All I know is that the stories of my partners in this endeavor go without mention, articulate through stereotypes like the constant warning that I’ll be forced into matrimony with a woman whose skin incidentally brushes mine. I wonder, who translates these narratives and who is advocating for plurality? I make assumptions that knowledge is equated with writing, that research is a mode of discovery, that recollection is a perfect monolith; All of which have been contested by emergent voices.
Every so often, I’m fortunate enough to have the opportunity to sit with Andrea, a colleague and artist who collaborates with communities in her own corner of the world’s largest rainforest. She reminded me of a biological mechanism that had slipped from the so often distracted forefront of my memory. A story of tributaries formed in the sky like rivers of clouds, mists that mirror the hydrological world below. Strung somewhere between are the trees and the people who care for one another. Scientifically, this transpiration en masse is what generously contributes to the flow of water between the Atlantic and the Andes. Unseen pathways, they work invisibly to water the many organisms who call these geographies home. By pulling the ocean into the sky, it’s the mechanism that keeps similar latitudes to vast deserts lush; lush at least for now.