Fernanda, a lawyer and anthropologist, specializes in merging indigenous and scientific knowledge. She works to support indigenous communities in preserving biodiversity, upholding traditional medicines, and advancing their cosmologies. Exploring the influence of indigenous rituals and medicines on Western viewpoints, she delves into various perspectives on existence. Additionally, she investigates themes such as consciousness in non-human entities, co-evolution, trust, reciprocity, and shared intentionality. Collaborating with the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute, Fernanda safeguards indigenous rights concerning traditional knowledge, medicines, and genetic resources.
Her initiative aims to protect indigenous rights by ensuring respect and benefit for traditional practices, medicines, and knowledge in modern health and environmental policies. It addresses issues like the use of indigenous medicines and emphasizes transparency on matters like traditional knowledge, benefit-sharing, and regulation. Through activities like Ayahuasca Indigenous Conferences and online platforms, it seeks to safeguard indigenous rights and ensure fair distribution of benefits from indigenous knowledge.
Colloquium Presentation: 29 May 2024
Reconnecting with Ancestral Wisdom: A Conversation with the Yawanawá
Abstract
The Yawanawá come from the Acre region of Brazil, they are renowned for beautiful musical and powerful plant medicine tradition. They are now looking at ways of preserving their native language, once reduced to only fifty native speakers, now expanding again. The three we welcome here are Schaneihu, Yawatume, and Utxi. Shaneihu has been trained by his elders and proficient and providing the medicine of song. Yawatume is also trained by a pajé (shaman) and steeped in the tradition. Her husband, Utxi, is also trained in the musical and medicinal traditions. They will talk and perhaps sing about their medicines, including ‘Uni’, referred to in the lingua franca now as by the cover-all ‘Ayahuasca’ in the West, their relationship the land, and their history with a colonist past.