MOCOA, Colombia — A bonfire crackles in the center of an Indigenous open-air pavilion atop a hill in the Putumayo jungle, adding warmth to the already sweltering Amazonian heat. The sound of homemade jingle bells fills the air as the essential aromas of local plants are sprayed around. This is part of an Indigenous ritual to connect with nature.

“The heat of the fire connects us with the earth,” says Sandra Chasoy, a 41-year-old Indigenous Inga woman. She’s accompanied by María Dolores Sigindioy Dincoy, 57, an Inga elder, who tears up as she says: “Water is life … Without water, we are nothing.”

Indigenous communities like Chasoy’s and Sigindioy Dincoy’s have safeguarded the Colombian Amazon for millennia, grounded in an ancestral belief system that holds nature as living and sacred, with its own rights.

Indigenous communities have long understood the delicate balance and connection between humans and nature, with their traditional knowledge and nature-based practices proving to be among the most effective strategies for conserving the Amazon Rainforest. For centuries, Indigenous communities have lived in harmony with the forest, using sustainable farming methods, fire management techniques, and deep ecological understanding to preserve biodiversity. Indigenous know-how about safeguarding nature is wildly necessary, as about 20% of the Amazon Rainforest has already been lost in the past 50 years. Yet, historically, Indigenous nature protection efforts have been overlooked or undermined, despite being proven to be a cornerstone of successful environmental management.

Growing interest in Indigenous knowledge

Almost half of the Amazon’s intact forests lie within Indigenous territories. In Colombia, it’s estimated that 64% of the Indigenous population inhabit 846 legalized collective territories, spanning about a third of the country.

“Before, there was little interest in Indigenous life,” Chasoy says. But “nowadays there is a deep interest in exploring the thinking and ways of life that we have as Indigenous people.” She explains that outsiders are now curious about Indigenous principles like sumak kawsay, an Andean Indigenous belief in living harmoniously with nature to achieve “the good life.” Sumak kawsay is part of a transcendental ancestral worldview that sees all beings as interconnected. “Everything is connected and everything has life,” Chasoy says.

At the COP 16 United Nations biodiversity conference in Cali, Colombia, in October, the role of Indigenous peoples in environmental protection took center stage. Promoted by the Colombian government as “the People’s COP,” the conference featured 33 Indigenous organizations from around the world, including Chasoy’s.

“[COP16] was very necessary because as Indigenous people we have an ancestral ability to understand the problems, the sadness and the pain that we feel with the land, the water, the flora and the fauna,” Chasoy says.

COP16 focused on financing and implementing the Kunming-Montreal agreement from the previous COP in 2022, aiming to protect 30% of land and sea by 2030, and with a special article recognizing Indigenous rights and territories.

At this year’s COP, Indigenous peoples celebrated the creation of a Permanent Subsidiary Body to support their work on Article 8(j), which focuses on protecting traditional knowledge, innovations and practices. They also welcomed the establishment of the Cali Fund, which ensures that communities, including Indigenous peoples, receive benefits from the commercial use of digital sequence information (DSI) — genetic data derived from the biological resources that they have long stewarded.

Yet disappointments abounded over the lack of a monitoring framework, and the failure to establish a funding mechanism to implement the biodiversity agreement effectively.

A long way to go for Indigenous rights

Indigenous communities receive scant financial, political and security support. Between 2011 and 2020, less than 1% of international climate aid went to Indigenous land tenure and forest management, according to a study by the Rainforest Foundation Norway. Politically, Indigenous communities remain underrepresented. In Colombia, there’s a 66% representation gap between non-Indigenous and Indigenous legislators in the national parliament, according to the think tank Global Americans. Moreover, many Indigenous environmental defenders pay the ultimate price for their work: in 2023, Colombia was the deadliest country for killings of environmental defenders, about half of whom were Indigenous.

Indigenous peoples’ contributions are also often overlooked or exploited in environmental projects. The $2 billion, and booming, global carbon credit market, for example, is marketed as a way for companies to offset their carbon footprint. Yet it often exaggerates or falsifies the impact of the credits, and has created problems for Indigenous communities. Indigenous peoples sometimes become entangled in opaque carbon rights agreements that can extend up to a century; complex contracts written in English; and displacements from their own lands in favor of new projects.

Projects are sometimes initiated without Indigenous knowledge or consent, says Pablo De La Cruz, an adviser at Gaia Amazonas, a Colombia-based organization that works with Indigenous peoples on conservation. He points out that “compensation thinking” — the concept of offsetting emissions — doesn’t match Indigenous beliefs: “Carbon credits give permission to pollute elsewhere. Ecology doesn’t work like that.”

De La Cruz says that while Indigenous communities should benefit from the use of their knowledge and lands, this rarely happens. The Western concepts of intellectual property and patents clash with Indigenous ideas. “Indigenous knowledge is different. It’s not that one person owns the knowledge, rather, knowledge is passed down from ancestors, sometimes with secrets. It’s collective,” De La Cruz says.

Indigenous ideology and belief system

Chasoy and her community use traditional farming techniques for their chagra, small subsistence plots that rotate crops and rest the land, guided by lunar phases. “The ancestral system teaches you balance. You need to give in order to receive. You need to sow to harvest. And there is a time where you cannot take,” Chasoy says.

Luz Angela Flores, WWF’s conservation coordinator for the Amazon, says Indigenous peoples have acquired profound knowledge about local ecosystems and biodiversity over thousands of years, and have established agroecological calendars “where they have identified the best times for planting and harvesting,” as well as for hunting species. She adds that their land use respects the balance in the territories, and in the chagras (also known in some Indigenous communities as conucos) there are “crops that integrate a diversity of different species, such as pineapple, cocoa and forestry species.”

Monocultures, by contrast, “are a threat,” Sigindioy Dincoy says. “They leave us without anything. Monocultures come with chemicals,” she says, adding that the earth needs breaks to rest.

Chasoy regularly leads waste collection and tree planting activities, and teaches younger community members to safeguard water and the land. “Indigenous people have a strong implementing capacity. They have hierarchy and structure and they get on stuff right away,” says Oliver Kaplan, associate professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, U.S., who has studied Indigenous resistance.

As a result, deforestation rates are more than twice as low on Indigenous woodlands where property has been ensured than outside such areas, according to a United Nations study.  Chasoy knows the secrets why.

Nature is central to Indigenous peoples’ cosmovision, their holistic understanding of the universe as a system of interconnected living elements. Chasoy describes the profoundness of Indigenous peoples’ spirituality: “The earth speaks to us. It tells us it is being exhausted.”

As Chasoy walks a forest path, she closes her eyes and sprinkles her body with plant extracts, asking nature for permission to go down to the Caquetá River.

“[Indigenous peoples] have a strong ideology and belief system,” Kaplan says. “[T]hey have a strong commitment to protect the environment. It’s fundamental to who they are.”

Indigenous cultures also tend to shun the Western logic of individualistic consumption. Rather, they’re guided by principles of sustainability and collective thinking, says Leonardo González Perafán, director of Indepaz, Colombia’s Institute for Development and Peace Studies. He highlights how Indigenous peoples make life plans, whereas politicians typically offer just four-year development plans.

According to De La Cruz, conservation itself is a Western political term. He says Indigenous peoples don’t think of conservation as leaving nature untouched; rather, “they take care [of nature], because they use it.” This ethic is formed by their spiritual connection, the belief that plants and animals have spirits too. Therefore, Indigenous peoples will ask for permission to cut down plants and trees, De La Cruz says: “There’s a reciprocity.”

Blending knowledge systems

While Indigenous ways of life remain rooted in tradition, their practices are increasingly blending with modern ideas, De La Cruz says.

This fusion is exemplified by Tulia Elena Quistial Lara, an Indigenous Pasto woman in her late 20s who lives in Mocoa, the capital city of Colombia’s Putumayo department. Trained at the Putumayo Technological Institute, Quistial combines scientific techniques with Indigenous ideas in her volunteer community work. She monitors water quality in Indigenous communities throughout the department using methods like measuring temperature, conductivity and pH values, while also joining community initiatives to collect waste, reforest or conduct trainings about environmental protection.

Like Sigindioy Dincoy, Quistial has a special connection to water. “Everything revolves around water,” she says. Concerned about contamination from extractive industries like copper mining and oil production in Putumayo, she sees the department’s polluted waters as a chiding from nature. “Nature is giving us a lesson,” she says.

Quistial’s daily life revolves around study, work and volunteer efforts. She says there’s a lot of necessity in Indigenous communities and they need young professionals to carry out projects in their communities.

He path isn’t without hurdles. Scarce resources have forced her to organize fundraising events to cover the costs of expensive water tests. She sometimes faces skepticism from some members of her community about the scientific methods she applies. Adding to her challenges, Quistial struggles with her identity as a Pasto Indigenous woman, as the government hasn’t formally recognized her ethnicity — a struggle shared by many Indigenous peoples who give up on the required bureaucratic processes.

Marino Peña Jamioy,  president of the Indigenous Regional Organization of Putumayo (OZIP), praises Quistial’s community work, but raises concerns about Western scientific frameworks. “Not everything can be [scientifically] proven. For us [Indigenous] it’s not really like that,” Jamioy says. Instead, he says, “Everything is energy. And everything is connected.”

As Jamioy explains it, the world is constantly changing. “We cannot have what we had before,” he says, noting how Indigenous peoples now have to navigate a capitalist society where money is “a necessary evil.” Young people often leave their villages to look for sources of income, and many have had to learn how to monetize their knowledge. 

Chasoy says protecting nature is transcendental and that Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples need to come together in the fight to protect nature, because otherwise “there will be a void.”

A continuous struggle

“We’re sitting on some very rich lands,” Jamioy says, adding that there are a lot of interests at play in Putumayo.

Indigenous communities in this Amazonian department are under constant threat. Last year, deforestation for coca production in Colombia hit a record-high rate for the third consecutive year, at 253,000 hectares (625,000 acres). The Putumayo-Caquetá region alone accounted for more than a fifth of the country’s coca crops. Putumayo is also a major oil-producing department, the fifth-largest in the country. These activities, as well as cattle ranching, gold and copper mining, and other extractive activities have contributed to the region’s alarming deforestation rates. From 2001 to 2022, Putumayo lost 323,000 hectares (nearly 800,000 acres) of tree cover, a 14% decline.

Indigenous peoples have long been at the forefront of denouncing extractive activities in the Amazon, but say they sometimes feel helpless. For instance, the Libero Cobre mining project in Mocoa, by Canadian company Libero Copper & Gold, has caused concern: “Can you feed yourself with copper? Live without water?” Chasoy asks, voicing her concerns.

She blames foreign companies for “destroying everything” and conducting “prior” consultations with Indigenous communities after they’ve already set project start dates. “It cannot be like that,” she says, shaking her head. She says companies don’t listen to Indigenous peoples or nature: “Sometimes I lose hope.”

“There is no support from the institutions,” Sigindioy Dincoy says. “This must be a lack of will from the government. We feel very unprotected.”

However, the Colombian government has taken steps to improve rights and conditions for Indigenous peoples. The country’s first left-wing president, Gustavo Petro, issued a decree in October recognizing Indigenous peoples as environmental authorities in their territories.

In a statement to Mongabay, Colombia’s Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development highlighted efforts to strengthen Indigenous governance and participation through programs such as Visión Amazonía, which will fund 42 Indigenous-led projects, valued at about $6.5 million, aimed at conserving the Amazon. Half of the projects announced by Minister Susana Muhamad, who chaired the COP16 biodiversity summit, will be led by Indigenous women.

The ministry emphasized the importance of “recognizing the diversity of worldviews, knowledge, and traditional wisdom of Indigenous peoples,” and stressed the need to “transform our way of relating to the natural world, encouraging a new paradigm based on an ethic of care — something we can learn from the experiences of Indigenous peoples worldwide.”

Chasoy says that even if some laws have been written to protect Indigenous peoples, “if these laws are not known, they won’t be enforced.”

And while she welcomes the participation of Indigenous people like herself at this year’s Cali COP as important, “we’re doing the COP here [in the Colombian Amazon] every day … We never stopped protecting nature.”

Banner image: The Caqueta River is a major tributary to the Amazon River and a lifeline for many Indigenous communities. Credit: UMIYAC.