“The earth is a living body. It has veins and blood. Damaging certain places is like cutting off a limb; it damages the whole body,” they say. From the highest peak of Sierra Nevada, in the region of Santa Marta, in Colombia, to Riohacha, a city facing the Caribbean Sea, there is a connection, invisible to the eyes of the rest of mortals, that the Kogi people have woven through of a golden thread. With this cord, more than 400 kilometers long, these indigenous people have wanted to unite the first snows with salt water; With it, they have literally delimited the territory in which they have lived for centuries. And in their wake, everything around them, what they call “Mother Earth”, is naturally interconnected. If one of the parts is sick, the rest will also need healing.
This is one of the many lessons that can be learned from the documentary Alunaa film directed by Jean-Paul Martinez. The film, shot in 2009 and released in 2012, is the sequel to Alan Ereira’s 1990 BBC1 documentary titled From the heart of the world: The elder brother’s warning (From the Heart of the World: Big Brother’s Warning). This work first brought world attention to this people, isolated abroad until that day, when they decided that the time was right to issue an environmental warning to humanity. “Listening to them, they offer us a wealth of valuable information and guidance on how to restore a connection to nature that is missing in our current society. They believe that they live to take care of the world and maintain its order, but for some years this task has been made impossible for them due to, among other things, deforestation and mining,” explains Mertinez by phone, from his home in London. .
The Kogi say that listening is thinking, and thinking is the basis of reality. We need to listen to survive
Alan Ereira, British historian and filmmaker
Aluna, which means “awareness”, is another new cry for help from the Kogi to the outside world, and now celebrates 10 years since its premiere. The message of this indigenous people remains valid after decades in which human beings have built roads, power plants and ports in their territories, and where global warming has made the glaciers of their mountains disappear. “We have to fundamentally re-evaluate how our relationship with mother Earth works. The Kogi’s connection to nature is completely different from what we can have. For them, it is not a resource to be exploited, it is part of a living system with which human beings have a responsibility to interact in the right way. And at this time, as a society, we are not complying with it”, reflects Mertinez.
The Kogi’s connection to nature is completely different from what we can have. For them, it is not a resource to exploit
Jean-Paul Martinez, director of ‘Aluna’
As early as 1989, the Kogi launched a wake-up call: without their help, without their advice, Mother Earth would sicken and die. They claimed to have the key to how to deal with this destruction, and that warning would reach more than eight million viewers. In addition, his step to the front would lay the foundations for the celebration of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, in 1992, where what is now known as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. “Nowadays there is more awareness, but when we shot the documentary, a lot of people were asking: ‘why would you want to make a film like this?’ Whereas if we were to perform today AlunaI’m sure people would say, ‘Yes, now we know that this message is important and that we need to have a better relationship with nature,’” explains Mertinez.
However, despite their efforts, they have not felt heard throughout this time. “It is not possible to repair the damage that the younger brothers have done to the holy places. Now we see the rivers that dry up, the landslides, droughts, unknown climate… And all this is caused by them”, lament during the feature film the so-called momsthe paramount chiefs of the 20,000 Kogi, the descendants of a pre-Columbian civilization who survived the Spanish conquest by isolating themselves in the mountains.
This people, of whom very few anthropologists know their language, do not use writing or the wheel, and they believe that the knowledge, which they transmit orally, is lost with each successive generation. “They say that listening is thinking, and thinking is the basis of reality. We need to listen to survive”, reflects Alan Ereira. For this reason, so that they would be heard, and on the occasion of COP26 – the climate summit held last November in Glasgow – Mertinez and his production company decided to translate the feature film into 14 languages, from Mandarin to Russian, among others. “The Kogi wanted world leaders to listen to them too. Mainly, in one of its greatest concerns, which is the protection of rivers and water, “says the director of the film, which was initially shown on Netflix, but can now be seen on YouTube for free.
The two films, throughout these more than 30 years, are not the only pillars of support that the Kogi people treasure to spread their voice. After shooting the first one, the British historian and filmmaker Ereira created The Tairona Heritage Trust, a foundation to help indigenous people in the decolonization process of Sierra Nevada. The donations that have come in so far have enabled the natives to purchase and restore some of this land. With his wisdom, and as a Kogi member in Aluna, in the time that they recovered the lands that border the Guachaca river basin, they managed to restore the biodiversity around the flow. “We are able to read the bubbles in the water, Mother Earth speaks to us through them,” she explains.
They consider the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta the “heart of the world”, they assure that unless we change our destructive habits, nature will force us to do so. “The Great Mother taught and taught. The Great Mother is what we needed to live and her teaching has not been forgotten to this day. We all still live for it.” However, we don’t know for how much longer if we turn a deaf ear to her message.
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