Eagles and Condors - Heartland
Living a different dream in the Amazonian rainforest
November / December 2006
Nina Utne Utne Reader
According to a legend told in parts of South America, we are
living at the end of the 10th pachacuti. Whenever a
pachacuti-a 500-year cycle-shifts, the earth rumbles to
remind people of their rightful place. It was predicted that the
eagle people (the people of the mind from the north) would become
highly evolved intellectually but spiritually bereft. The condor
people (the people of the heart in the south) would be materially
deprived but spiritually advanced. According to prophecy, at the
end of the 10th pachacuti, the eagles and the condors will
come together to bring the world back into balance.
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The Achuar tribe lives in Ecuador's Amazonian rainforest, just
north of the Peruvian border. Since the area has seen very few
outsiders, save for a handful of missionaries, the tribe's
traditions are intact, its culture is vibrant, and its members
continue to sustain themselves in one of the few untouched
stretches of rainforest left in the world.
Achuar elders had a series of visions in the early 1990s,
however, that convinced them that their tribe's way of life was
about to be endangered by outside forces. This threat would arrive
in the form of oil drilling, which has devastated adjacent
indigenous peoples.
The Achuar took the radical measure of issuing a call,
communicated through dreams and visions, to potential partners in
the modern world. They hoped to reach people who understood the
value of an unmolested rainforest and who could help the Achuar
develop a sustainable economic infrastructure that would both
protect it and be true to the tribe's traditional structure and
mores.
The Pachamama (an indigenous word meaning the earth, the sky,
the universe, and all time) Alliance formed 10 years ago in answer
to the call. Funded by members and private donors, the group aims
to preserve the world's rainforests by empowering their natural
custodians, contributing to the creation of a new global vision of
equity and sustainability for all.
In late August, I traveled to the Achuar tribal territory with
the alliance. As we were told at the outset, this was not a
vacation, though there were many sybaritic moments; it was not
adventure travel, though we certainly stretched. It was a
pilgrimage.