Blog Post 4 — The Yarinacocha Declaration

Declarationthemedicinetribe.nl/blog · July 2026

In January 2019, representatives of the Shipibo-Conibo, Kichwa and other Indigenous nations gathered in Pucallpa, Peru, and wrote something down.

They called it the Yarinacocha Declaration.

It is not a political manifesto. It is not a fundraising campaign. It is a statement from people who have protected one of the most biodiverse places on Earth for countless generations, while watching it disappear around them.

One sentence has stayed with me since the first time I read it.

"For us, the forest is not a natural resource. It is life."

To many governments and corporations, the Amazon is

measured in hectares, timber, minerals, oil.

To the Shipibo, the forest is family.

It is the pharmacy that provides medicine. The school where children learn. The church where prayers are sung through the icaros. The library that holds thousands of years of knowledge no university has ever indexed. And the home of countless visible

and invisible beings with whom they have lived in relationship since

long before national borders existed.

When the forest disappears, a culture disappears with it.

The declaration describes what is actually happening on the ground.

Rivers poisoned by mining. Ancient forest cleared for palm oil and industrial agriculture. Illegal logging. Land grabbing. Communities waiting decades for legal recognition of ancestral territories while companies receive permits in months. Leaders who defend the forest becoming targets, threatened, criminalised, killed.

These are not isolated incidents. They are the pattern.

What strikes me is what the Shipibo are not asking for. Not ownership in the Western sense. Recognition of what has always been true. Their relationship with the forest is not based on extraction. It is based on reciprocity. They do not own nature. They are part of it.

Their struggle asks an uncomfortable question: what happens when the people who know how to care for a forest can no longer remain on their land?

Our connection with the Shipibo has never been about borrowing ceremonies or romanticising what we don't fully understand. It is about relationship. Friendship. Listening. Asking how we can be useful in ways they themselves have named as meaningful.

Over the past years we have worked alongside families in Paoyhan, and through Stichting Mother's House helped fund practical things: clean water, community infrastructure, and new homes for families being pushed off their land by flooding that gets worse every year.

Every house built means one more family rooted. One more elder passing knowledge to the next generation. One more child growing up surrounded by the language, the songs, the traditions that might otherwise be gone.

There are many ways to appreciate Indigenous wisdom. There are fewer ways to actively help preserve the communities that carry it.

You can support Stichting Mother's House directly, every donation goes toward community-led projects, including moving the entire village of Pahoyan to higher, safer ground before the next flood season.

Or you can go deeper. The Shipibo Tradition is a nine-unit course on the people, the cosmology, the language, the icaros and the healing practices they carry. And every enrollment contributes directly to building new homes for Shipibo families, so that the culture you are learning about continues to exist where it belongs.

Preserving a culture does not begin with admiration.

It begins with relationship.

And relationship always asks something of us.

Blessings.

Tamara