As a class, we surprisingly had a lot of diversity in the objects we gravitated towards when approaching this blog assignment. As a result, each blog post ended up being completely unique and as a collective the blogs were incredibly informative. Many people clearly spent a long time researching outside of the museum exhibit because the Amazonia moved them to search for more information and stay educated about the social, political, and economic issues facing the aboriginal people of the Amazon.

Each article managed to tie the issues facing the Amazon and its peoples in interesting ways to outside issues, providing us with evidence of how the issues of the Amazon are not isolated, but are spread out throughout the world of Aboriginal peoples as well as in some ways their colonizers. Eun Ho and Beril both point to how the struggles that the Aboriginal peoples of the Amazon face are quite similar to those which local First Nation groups face in British Columbia. Beril draws attention to how “The Amazonian indigenous were forced to leave their lands after the white settlers just like the indigenous people in Vancouver”, While Eun Ho draws connections between the Ashanika and local Canadian groups in that “they were confronted with atrocities. Including problematic practices that still continue today, like mining and agroindustry.” By Identifying these struggles as similar, we can trace these similarities back to the Settler Colonial vs Indigenous power relations which have existed for the past 500 years, and as Eun Ho points out, “continue today”.

We see this relationship presented in Jordan’s blog posting. She draws our attention towards the Kayapo people. This indigenous group rose to the spotlight following plans presented by the Brazilian government to construct a dam in their area of the Amazon, which would effectively have destroyed the land which they relied on to sustain themselves, pushing them off their land. Their call for international support actually won out in the late 1980s and the dam’s construction was dropped. However, another dam (Belo Monte dam) was put forwards and has actually begun to be constructed, and will be finished sometime next year. Jordan’s post shows us that the settler-colonial relationship with indigenous populations is still one of disregard in terms of culture and people in the name of exploiting the environment. Jordan brilliantly ties in how this relationship is playing itself out in Canada and the United States as well, she points to the Dakota Access Pipeline and the corresponding Standing Rock Protests. She argues that “Both the pipeline and the dam destroy some of the last traditionally indigenous people’s land in the world.” Both provide examples of how western ideals of progress through resource extraction and high levels of consumption are often conducted in disregard of the effects they will have on indigenous peoples and their cultures. Neither the Belo Monte dam, nor the Dakota Access Pipeline went unprotested, showing that although both were unsuccessful in fully stopping either construction project, there remains a high level of Aboriginal activism and tight nit communities which will keep on fighting.

Indigenous groups have had to find ways to maintain their culture by incorporating their own cultural practices into that they were forcibly being assimilated into. Codi identifies that “There was a consistent trend, as with nearly every indigenous culture, of controlling powers forcibly seizing and “governing” land and peoples”, and this relationship played out not just over taking native land s and turning them into settler lands, but also with the culture the people practiced. Codi wrote about the Kamëntsà Headdress, which the museum wrote was part of a Catholic ritual. She drew our attention to how this headdress and its accompanying ceremony were possibly a way of maintaining their cultural practices under the watchful gaze of the Catholic missionaries which introduced Catholicism to the Kamëntsà people. First, the ceremony and headdress predate Catholicism in the Kamëntsà community, and secondly the ceremony did not worship a divine being, it was a ritual which instead “thanks Mother Nature for all that she has provided”. This is opposed to traditional Catholicism where one would not see worshipping of nature in such a manner. This is one example of how native peoples incorporated their cultural practices into the culture they were being assimilated into.

Part of the colonizer- colonized relationship is that it is assumed that the colonizer has nothing to learn from the colonized. Ayse however points out how Western standards of beauty have much to learn from those of Shipibo people. They believe that beauty and health are tied together. Ayse shows how this concept also plays out in our own culture “Getting a haircut, doing makeup, getting tattoos and dying our hair are examples of how we change our appearance for our mental health” However, they hold that “Beauty and health are one and the same thing. Both are likely to be obtained and maintained by the morals of a good life” (Amazonia exhibit text). With all the issues regarding beauty standards and self-esteem now in our culture, this concept seems like it could greatly benefit our collective mental health.

            There is much we can learn from the aboriginal peoples of the Amazon. Their struggles against the continued colonizing powers that be is not isolated in jungles of South America but is a reality for indigenous peoples around the world, including those close to home. Reading these blogs and seeing the research that went into the posts and the compassion and empathy they present personally makes me feel hopeful, and I hope this translates into broader education on the issue as well as political action and appropriate social and policy changes.