Gaia Amazonas

In Gaia Amazonas we consider that there are certain pre-requisites so that indigenous people can recover their autonomy and social capacity to decide on their own development.

These are: 

We work with indigenous communities and authorities only after a written request from, and prior consultation with, the traditional authorities.  Advice, accompaniment and support are framed within an agreement in which Gaia Amazonas and the indigenous organizations establish the aims, as well as the responsibilities and inputs from each side. Until now, we have entered into nearly seventy agreements with different communities and AATIs.

Our advice is framed within a dynamic relationship of mutual trust, the basis for identifying problems that affect the communities and constructing proposals to resolve them. In this way the indigenous communities and organizations define, develop and implement their own local and regional initiatives, projects and programs, with our legal, technical and financial support.

Our methodological principles do not pretend to bring answers or theories for indigenous people on how to build their own autonomy. On the contrary, we seek to generate processes and programs from the communities, locally based, with the support of our field advisors. The work focuses on:

Our methodology stimulates observation, analysis, critique, teamwork and formation, key principles for all processes. Thanks to this, it has been a successful methodology that involves the entire community in a scenario where, from a starting point of understanding daily tasks, indigenous people develop their own learning, strengthen the transfer of traditional knowledge, and develop their capacity for managing knowledge and techniques of the western world.

In this way we have contributed to the recuperation of spaces – the maloca, the chagra, the river and the forest – and forms – the word of council, oral tradition, imitation, games, and rituals – for the transmission of knowledge, respecting the traditional roles of gender and age. It is important to highlight that our mythology enables Amazon indigenous people to assimilate western knowledge to strengthen their own and to articulate with the rest of national society.

Lines of Action

In Gaia Amazonas we have worked for twenty years on issues such as indigenous governance, territorial management, intercultural education, intercultural health, transboundary coordination, and institutional strengthening. Our premise is that: conservation of the Amazon forest is possible, through putting into practice indigenous rights. With this objective we have defined some specific lines of action.