Indigenous Spiritual Leaders Bring the Medicine to the COP16

By Ocean Malandra

The Indigenous Medicine Conservation Fund (IMC Fund), an organization that unites a network of sacred plant medicine using Indigenous biocultures from around the world, has sent a delegation to this year’s UN Conference of the Parties on the Convention on Biodiversity (COP16) in Cali, Colombia from October 21st to November 1st. The delegation is currently in Cali, networking with various contacts and learning from the daily presentations happening in the Green Zone.

Today, October 24th, the IMC Fund and the Union of Traditional Yaǵe Healers of the Colombian Amazon (UMIYAC) are co-hosting a panel: “The role of spirituality in the processes of governance and territorial defense,” also in the Green Zone of the conference, which is open to the public at large.

“We have a clear message to the world: the destruction must stop.” says Miguel Evanjuanoy Chindoy, member of the Pueblo Inga and Co-Executive Director of the IMC Fund, as well as a spokesperson for UMIYAC. While the Blue Zone is a negotiating space that, this year, will focus mainly on the Kunming-Montreal Framework, where signatory countries and observer parties will reach a next-stage draft of the agreement, Indigenous people are concerned that the framework isn’t doing enough to protect their relationship with the planet and the biodiversity they conserve.

“We do not negotiate over the territories. We do not negotiate over Mother Earth. Because this is life for us. And life is not negotiable,” Evanjuanoy Chindoy explains. “If we really want to safeguard the territories, we must see that the core of the culture is spirituality. We must focus on how spirituality is the driving force behind our relationship with Mother Earth.”

The use of Yaǵe, also known as Ayahuasca, lies at the heart of the spiritual traditions of UMIYAC, which is led by spiritual authorities from five different Indigenous nations in the Colombian and Ecuadorian Amazon. UMIYAC, which is one of the IMC Fund’s key partner organizations, is led by traditional Yaǵe doctors, who preside over ceremonies involving this plant medicine to heal individuals, families, communities, and their territories.

“I am with the grandfathers and grandmothers drinking the medicine, listening and learning from the stories and concerns of people from across our network of communities. My voice and leadership mandate are rooted in the communities,” Evanjuanoy says.

For all five biocultures around the world united by the IMC Fund – which include Iboga using communities in Gabon and Peyote-using communities in the United States and Mexico – sacred medicine traditions play a special role in maintaining territorial integrity and fostering collective governance. Yet many Indigenous biocultures and their spiritual leaders lack adequate support and protection – all five of the nations involved in UMIYAC are classified as “in danger of physical and cultural extermination” by the Colombian Constitutional Court, for example.

Threats to Indigenous territories include global energy interests, land grabbing for cattle ranching and monocultures, drug trafficking, and the medicalization and commercialization of ancestral knowledge and practices, in particular due to the revival of the psychedelic movement and new trends in mental health.

“Apart from the multiple physical threats to Indigenous people and their cultures, we have to look at this new threat from the psychedelic boom,” says Bia'ni Madsa' Juárez López (Anuuk and Binizá), the IMC Fund’s other Co-Executive Director and a social activist and Indigenous community leader from Oaxaca, Mexico.

Juárez says that the commercialization of sacred plant medicines can impact the structure of Indigenous communities in profound ways. Once medicines that are used to address spiritual and knowledge-based issues are thought about from an economic perspective, she says, it “creates fractures in the community, division. And once a community is fractured, it is easier for other threats to enter.

“I see the COP16 as a space where we can take measures, including proposing legislation, aimed at protecting biocultures like mine, which has not yet been impacted, from the risks that are coming,” says Juárez.

In terms of specific negotiations, the IMC Fund and key allies are especially concerned with Target 3 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Framework: the so-called goal 30x30. This sets aside 30% of degraded marine ecosystems and 30% of land ecosystems for restoration and conservation; however, there is a high risk that the 30x30 will become a new mechanism of land grabbing and displacement that works against Indigenous peoples. Inclusion of policies and agreements that favor land tenure and governance of Indigenous communities over their ancestral territories is one way to mitigate this risk.

“Collective titling of lands, which include a portion destined for community natural reserves, managed by the communities and not by the states, is a respectful and effective way to navigate this” says Juárez.

Another point of interest for the IMC Fund is Target 13 of the Global Framework. This target calls for increasing the benefits to Indigenous peoples resulting from the exploitation of “genetic resources, digital sequences, and traditional knowledge.”

“Before we can talk about benefit sharing, we need to talk about the future. We need to talk about the governments, the big organizations, businesses, and making reparations to the Indigenous communities for all the damage that has been caused,” says Evanjuanoy, emphasizing that many Indigenous communities are attending COP16 not to negotiate, but to demand “actions of restorative justice.”

“Our medicines are not just for curing individuals; they are for curing the entire territory. They are collective medicines. So how can we talk about ‘benefit-sharing’ when the territory, when Mother Earth, is under threat?” he asks.

Juárez adds that benefits sharing “need to be talked about in the context of collective property and recognizing that Indigenous Peoples have the right to care and administer their resources.”

“It's important for Indigenous people to be at the table,"; says Mona Polacca (Havasupai, Hopi, Tewa), IMC Fund Conservation Committee Member and founding member of the 13 Indigenous Grandmothers. "We need to say, 'This is who we are, and this is what we hold as our way of being, our way of life, our way of existing, and we choose to keep it that way, and this is what we will allow. These are the things that we hold as our sacred agreements with life, with the Earth, with the water, with the air, to keep ourselves healthy and alive not just for us, but the future generations," continued Polacca.

"That's what this journey is, that's what our presence at COP16 represents, and that's why it's important for our group to be there. These are not just my words, these are the words of the Ancestors that all Indigenous Peoples have been bringing to fora such as the Conference on Biodiversity over the years, and again now. It is a basic call to consciousness for all of humanity.”

The COP16 has been given the theme “Peace with Nature” by the Colombian government, although the concept originated from Indigenous communities during the Peace Dialogues of the 2010s. Leaders of these communities argued that real peace must include reconciliation with Mother Nature. Moving towards this goal, government representatives and environmental organizations are convening in Cali to put into play concrete strategies to promote biodiversity and mitigate climate change worldwide.

For the IMC Fund, Indigenous led, spiritually informed conservation is a game-changing paradigm that deserves recognition and support by world leaders. Not only do Indigenous territories protect 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity, studies show that sacred plant medicines foster a deeper sense of “nature-relatedness,” or connection to nature. The biocultures aligned with the IMC Fund are the millennial guardians of relationships with these medicines, promoting a deep ecological resilience that safeguards important ecosystems.

“The IMC Fund is unique in that it operates in different countries and is led by us, by Indigenous people ourselves, from the bottom up," says Evanjuanoy, explaining that the organization acts as a vehicle for supporting grassroots programs that strengthen Indigenous people's resilience and ability to protect their territories.

The “Green Zone” of this year’s convention, taking place in Cali’s verdant downtown “Boulevard,” where a freeway was replaced by a wide riverside pedestrian walkway several years ago, hosts dozens of organizations from across Colombia and around the world. The panel hosted by the IMC Fund and UMIYAC takes place at 2:45pm on Thursday October 24th and is open to attendance by everyone with free pre-registration.