VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbUo9Ah7d94

According to the IUCN Inter-Commission Task Force on Indigenous Peoples, "Cultures are dying out faster than the peoples associated with them … It has been estimated that half the world’s languages—the storehouses of peoples’ intellectual heritages and the framework for their unique understandings of life—will disappear within a century." The Task Force identified uncontrolled frontier expansion, military warfare, extension of government and corporate control, and unjust land policies as the main threats to the erosion of indigenous cultures, factors that run in tandem with the destruction of the global environment.

Indigenous peoples manage or have tenure rights over a quarter of the world’s land surface, intersecting with approximately 40% of all terrestrial protected areas and ecologically intact landscapes (Garnett, et al., 2018), and their territories hold at least one quarter of all tropical forest carbon (RRI, 2016), making them crucial actors in international and national policy agendas to combat climate change and its impacts. In this light, biocultural conservation approaches and associated methods to promote traditional knowledge should be increasingly considered as tools to confront the rapid global loss of both biological and cultural diversity (Gavin, et al., 2016).

Currently, there is still little attention placed on applications, approaches, and technologies that have been developed to foster traditional knowledge, which is often handed down over generations through oral history and stories. These tools bond cultural revitalization to nature conservation, helping to maintain intergenerational memory and connecting conservation discourses to local contexts (Fernández-Llamazares & Cabeza, 2018).

The Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) has been working hand-in-hand with indigenous peoples to protect tropical forests and watersheds and strengthen traditional culture for almost 25 years, and will showcase several successful efforts with partner organizations and communities to promote indigenous knowledge and its potential for environmental conservation in tropical South America.

PRESERVING INDIGENOUS INTANGIBLE CULTURAL HERITAGE THROUGH THE PARTICIPATORY MAPPING AND RECORDING OF ORAL HISTORY STORYTELLING

The Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) has recognized that for indigenous peoples, storytelling is one of the primary vehicles for the transmission of traditional knowledge, and that it motivates them to conserve their own environments. Consequently, ACT is taking action to support indigenous peoples across South America in mapping and documenting oral histories about their ancestral lands. In this process, we have developed a participatory methodology to empower communities to take ownership over recording their own storytelling traditions entirely. We are also collaborating with a team of volunteer developers to build an open-source application called Terrastories to map these oral histories about places of significant cultural value and rich biodiversity. Community members can add places and stories through a user-friendly interface, and make decisions about setting certain stories as private or restricted. Moreover, the application works entirely offline. The goal of this initiative is to ensure that future generations can learn about their history and territory as their community always has: through the words of their elders.