I love antique stores. Like a hound, I sniff about cobwebbed corners, seeking that special kind of musty, magnetic memory found in human things. I'll run my fingers over the imperfect handiwork of a long-deceased carpenter, and admire a homespun cloth of a woman who, I imagine, enjoyed the generous shade of giant trees now long gone.
I find that there is some memory—some mana—transferred through these objects, these handcrafted hymns of the human imagination.
So I want to share a story that, to me, is hauntingly beautiful. It’s a story about making a canoe in the Amazon rainforest.
I reckon I'll begin with where I enter into the story, or how the story first meshed into this life of mine. It started maybe a decade ago, when I first went to the Ecuadorian Amazon, based off of a tip from an ethnobotanist-associate of mine. Through him, I’d learn of a small community (population <800) called the Siekopai (or Secoya) who are regionally revered for having preserved an unparalleled knowledge of the botanical world—a cosmovision so wildly animated with spirits and cosmic creatures, so fantastical and fabulous, they could only be relegated to the realm of myth (or madness) in the world of my people.
The Siekopai are an indigenous community living in the far reaches of the Peruvian and Ecuadorian Amazon. The community I have grown to know and love live off of the banks of a river known as the Aguarico, in Ecuador. This name is somewhat ironic, as this river (translating from the Spanish ‘rich water’) is, in fact, heavily polluted with petroleum runoff from a mismanaged Chevron operation (then owned and operated by Texaco) back in 1964. This oil spill is often referred to by environmentalists as the “Chernobyl of the Amazon.”
Silent forests: palm oil plantations taking over the Amazon
Biologists freak out about this part of the world. It’s brimming with strange mushrooms, supersonic birdsong, mammals, and plants whose names have never made it to the pale pages of books in faraway Ivy League libraries. Some say Yasuní National Park, located just a ways south of Siekopai territory, boasts more plant and animal species in a single hectare than you’ll find in the entire North American continent. That’s a lot of existential creativity!
Perhaps you’ve heard the quote attributed to the Sufi poet Rumi, “you have to keep breaking your heart until it stays open.” I often think about this when reflecting on my first trips to Siekopai territory: my heart was broken so intensely, so profoundly, by the unfathomable destruction caused by palm oil and petroleum ventures, that it stayed wide open. As Donna Haraway put it, I “stay with the trouble” of this world, this deforestation. I ache, but I recognize the opportunity in it, and the capacity for feeling it sows in me.
I went back and forth a few times, and stopped eventually because, well, I am not a jungle person, nor am I a person of unlimited financial means. But I did develop a fierce passion for preserving what remains of the rainforest, inspired by what few tales I’d heard, and mind-bendingly magical moments I’d experienced with the last remaining elders of the Siekopai people.
Fast forward to last month, where I had the heart-swellingly, sweet, special pleasure and privilege to visit a young Siekopai woman who is rescuing rituals and ancient technologies from the edge of the bitching cliffs of extinction. Really—she is one of the last people of her community actively working to preserve crafts and customs like ceramics and communication with spirit-realms aided by plant medicines.
Her story is deep and wide, but I’ll stop there and carry on with my story about this canoe.
As I’ve come to understand it, within the Siekopai-universe, there are a number of key material allies that are crafted using very special materials. These material allies include things like hammocks, bags, bows and arrows. While they appear to be simple, they are actually odes to their ecology. A ceramic bowl, for example, only appears to be such: when looking deeper, you’ll see the particles of ash from a special tree, the earth of rainforest never before disturbed by humans, the fire made by a woman thinking good thoughts, red earthen paint collected from the riverbanks of the ancestral homelands of a people displaced. Elements arranged into living testimonies of survival, sentiment, sense.
Included in the limited canon of special objects is the canoe. For riverine communities, the practical significance of a canoe cannot be understated. It is the car, train and plane — it is THE way to get around. As things tend to be in forest communities, the material also has a metaphysical presence, and canoes also play a prominent role as the vehicles-of-choice for the spirits.
Paintings by Cesar Piaguaje, son of the great and highly-esteemed elder Cesario Piaguaje. The image on the right depicts a story from the Siekopai yagé cosmovision, of a spirit-boat, operated by spirit-boat-beings.
So, canoes are usually made out of metal of whateverelse these days. And while I have seen traditional, hand-crafted wooden canoes (they seem to last a really long time!) apparently, the art of making them is also on the edge of oblivion. Only a handful of living Siekopai have seen the process, let alone participate in it.
This amazing young woman helped initiate the making of this flaming canoe you see pictured. For the sake of my own memory (and for anyone out there who is reading this!) I’m inclined to list a few steps of this ancient process. My hope that, if nothing else, inspires you to do the slower thing, for no other reason but to preserve what remains of the human soul we feel in the things left behind.
1) Collect wood from the chuncho (Cedrelinga cateniformis) tree. Cut it in half, and begin to shape the wood into a boat-shape.
2) After the halved-tree has been sufficiently contoured, proceed to hollow the trunk with an adze. Many hands make light work!
3) Once the tree starts to resemble a canoe, take hefty sticks and suspend it off of the ground. Retrieve dry fronds from the aguaje (neé in Paicoca) (Mauritia flexuosa) tree, and place these beneath the canoe. Light them on fire! Distribute smoke and heat evenly across the canoe. Repeat this on the other side. This tempers the canoe so it becomes impermeable.
4) While the canoe is still warm, take wooden poles and place them in the canoe to “stretch” the wood, kind of like a shoehorn. This ensures the canoe will maintain its form when it cools off and hardens.
5) When the fires have gone out, take hand-made chisels made from soft wood and go at shaving off the black ash from the canoe.
6) Enjoy the soft, solid contours of a spirit-worthy ship, made by the hands of a village.
(Important! Note that masato, the famous jungle-beverage of choice made from spit-fermented cassava, should be enjoyed throughout this process —you ain’t a part of the community until you’ve tried everyone’s masato!)
I suppose this whole process touches me so deeply because, well, I see it means the world to someone. Perhaps it doesn’t make MY world (I would have gone on just fine, having never seeing this rare, endangered process…) but it means somebody else’s world. Their rare, colorful, fragile, nearly-extinct world— a world where jubilant ancestors still glide on canoes through the velvety, dark, cosmic rivers of night, into the starry heavens, thanks to these vessels crafted by the weathered hands of humans humming with memories of more miraculous, mystical, marvelous times. I did not have the good fortune to be born into such a culture with such a colorful memory, but it means the world to me that they are still out there. I wish I could explain.
See, for example, the hammock—also a dying craft—was once the welcoming sling for laboring women to birth babies, the cocoon for the dizzy yagé voyagers, the lovenest for the newlywed couple, and the final cradle for the deceased. The hammock, made from the chambira (palm) fiber woven by hand by Siekopai men, is an old friend, a marvelous technology, a trusted companion throughout a humans life. I cannot think of any object imbued with as much soul as a Siekopai hammock, featured in this life of my own.
So I conemplate the disappearing arts of ancestral, communal crafting. I think about the thousands of hours of mastery, passed on through generations, remembered in the unassuming gestures of a people who still feel what it is to belong to a place, belong to the Earth. The belonging, I imagine, comes with those simple, repetitive gestures—collecting leaves, whittling wood, digging into the clay, collecting the seeds—that, like beads of dew on a spiders web, glisten so brilliantly, so delicately.
