Nina Gualinga, co-founder of Passu Creativa, celebrates the resilience and richness of Indigenous cultures through photography and storytelling. With words by Nina Gualinga. Moments captured by Nina Gualinga, Elizabeth Swanson, Bolo Miranda, Sani Montahuano, Enoc Merino, Tsunki Shacay, River Claure, and Tawna Collective.
Nina was a juror for our global open call, The Tree of Life: A Love Letter to Nature, and this week, at the ninth edition of the PhotoVogue Festival, she will be moderating the panel Indigenous Voices: Honoring Cultural Heritage.
Shunku
The Amazon rainforest is more than a place;
she is a living being,
full of memory,
full of stories
Her soil is rich with the wisdom of countless generations.
In her lives the resilience of saplings that grow
where the earth has been scarred
She is the heart of this Earth
beating with the same conviction
that lives in every mother,
standing firm as the roots of the ceiba tree
fighting for her people, for her territory
for all children of this Earth
for she carries the dreams of those who have come before,
and the hopes of those who are yet to be born
Yaku Warmi
Deep in the rivers of the Amazon
exist a worlds unseen,
worlds within worlds,
and there live creatures
keepers of secrets
balancing the web of life
Its currents flow with the strength of those
who stand to protect them,
with the voices of women who refuse to be silenced
Because women carry the rivers in their bodies,
in the swell of their wombs
Like the rivers, we are givers of life,
guiding the waters of birth,
nourishing the next generation
So when the rivers weep,
women weep too,
our tears fall for lands defiled,
for all the spirits displaced,
for the future stolen from our children
Ñuka
They wrote about my people in their books
With words too flat, too small to hold our spirits
Their maps and borders fragmented our forests
Their stories turned my ancestors in to stereotypes
They called us indians, as if that identifies us
as if it speaks the languages they silenced,
as if it gathers the roots of all our worlds
into a single word
We are more than their museums, their books, their photographs
We are not the noble savages, nor the indians or the voiceless victims
We are not a romantic dream
We are not a vanishing past
not a cautionary tale
We are the present, the future,
alive in ways that maps and museums cannot contain
I will no longer be bound by words that were never mine
I am the river that carves the stones
I am the orchestra of animals when the night falls
I am the keeper of the languages they tried to erase
I am alive
Now I wonder if you will listen, with more than your ears
When we will tell our own stories, on our own terms
Because to represent ourselves
is to untangle imposed narratives
It is to say, “We are here,”
without asking for permission
To represent ourselves is to resist
To exist on our own terms
Ñawpakma Rukuyanakuna
I did not ask for this burden,
This weight carried by my tired shoulders
I did not choose to be the one
to hold the future of the forest in my hands,
to cradle the rivers in my heart,
to defend a world that others seek to tear apart
But I am here
Because I am a future ancestor,
a child born into the tangled web of two worlds,
a world that was imposed upon me,
a world that tries to erase me,
or at best, to define me,
and carve me into shapes that do not fit
to tell me that my people’s culture is something of the past
I am a a bridge between the dreams of my elders
and the dreams of those not yet born
a guardian of what remains.
I see all the steel and concrete
I see the machines tearing open the earth’s flesh
for gold and for oil
I know that the damage done to the earth
is a wound to humanity’s hearts
I know that to protect this land, is to protect all life,
Because the breath of the Amazon rainforest
is the breath of the world
