Amazonia surveys an ancient region at risk VISUAL ARTS

AMAZONIA: THE RIGHTS OF NATURE

At the Museum of Anthropology at UBC until January 28, 2018

Amazonia: The Rights of Nature, 2

on at the Museum of Anthropology, examines the impacts of resource exploitation and industrial agriculture on indigenous peoples and the lands they have occupied for thousands of years. In its cultural and environmental themes, the show echoes In the Footsteps of the Crocodile Man, on view last year in the same temporary exhibition gallery at MOA. Crocodile Man spotlighted large and often spectacular works of contemporary art from the Sepik River region of Papua New Guinea. This new show, however, pins its ideas to smaller and more modest objects of ritual, quotidian, and commercial use from a range of cultures in the Amazonian rainforest.

These include basketry sieves and containers, woven fibre bags, feathered headdresses, beaded aprons, spears, quivers, masks, ceramic vessels, latex figurines, and tubular strainers used for processing manioc root. Over 300 indigenous groups live in the Amazon River basin, a vast area that falls under the jurisdiction of nine different countries. During a media preview of the show, its curator, Nuno Porto, noted that human beings have occupied this region for 11,000 years.

When the Portuguese first arrived, 500 years ago, he said, the indigenous population was an estimated nine million. One of the points made by the show is that the Amazon rainforest has a long history of environmentally harmonious human habitation. “The forest became what it is not despite but rather because of the many people who live there,” Porto said. The vast scale of deforestation there—a process that threatens not only indigenous cultures and biodiversity but also the well-being of the entire planet—is a product of the last hundred years. This is also the period represented by the works on view, drawn from MOA’S collections.

Some of these objects arrived at the museum through donations, with very little information concerning where they were made, for what use, or by whom. One of the pleasures of the show is following recent lines of research to establish origins and meanings. The first object we see as we enter the gallery is an old Ashaninka txoshiki or bandolier, recognized as such through work by a forensic ornithologist at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum. Attached to the bandolier are the preserved bodies and body parts of seven different tropical birds, including a round-tailed manakin and a blue-necked tanager. Through identifying all the species represented, it was possible to locate the area in which the bandolier was made and to pinpoint the cultural group that lived there. In the Ashaninka world-view, we’re told, birds are able to move between visible and invisible realms and dimensions.

A series of Makuna or Yaba Masã masks, made of wood, resin, and bark cloth and displayed behind a screen of dark fabric, suggests the belief that hunting is a form of exchange between humans and their animal relations. The masks are danced to ensure that this exchange continues and that the animals regenerate. Polychrome ceramic bowls made by the Shipibo people of Peru strongly resemble the pre-columbian ceramics of their ancestors. The colonial history of the Shipibo is, like that of so many other Amazonian groups, horrific, and includes enslavement by rubber entrepreneurs. Their situation today is also dire, with Spanish-speaking encroachers destroying their subsistence base.

As we observed while reviewing In the Footsteps of the Crocodile Man, the negative impact of resource exploitation on indigenous peoples, cultures, and livelihoods worldwide is hardly a new story. What is new in Amazonia, however, is a hopefulness expressed through the idea of “the rights of nature”, which recognizes that ecosystems have the right to exist and regenerate. This is an idea that has found its way into the constitutions of a couple of Amazonian nations, Ecuador being the leading example. Closely connected to the rights of nature is the South American philosophy of buen vivir or “good living”, which espouses consuming less and living in harmony with nature and with other human beings. It sounds impossibly idealistic, but it, too, has been incorporated into the Ecuadorian constitution, along with the recognition of the cultural sovereignty of many indigenous groups and the country’s self-description as a “plurinational” state.

Amazonia isn’t an exhibition of visual art. Rather, it is an exhibition of artifacts and advocacy, with a range of visually and culturally intriguing objects, thoughtfully displayed; evocative video and audio installations; an abundance (perhaps an overabundance) of explanatory text and pertinent statistics—and an important message of the inextricable relationship of the social and the environmental.

> ROBIN LAURENCE