Cabildo Mayor Indígena de Chigorodó

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Project:

Building the Ancestral Home for Teaching Cultural and Spiritual Knowledge of the Embera of Chigorodó

Country: Colombia
Communities: Embera, Eyabida and Chamí
Grant awarded: 2018, 2019
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We support Building the Ancestral Home for Teaching Cultural and Spiritual Knowledge, in order to promote the formation and transmission of ancestral knowledge and continue deepening the pedagogy of the Emberas’ cultural and spiritual practices. For the construction of the house or tambo, they are conducting investigations with their own Embera grandfathers and grandmothers on the meanings of rituals, cosmologies, and origin stories of the Emberas homes. The house represents the order of the universe with its three worlds: the world below where beings called Eberemadrua live, who acquire their strength through the smell of food; the world in the middle that humans, plants, and animals inhabit; and the world above that the star beings inhabit. Each world has Spiritual guardians that help traditional doctors in their work.

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Previously, we supported the Guardians of Wisdom project, which aimed to recover and dignify the wisdom that the Embera women preserve with their ancestral songs. A recovery and compilation of the ancestral songs or Truambis was carried out in the 5 indigenous communities of Chigorodó, generating intergenerational training spaces among women, children and young people to make visible the importance of Embera women in their culture. The youth group and the seeds of communication of the Indigenous Cabildo de Chigorodó were directly involved in the execution of the project, providing workshops on research of their own culture, cultural empowerment and audiovisual techniques so that they can obtain suitable tools that can be used in the field. With the material collected, a series of 4 audiovisual chapters was made about the ancestral songs, a fiction or story, a sonoteca (a sound library) and several infographics about the life of the women singers. This material was shared and delivered in the schools of the communities, sensitizing the teachers about the wisdom of the women and the importance of teaching the ancestral songs in Indigenous schools and community spaces.