Helena Gualinga: “The Living Forest” and How Intercultural Conversations Lead to Climate Justice
“In our way of seeing life everything is living– not only alive, as in the ‘natural world’, but as in all beings have spirits and are equal to us.”
Helena Gualinga, Sarayaku spokesperson
Helena Gualinga in action as a spokesperson for environmental and Indigenous rights. Image source: CNN.
When Roots & Routes’ Youth Visionary Collective (YVC) welcomed Helena Gualinga as one of our pluriversity teachers, Helena shared how her mixed Ecuadorian-Finnish cultural upbringing has impacted her work as a spokesperson for environmental and Indigenous rights. Helena spent a large part of her childhood in Sarayaku, a Kichwa Original People’s community located along the Bobonazo River in the Ecuadorian Amazon region and whose place name means “village of the midday sun”. As Helena grew up she also participated in many international Indigenous youth and Climate Justice gatherings and communities. These intercultural experiences have given Helena an opportunity to bridge Indigenous and European worldviews.
When Helena came to speak with us at the YVC she taught us about her intercultural experiences, and the traditional Sarayaku teachings based on their cultural ways of being, knowing, and doing in relation to taking care of the living world around them. This approach is called Kawsak Sacha or “Living Forest” and is transforming the global conservation and climate change movements in vital ways. Here we share with you the teachings that we learned from Helena.
Kawsak Sacha “Living Forest”
Since her late teens, Helena has been one of the voices from Sarayaku in global conservation forums advocating the importance of Indigenous-led and place-based conservation practices. Sarayaku’s approach, based on what some refer to as “Traditional Ecological Knowledge” (or TEK), is called Kawsak Sacha, meaning “The Living Forest.”
Sarayaku, in fact, forms part of a global community-based movement called the ICCA Consortium. ICCAs (TICCAs in Spanish; APACs in French) is an abbreviation for “territories and areas governed, managed, and conserved by custodian Indigenous peoples and local communities.” These territories and areas are referred to as “territories of life.” ICCA communities form a global network and movement that recognizes Indigenous peoples as land defenders of the most diverse places on Earth. As a collective, they reinforce Indigenous Peoples' and local communities' ancestral practices of conservation. As ICCA states in their 2021 Report on their website: “They [the territories of life/ICCAs] are as diverse as the peoples and communities who shape and sustain them through their unique cultures, governance systems and practices.”
Although some may assume that climate change can best be handled by implementing international and national legislation, Helena illustrated to us why taking into account diverse cultural and place-based approaches—and collaborating between them—is vital to revamping western approaches to become more effective. She talked to us about the importance of not only spreading awareness about the Amazon, but also creating spaces where Amazonian peoples themselves offer solutions and change people’s mindsets. To save the Amazon we need the centuries-long rainforest protectors at the table! Taking these kinds of steps are examples of what that big word “decolonizing”climate change is all about—a necessary stepping stone on the path towards climate justice. Now in Helena’s own words:
“[I tell] the truth about the Amazon, what I’ve seen and what I’ve lived… to me the idea of decolonizing is really important… it’s not only about awareness about the Amazon, but also about changing the mindset of people and their perception on a lot of things…”
What are the implications of Gualinga’s statement? She showed us that a sustainable future is a collaborative future. We need more equal representation of many peoples—pluricultural representation—to come up with ways forward that make sense to place-based peoples. We also need to transform the kind of thinking that got us into this planetary-level predicament in the first place.
We need more communication between place-based global communities, where everyone feels welcome to participate. When these conversations are in place, doorways to unthinkable pathways and brighter and more inclusive futures swing open. These lessons became abundantly clear as we, youth from around the world, listened carefully to Helena as she unpacked Kawsak Sacha for us.
Kawsak Sacha is a proposal that originated with the Sarayaku view of everything around them as living—the rocks, the trees, the rivers—and having spirits and beings which are equal to us humans. This has turned into a legal proposal in Ecuador where they seek to get all Indigenous territories recognized as Kawsak Sacha territories in order to protect their lands. It is similar to Rights of Nature as a way of recognizing Nature as equal to us humans and as having rights of its own. Helena stated the following:
“This [Kawsay Sacha] gives us another tool to protect our communities, and it’s really, really important, but it’s also this symbolic example of how we need to shift our mindsets and our view on Nature.”
The people of Sarayaku see themselves as “already developed” because of the following: 1) They have been protectors of the land and peoples since time immemorial and doing fine. And, 2) they live a life of harmony that includes living together with all the inhabitants of the forest and rivers in their traditional territory (To read more see “The Double Binds of Indigenous Resistance” by Ludlow et al. 2016).
The Living Forest principles, Helena explained, denote that natural entities have souls whose ways of knowing are translated by yachak, village elders. The yachaks then pass on their interpretations to their communities.
Sarayaku’s Kawsak Sacha goes beyond either-or approaches to conservation versus development that pit them against one another. As opposed to pinpointing one as the good guy and one as the bad guy, Kawsak Sacha emphasizes that both are based in a western “scarcity model” and leads to models founded in “risk” and competition for dwindling resources.
While increasing deforestation most definitely poses a risk of greater scarcity in the Amazon, Kawsak Sacha posits that there is still abundance, and that an approach based in abundance is more appropriate than one based in scarcity and risk. The approach re-envisions holistic ways to care for people who care for the living forest, taking future and past generations into account, including all living beings around them. This is explained by the people of Sarayaku people in the quote here:
Kichwa Original Peoples of Sarayaku explaining how the concept of Kawsak Sacha permeates the past, the present, and the living world around them.
When all those who inhabit a place are viewed as soul-bearing and just as important as you, the next step is recognizing them as subjects of rights. While environmental laws establish limitations for allowing pollution, Rights of Nature (RoN) is a distinct approach. Granting natural entities rights opens up possibilities beyond solutions based in unpredictable market-based conservation management.
The concept of Rights of Nature is not new, as Indigenous peoples have been referring to them since time immemorial. As the title of an important book edited by Dr. Melissa Nelson suggests, it’s part of diverse “original instructions'' from around the world—what Indigenous communities share in common and can teach. While it’s beyond the scope of this blog to go into the history of how such thinking became integrated in Western thought, Ecuador played a big part in breaking through and implementing RoN as a national-level law when Ecuadorian citizens approved the 2008 constitution that included this legislation. Many states in the U.S. and around the world are following in their footsteps.
Engaging in intercultural conversations is a key element of Helena’s work as a spokesperson for Sarayaku as a Living Forest—and thus a community of entities whose rights are to be respected. But what brought this young woman to such a place of power? Watch this teaser to find out!
The film lays out the trajectories between Helena’s upbringing in the Amazon and her experience living in Finland. In Finland she saw that environmental protectionism is universal and should be practiced by all individuals and governments. And in Ecuador she experienced that the wealthy and powerful often disrespect and devalue Indigenous lives, cultures, and knowledges. Helena has not only learned about these differences, but she has lived them. She experienced both “the west” and “the rest”, and together, they shaped her. Helena says this succinctly:
Helena explained to the YVC how important interculturality is to widen your perspective on the world.
Helena also explained, “Understanding the complexity of both worlds and the issues that we face …I think it has shaped everything that I believe in today.” She also shared that having the privilege of the type of education Finland has to offer gave her freedom to explore the thoughts and images she had gotten from her Sarayaku community, and in this way both cultures served her so she can better serve the global climate justice movement. In the Instagram reel below, Helena expands on these thoughts:
A memorable moment in our intercultural conversations was when Helena emphasized that it is not always a choice to enter the world of activism. To her it seems like a luxury that some people choose to be an activist.
The year that Helena was born Ecuadorian state petroleum interests started encroaching on the Sarayaku territory. Sarayaku was forced to stand up for their living forest. Bearing witness to all this as a child showed her the importance of advocating for her Sarayaku, not as a choice, but instead as part of who she is and what all Sarayaku people, who form part of the Living Forest are instructed to do: protect and defend their ancestral territory.
Whilst activism and advocating for human and Nature’s rights is an important avenue to impactful change,
it is not always a choice for many Indigenous peoples who experience encroachment on their rights first hand.
Speaking Kichwa, Finnish, and English helped Helena to spread the struggles of Sarayaku far and wide. Like Greta Thunberg, she has become a worldwide youth leader inspiring people all over the world to take a stand for the planet. Yet, Helena also raises awareness about how climate justice and respect for Indigenous peoples are inseparable. Social media has become an important megaphone for her work that communicates this:
“It’s not just about the Sarayaku territory, it’s about all the Amazon, and all Indigenous peoples. And I do feel a sense of responsibility there as someone who lived through what Sarayaku lived, and who has experienced those things first hand and seen it first hand, but also as someone who can raise awareness and spread that message”
Check out her instagram account @helenagualinga.
Kawsak Sacha embodies a holistic vision of how to care for the people and the planet, how to more respectfully relate to and learn from our rivers and forests, and how to include past and future generations in our decision-making.
Expanding and transforming western social and environmental values as they are put into conversation with other cultural approaches is necessary. We can only protect the places where we live, including all inhabitants, if we learn to recognize our cultural blindspots and rise above the impediments to coming together for climate justice. As Helena has shown, bridging cultural communication gaps can prove to be highly effective at creating meaningful solutions to local, regional, national, and international causes. Nevertheless, as she highlights in the video below, it is also important to recognize and celebrate pluriculturality—the gifts within and differences between cultures:
We at R&R’s Youth Visionary Collective are grateful to have learned a great deal from Helena about “The Living Forest” and how intercultural conversations lead to climate justice. Her contributions to protecting the Living World around us in Sarayaku, throughout the Amazon, and around the Earth inspire us to collaborate across cultures in order to defend Mother Earth.
Following this enlightening discussion with Helena, the YVC would like to leave you with questions: What does the Living World mean to you? And how do you think that we can best protect the Living World?
*Roots & Routes Youth Visionary Collective Blog Team: Arianna Shafai, Zachary Bolash, Eleonora Moen, and Juli Hazlewood, PhD.