TABATINGA, Brazil – Since mid-May, a multidisciplinary fitness team made up of members of the Kokama indigenous organization has been visiting network houses in Brazil’s Upper Solimes River region to monitor the symptoms of coronavirus. Whenever they locate potentially inflamed Kokamas, they warn local shamans. Patients are then prescribed a remedy consisting of rituals that employ ayahuasca, the sacred drink of the forest used for millennia in healing ceremonies.
“At first we depended on the drugs of other non-Indigenous people, but our other people went to the hospital and stayed in a coffin,” says Edney Samias, leader of the other people in Kokama. “Now all other people with coronavirus symptoms are treated at home, only with ayahuasca and other classic medications. Now we save a lot of lives.”
The first showed a case of COVID-19 infection among the indigenous peoples of Brazil who came here from the Kokama community. The infection occurred on 31 March in the district of Santo Antinio do Ia, amazonas province, after a 20-year-old indigenous fitness worker had contact with a doctor from the Government’s Special Secretariat of Indigenous Health (SESAI) who had returned from uncor quarantined leave.
Since then, the virus has spread among the Kokama, leaving 60 dead and more than 1,000 people more inflamed throughout the Amazon at the end of July.
Chief Samias lost 17 direct relatives to the disease, but it was the death of his father, network leader Guilherme Padilha Samias, on May 14 that replaced the way the network treated others with COVID-19 symptoms.
Their confidence in Western medicine has collapsed as a result of the series of deaths and prejudices that the Kokama say they suffered at Tabatinga Military Hospital, and added forgetting that they were treated.
“They were going to bury my father like a brown man, ” said Samias. “I fought from 7am to noon so I wouldn’t settle for it. They said it wasn’t Aboriginal because I didn’t have an RANI [Aboriginal birth certificate]. They called us fake natives. For the Kokama, being buried as a non-Aboriginal user is thought of as a disrespect for ancestry, with the confidence that the soul will be lost because it is not considered aboriginal. “If you’re a Kokama, you’re a Kokama, dead or alive,” says Samias.
Since then, the Kokama have met an internal resolution of not looking for more public fitness equipment in instances of COVID-19 symptom networks. Instead, they turned to classical medicine and indigenous wisdom to treat the disease, replacing doctors with shamans and Western medicine with ayahuasca, ginger, garlic and lemon. “White medicine has killed our people,” Samias says.
He says the remedy with ayahuasca to combat COVID-19 has already been presented to more than 800 members of the indigenous network of Tabatinga, a municipality on Brazil’s border with Peru and Colombia, and shelters about 5,500 kokama. As they live in the city and are considered non-villagers, they are not included in SESAI statistics.
Of the 60 deaths among the Kokama, 56 occurred between mid-April and mid-June. The other four deaths were reported in the more than six weeks following. Reducing the mortality rate, even with the huge number of patients treated at home, is the result they say they would expect when they moved away from hospitals in favor of their classic medicines combined with hygiene practices and social estrangement.
For Glades Kokama, president of the Kukami-Kukamiria Federation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil, Peru and Colombia, Western medicine has not worked for them “because resources and medicines come too late” and discourages the community. “In the past, other people survived without laboratory medicine. We will respond for what is ours and maintain our millennial culture. I hope everyone in classical medicine will respect us because, in a different way for us, we don’t know what it will be,” she says.
To date, there are no clinical studies demonstrating the effectiveness of ayahuasca in the fight against coronavirus. However, there is evidence of prospective healing of the drink as an auxiliary remedy for mental disorders and diseases such as cancer.
Ayahuasca is made from a mixture of two plants: jagube vine (Banisteriopsis caapi) and chacrona (Psychotria viridis). Sacred drink rituals are performed 3 times a week at night and can last until dawn. They run in a compromised area and are guided through an organization of shamans. The eldest of them is now 105 years old and, according to the network members interviewed for this article, showed no symptoms of the disease. In express cases, the rite would possibly be performed at the patient’s home.
‘In rituals, the poorly healthy user’s body connects to the walled tree [Brosimum acutifolium] through singing,” explains Edney Samias, referring to an Amazonian tree known for its multiple medicinal properties.” But when there are several patients at once, we gather up to 8 more people who carry ayahuasca to their souls.”
The ritual of ayahuasca is through Kokama as the ultimate hard remedy, and it is a moment of experience, discovery, visions of the long term and the past, and learning traditions. It is a secret ceremony, with all the secrets transmitted directly from teacher to disciple.
“My circle of relatives took ayahuasca, however, before the disease occurred, I left it for 3 months. I was afraid and I thought it was more productive to succeed with white men because they have respirators, medicine, doctors and they can cure. And I forgot so that I myself can heal my circle of relatives,” says Samias. “I’m sorry. I deserve not to have believed in the white man’s medication, nor do I deserve to have taken anyone to the hospital.”
According to Glades, medicine and home care helped her other people survive. “Pollution spreads more smoothly in the hospital. With our own medication, we stayed home. Ancient medicine is the essence of it for us. We can’t wait for a doctor,” he says.
He adds that the time has come to inspire netpaintings members to begin developing “healing gardens” with medicinal plants like those used to make ayahuasca. “We’re going to teach because there’s a smart way to grow and paint ayahuasca plants, it’s not random,” Glades says. “Now is the time for [traditions].”
Cover image: Residents of the village of Kokama de Boar on Cima have erected barriers to save foreigners who would possibly become inflamed with the coronavirus. Image courtesy of the inhabitants of Cima Boar.
This story was first reported through Mongabay’s Brazilian team and was published here on our Brazilian website online on July 30, 2020.
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