In the forest’s fecund gloom, José Muchavisoy leads the guardians of the territory as they scan the undergrowth for trails left by their target. Strangely splayed paw prints, dung among the leaf litter and mud wallows where the creature cooled off during the hottest hours of the day are hints it was recently here. If they’re lucky, they might hear its shrill whistle and catch a glimpse of the animal as it bolts through the trees, looking like a vestige of the ice age.
“We know how to look for them and where to find them, because the elders taught us,” says Muchavisoy. “The forest is our university.” As members of the Indigenous Inga community of Musuiuiai, the guardians are tracking the lowland tapir (Tapirus terrestris), a sacred species in their culture.
According to the community, the psychoactive drink ayahuasca gave them divinations in the 1990s to move to this village, a high-priority region for tapir conservation, and today their spiritual beliefs are pushing them to protect the species. The tapir is now the focus of an Indigenous-led conservation project in the forests of Colombia’s Putumayo department, using camera traps to assess its presence and understand the environmental factors affecting it.
Prehistoric-looking, with its sagging snout and mohawk-like mane, the lowland tapir is one of South America’s largest native mammals. It roams tropical lowland rainforests and savannas, from north-central Colombia to northern Argentina. A heavyweight herbivore, the tapir can feed on the leaves, shoots and fruit of more than 460 plant species.
“Tapirs have been called the gardener of the forest because of their ability to disperse seeds across wide areas, which helps with forest regeneration and tree diversity,” says Frederico Mosquera-Guerra, a researcher at the National University of Colombia. “They are the last large-bodied seed disperser of South America and a keystone species.”
However, the lowland tapir’s tenure as forest gardener is at risk. Listed as vulnerable to extinction on the IUCN Red List, its habitat in Colombia has steadily shrunk due to agriculture, oil palm plantations, mining, and oil extraction. Still, it’s found from the Andes in the country’s west to the Orinoco River in the east; from the Amazon in the south to the Caribbean coast in the north. Similar pressures on its populations have also seen its numbers dwindle in other countries across its range, especially in Brazil’s Atlantic rainforest.
Still, one of the biggest threats is overhunting. “Smaller-bodied mammals like pacas and peccaries can recover quickly, but tapirs can’t. They have longer reproductive cycles, so any hunting will affect their populations,” Mosquera-Guerra says.
The community of Musuiuiai made hunting the animals a taboo to allow it some respite. This, along with their other efforts, conservationists say, have marked them out as natural allies in tapir conservation.
The Sacha wagra and the spirits
In the early 1990s, the Inga community of San Miguel de La Castellana was embroiled in the Colombian civil war, caught in the crossfire between paramilitary groups and FARC guerrillas. Seeking answers, the elders turned to ayahuasca (or ambiwaska as it’s known in the Inga language), a brew made from the yagé vine (Banisteriopsis caapi) and the leaves of the chacruna (Psychotria viridis). Traditionally, it’s used by many cultures in the region to treat illnesses, divine the future, and find solutions to problems.
“My grandfather, had a vision that we had to leave and where to go,” Muchavisoy says. “We crossed the mountains for 12 days. When we found the place, we called it Musuiuiai, which means ‘new thought’ in our language. Over time, more people came, and the village grew.”
They’d arrived in a part of the Amazon-Andean piedmont, a bioregion where the Amazon Rainforest blends into the foothills of the Andes, creating a biodiversity hotspot. It’s also a rich crossroads of Indigenous Andean and Amazonian cultures. Here, 54 Inga people founded Musuiuiai as a sanctuary for Inga traditions during a time of social upheaval.
The 18,000 hectares (44,000 acres) of lowland rainforests and cloud forests surrounding the settlement are home to an array of animal species, including the spectacled bear (Tremarctos ornatus) and jaguar (Panthera onca). In the Inga traditional worldview, these forests are inhabited by powerful spirits whose wishes are communicated to the elders during ayahuasca rituals and must be respected. While many Inga people today have converted to Christianity or mix it with their traditional beliefs, the Musuiuiai community still mainly practice their ancestors’ animist traditions.
Josefina Quinchoa, the last elder at Musuiuiai who says she can commune with the spirits, guides the community in the spiritual use of plants and animals. One of the strictest taboos is hunting the tapir, known as the Sacha wagra. The animal was once hunted by community members before their move to Musuiuiai for its meat and fat used in ointments for pregnancy and childbirth. Even then, it was still considered sacred for its habit of visiting spiritually significant sites.
“The tapir is the guardian of the mountains and the saladeros [salt licks], where we find the deer, armadillo and paca we hunt,” Muchavisoy says. Today, if “someone hunts at a saladero without an elder’s permission or kills a tapir, it offends the spirits, and they can drive the animals away or make a hunter sick or kill him.”
The community’s change of mind on hunting the tapir shows that shamanist traditions aren’t necessarily static and can have shifting views of the world’s nature, says Carolina Amaya, subdirector of Colombia’s Center of Intercultural Medicinal Studies (CEMI) and project manager of the institute’s Amazonian programs.
Other Indigenous communities continue to hunt tapirs for subsistence and cultural reasons. There’s debate about whether this level of hunting necessarily impacts the animals’ population. According to Mosquera-Guerra at the National University of Colombia, even subsistence hunting can be unsustainable. But researchers at CEMI, longtime collaborators with the Musuiuiai community, say most Indigenous hunting of tapirs can be sustainable. Unsustainable hunting, they say, is a result of Westernized hunting styles and acculturation.
In Musuiuiai, it was the revered status of the tapir that gave the village fertile ground to receive a new official status.
Guardians in a territory of life
In 2019, with the help of CEMI, Musuiuiai began documenting its biodiversity. “Traditionally, we monitored our wildlife and our forests using ambiwaska and the visions it gives us, but with [CEMI’s] help we started using camera traps and GPS units,” Muchavisoy says.
A year later, Musuiuiai was recognized as a “territory of life,” or ICCA (Indigenous and Community Conserved Area). Defined as locally governed areas of outstanding biological and cultural diversity, ICCA designation can improve community land rights and local governance while benefiting the conservation of biodiversity and cultural heritage, according to human rights and environmental activists.
“These conservation efforts aim to deter potential invaders of their territory, including state or private development projects such as mining exploration, exploitation, roads, new settlers, or migrants,” says CEMI’s Amaya. “It gives them a layer of protection for their territory and culture, through international recognition.”
One of the first actions of the new ICCA was to strengthen José Muchavisoy’s community environmental defense group, known as the Alapamata Michadur, or “defenders of the territory,” and shift focus toward the conservation of their sacred animal. Beginning with monitoring, the project has since evolved into an Inga-driven effort to gather baseline data on the factors influencing tapir behavior and population within the territory, helped by the Conservation Leadership Programme, a U.K.-based conservation funding organization.
Combining traditional tracking skills with newly acquired citizen-science methods, the defenders of the territory hike for hours to set up camera traps, retrieve images, and collect scat samples that are then analyzed by CEMI.
“I collect the seeds from the fruits the tapir eats for study, so we can understand how these animals affect the health of the forests of our territory,” Maribel Jiménez tells Mongabay. “Fieldwork can be hard; sometimes we have to cross rivers, and there are always rainstorms. But we love doing it.”
The project is a positive example of biocultural conservation, an approach based on the alignment of conservation goals with the value systems of Indigenous cultures, says Tania González Rivadeneira, a researcher with the Ecuadorian Society of Ethnobiology not directly involved in the project.
“Traditionally, communities have sometimes been seen as adversaries by conservationists and excluded or even removed from their land, but many Indigenous peoples have coexisted with nature for thousands of years in ways that support biodiversity,” Rivadeneira tells Mongabay. “We refer to the tapir biologically, but it also has different names and meanings in different cultures. For the Inga of this community, these meanings are driving conservation effort. It shows the effectiveness of biocultural conservation.”
There are no findings yet to share from the project.
An ambitious biocultural corridor
Yet the efforts in Musuiuiai are also part of a wider strategy, aimed at benefiting not only the conservation of the species and the broader biodiversity of their own territory, but also that of other Indigenous communities in the region.
Out of recent conservation efforts and the inauguration of the ICCA has emerged a more ambitious proposal for biocultural conservation, designed and spearheaded by the guardians of the territory: a biocultural corridor. The proposed corridor aims to safeguard more than 100,000 hectares (250,000 acres) of forest, stretching from the municipality of Villa Garzón, where the settlement is located, to the neighboring municipality of Orito.
The idea is that the corridor will protect not only the populations and movements of wildlife such as tapirs, but also the cultural traditions and spirituality of the Inga and other neighboring Indigenous peoples such as the Awa, Nasa and Embera.
“We want to help them become ICCAs too and join our biocultural corridor, so we’ve been talking and sharing our ideas with them,” Muchavisoy says. If other ICCAs are designated by the ICCA Consortium as autonomous tribal territories, they’ll form part of a corridor linked to Musuiuiai — an outcome they hope to achieve in the next few years through careful negotiations.
However, an important sticking point has emerged in these discussions, driven by the Inga’s efforts with their sacred animal.
“Other communities still hunt the tapir, so we want to try to persuade them to stop,” Muchavisoy says, adding, “I think we’ll be able to convince them.”
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This article by James Hall was first published by Mongabay.com on 20 November 2024. Lead Image: Typically found in habitats near rivers, lakes, and wetlands, the lowland tapir is a superb swimmer. Image by Frederico Mosquera Guerra.
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