In doing the research for my book, "Tales Of A Shaman’s Apprentice," I found chants among Siberian shamans which were almost identical to chants amongst the Yanomamo Indians on the Brazil-Venezuela border. So there’s clearly a connection there. And I’ve found the Tiriós have a legend of crossing a land that was so cold they had to wrap themselves in the skins of animals. This is the northeast Amazon, there is no cold weather there. This is a tribal retelling of crossing the Bering Strait, possibly 12,000 years ago, probably 50,000 years ago.

Miranda: How do the shamans acquire their knowledge?
Mark: Shamanic wisdom comes about in many ways. Clearly they learn from watching the animals. Clearly they learn from generic experimentation. Clearly they learn from the concept of bitters, which is found in all cultures, if it’s bitter it may be good for you. Quinine is the bitterest substance on earth, it’s the best treatment for malaria. Cod liver oil is bitter, it’s good for you. Bitterness often indicates the presence of alkaloids.

Color equals chemistry. Slash the bark of a tree with your machete and the sap comes out red and it turns orange and it turns yellow you know there’s some wild chemistry happening there. Many saps have medicinal properties.

Perhaps the hardest for Westerners to fathom, understand, accept are the language of dreams. I’ve had shamans say to me they took a hallucinogenic plant and they dreamed a cure for something. I’ve had shamans say to me they took a nap and they dreamed about a plant and that’s a successful treatment for something. Well if you think about the history of Western science and Kekulé was trying to figure out the structure of the benzene molecule, he couldn’t figure it out, couldn’t figure it out, couldn’t figure it out so he went to sleep. And in his sleep he had a dream and in his dream he saw some snakes and in this dream the snakes started chasing each other. And he woke up and said, eureka, benzene is a ring, as indeed it is. So when witch doctors dream of things we say, oh that’s mumbo-jumbo; when Westerners dream of something, we say, oh scientific process.

Miranda: What's it like, working with these shamans?
Mark: You know the great thing about ethnobotany, it’s like the Chinese box puzzle most of us had as kids, where you open it up and there’s another box inside. And you open it up and there’s another box inside. You open it up and there’s another box inside. And just when you get to the smallest box possible, what you think holds the ultimate answer to the question to the quest you’re on, to the question you’re trying to have answered, you open it up and there’s another box inside. That’s what working with shamans is really like.

Miranda: Why were the children in the villages not interested in the old ways?
Mark: I’m always curious as to why indigenous cultures have been so quick to give up the old ways. A friend of mine recently said, because Western civilization has the best toys! It’s very seductive, Western civilization. Boom boxes, electricity, electric razors, VCRs. I don’t think we should be denying people that. I don’t think it’s right for us to decide what people get and what they don’t get. None of these shamans can cure or prevent polio as far as I know. I don’t think we have the right to deny them polio vaccine.

But seeing people trade an entire culture for the gewgaws of Western culture uh, trading in all their traditional music for Madonna -- it shouldn’t be an either-or situation. You have had people actively forbidding people to practice indigenous culture, religion, wear indigenous clothing, practice indigenous healing and I think that’s wrong. The world is a less interesting place if everybody is wearing Michael Jordan t-shirts and wearing Michael Jordan tennis shoes. These guys want to wear tennis shoes, fine. But don’t shame them into never putting on the old breechcloth for ceremonial dances. And that’s what I’ve seen happen time and time again.

When the Explorer Farabee made contact with the Tiriós in the 1800s he wrote that he didn’t speak a word of Tirió but they danced these dances of all the animals of the forest and they were so good at it that he recognized every animal immediately. Here we are now over a century later and the last few old men who remember those dances are still there, but they haven’t done those dances for over thirty years. T the reason they haven’t done those dances for over thirty years is they were discouraged or even forbidden to do so either by missionary activity or by the chief who was convinced that they shouldn’t be doing that anymore, by the activity of outsiders.

I told the chief, I said, all of your kids of your village love Bob Marley, they wear Bob Marley t-shirts, they carry boom boxes with Bob Marley playing. I said, do you think they’re going to get into heaven listening to Bob Marley and will not get into heaven if they do the dance of the "Cock of the Rock?" I said, I don’t think this is an either-or situation, so why not encourage old practices which are not harmful? We’re not talking about devil worship here, we’re talking about celebrating nature and who created nature? The chief said, God created nature. So dancing the "Cock of the Rock" dance is a way of celebrating the biological diversity, that they know and enjoy and benefit from so much more than we do.

Miranda: How do shamans use plants and insects in their medicines?
Mark: Chemists aren’t forced to work with one chemical at a time when they try and come up with new compounds, why should we think that shamans don’t combine things to make new and useful, more effective, less toxic combinations? What we find now is that these combinations which have been dismissed and pooh-poohed in the past like curare [arrow poison] are actually very sophisticated chemical mixtures, where plants that are inert when added to these poisons potentiate the poisons. That is, they make them in effect, more poisonous, they increase the uptake in the bloodstream. We now have to go back and reexamine all of these shamanic potions, hallucinogens, curares and everything in between to figure out what’s really going on because these guys in breechcloths and penis strings turn out to be better chemists than we are in certain instances.

Miranda: What is the Shaman's Apprentice Program?
Mark: The Shaman’s Apprentice Program is an effort to re-start the shamanic tradition. To make sure that transmission, that oral tradition from the ancients to the current generation to the next generation is continued. This [information] has been handed down for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years. With the introduction of Western culture, with contact with the outside world, this connection to the past is sometimes lost. The Shaman’s Apprentice Program is about making sure that when they make this transition from pre-literate to literate societies, this oral tradition is passed on either orally, or orally and in a written form.

Miranda: Where did you get the idea for the Program?
Mark: I promised the chief of the Tiriós, when I started the work in 1982, that I would collect the wisdom of his shamans and write it down in a form that he could read it and take advantage of, if he so wished. I kept my part of the bargain and after year eight I presented him with a manuscript of 300 different plants that his people had used traditionally for medicinal purposes. He called a meeting in the jungle to which I was not invited and the next day my friend, Koita, came out and said, chief says this stuff is important. Koita says, I’m to work with you and the Jaguar Shaman to translate this into our language so we will have it to use on our own to perpetuate our own traditions.

Up until then they had one book in their language, the Holy Bible provided by the missionaries. Now they have two books in their language, the Holy Bible provided by the missionaries, and the "Tareno Epi Panpira," the "Tirió Plant Medicine Handbook," provided by the Shaman’s Apprentice Program.

Miranda: What do you hope for from the Program?
Mark: I think that the Shaman’s Apprentice Program has shown that it’s not too late. If you find the right individuals, empower them, finance them, encourage them, help them, the you really can make a difference. Look at a place like the Caqueta, Colombia [note: a river valley in southwestern Colombia, where the Amazon Conservation Team works with members of the Ingano, Kofan, and Siona tribes]. It’s the most difficult place in the entire Western Hemisphere. Every problem in the Western Hemisphere is found in that part of Colombia: deforestation, poverty, intra-cultural difficulties, military clashes with local peoples, landless peasants. The Shaman’s Apprentice Program has been a rip-roaring success, where these people have seized control of their environmental and cultural destiny. If they can do it in the Caqueta, you can bet your ass they can do it elsewhere.

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