Experience how the Kichwa-Lamista people of the High Amazon understand and live the connections between ecological, spiritual, and community health. Learn the political and cultural ecology of the region through re-creating Amazonian indigenous Pre-Columbian agricultural practices, while gaining a better understanding of food security and climate change.
Sachamama Center will immerse you in a transformative worldview with possibilities for how to build inclusive and sustainable community and address the global warming crisis through an indigenous technology.
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• Create effective solidarity actions between North and South in an inter cultural setting and translate the skills to your own community.
• Work on ‘terra preta de indio’ with the Kichwa communities of Shukshuyaku and Solo.
• Participate in rituals with a local Shaman to understand the Kichwa-Lamista’s relationship with spiritual energies that animate flora and fauna.
Cost
Winter 2014: TBA
Includes tuition, program costs, room and board, in-country travel.
Learn about financial aid options here
Credits
4 Transferable Credits from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst
upon successful completion of the program
Dates
Winter Session: TBA
Requirements
Minimum GPA: 2.5
Minimum Age: 16 and above
Language: none required
Apply Online
Visa
Yes: Contact the Living Routes office for details
Housing
Guest Housing
Application Deadlines
Winter Session: September 30
Rolling admissions on a first come first serve basis, so apply early!
Contact us for availability.
FAQs
Sachamama Center hopes to model a practice of a post-colonial, critical anthropology in horizontal, mutual, and inter-cultural collaboration with the Kichwa-Lamistas. The Center acts as an education, research and retreat center on the beautiful grounds of Casa La Sangapilla in the town of Lamas.
The Center also received status as a project of the Ecological Democracy Institute of North America in 2010. Projects at Sachamama Center include the Chacra-Huerto project, Ecological Literacy through Pre-Columbian Amazonian Permaculture and Project Qinti Qartunira, which strives to preserve the Quechua language through books recording the Quichwa-Lamistas life experiences, memories, songs, legends, knowledge and much more. Learn more about the community here!
Program at a Glance
Week 1
- Orientation to Sachamama Center and the Kichwa-Lamista people as well as their unique way of life
- Learn how to comprehend the locally specific political and cultural ecology of the region and help solve the climate crisis through re-creating an Amazonian indigenous Pre-Colombian soil with bio-char
- Bio-char: pre-Colombian soil of millennial fertility is called terra preta do indio (Indians’ black earth) internationally, and locally called by its Quechua name: yana allpa (black soil). The color black is given by bio-char, a charcoal made from agricultural biomass without oxygen.
Week 2
- Alternately live at the non-profit, Sachamama Center, and in a Kichwa-Lamista small community named Shukshuyaku and work on the communal food field/chacra and making terra preta de indio
- In another Kichwa community named Solo, learn the way of life and indigenous technologies
- Participate in rituals with a local shaman to attempt to learn modalities of relating to the local ecology and “other-than-human” spiritual energies that animate flora and fauna
Week 3
- Learn to understand your own personal experiences of cultural shock as an historical aspect of the politics of encounter between modern and non-modern modes of inhabiting life in a place and creating cultures of habitat
- Experience an immersion in a worldview that holds transformational possibilities for how to build inclusive and sustainable community as well as how we can begin to address the global warming crisis through an indigenous technology
- Familiarize yourself with indigenous practices of bio-cultural regeneration and a new form of economic practice, which we call, a “cosmocentric economy”
Health and Safety
The health and safety of students and faculty on Living Routes programs is always our highest priority. Living Routes has clearly articulated health and safety protocols and procedures compiled in our Health and Safety Manual. This manual is reviewed and updated on a yearly basis to ensure the highest standard of care is in place on all Living Routes programs. The Health and Safety Manual is available for download here, or contact our office for a copy to be sent to you. All students also receive a comprehensive handbook including detailed chapters on health, safety and guidelines for preventing illness during the program.
Living Routes faculty and staff have extensive international experience and numerous affiliations throughout our various host communities and countries. These individuals and networks ensure that we stay informed about changing conditions and help us prevent health and safety risks while also responding to emergencies quickly and effectively if they should arise. Our program managers and directors have regular communication with field staff and faculty, who all carry emergency cell phones and are trained to carry out Living Routes Emergency and Evacuation Protocols, in the event that we must respond to an emergency, or remove a student or program from the field.
The following are measures that we take on all of our programs:
- Regular updates from the U.S. Department of State and always abide by their safety precautions, travel warnings, and recommendations for U.S. citizens abroad
- Registration through the U.S. Department of State Smart Traveler Enrollment Program
- Abidance by the safety guidelines set out by the National Association for Foreign Study Abroad (NAFSA)
- In-country orientation on country, culture, host site, health and safety procedures, illness and injury prevention and emergency protocol
- Emergency Cards with program itinerary, local emergency contacts, emergency protocol
- International health insurance under iNext Basic Plan, which includes major medical, evacuation, repatriation, and 24-hour emergency assistance
For questions or more information about Living Routes Health and Safety policies, please contact our office at (888) 515-7333 or email us at info[at]livingroutes.org.
Required Courses
Ecology, Community, and Indigenous Spirituality in the High Amazon
(Anthropology 396P) (4 credits)
Course Topics
Bio-cultural Regeneration, Bio-char Soil, Shamanic Rituals, Chacra-huerto Garden, Global Capitalist Political Systems, Food Security, Climate Change, Transformative Worldviews
This course is designed to give students a Kechwa-Lamista experience of how indigenous peoples of the Peruvian High Amazon understand and live the links between ecological, spiritual, and community health. Students live in a Kechwa-Lamista small community, and work with an Indigenous organic farmers’ association on an alternative to itinerant slash and burn agriculture. Seminars prepare students for these immersion experiences while grounding their encounter in a political history of the region and the Kechwa-Lamista struggle to not only retain cultural autonomy and protect their lands from encroachment, but also to “talk back” to global systems of capitalism and political organization.
Program Faculty
Frédérique Apffel-Marglin
Ph.D., Anthropology Brandeis University
Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, PhD. is Professor Emerita, Dept. of Anthropology at Smith College. She founded the non profit organization Sachamama Center in 2009 which she directs. She was born in France and raised in Tangier, Morocco. She came to the US to do her University studies. She has spent years in India and Peru working with indigenous peoples and with farmers and campesinos. She was a research associate at the World Institute for Development Economics (WIDER) in Helsinki, a part of the United Nations University, for several years in the 1980′s and early 1990′s. Along with the Harvard economist Stephen A. Marglin, she has directed several research projects questioning the dominance of the modern paradigm of knowledge. She has authored as well as edited eleven books, three of them resulting from the work at WIDER: Dominating Knowledge: Development, Culture and Resistance, and Decolonizing Knowledge: From Development to Dialogue, both with Oxford Clarendon and both co-edited with S.A. Marglin; the 3rd book out of the WIDER work is Who Will Save the Forests? co-edited with Tariq Banuri.
In 1993 she decided for political and moral reasons that she could no longer engage in classical anthropological fieldwork and ever since then has been invited to collaborate with activist/intellectual groups in Peru and Bolivia and with one of them, PRATEC, has published The Spirit of Regeneration: Andean Culture Confronting Western Notions of Development and Rhythms of Life: Enacting the World with the Goddesses of Orissa.
Her latest book is titled, Subversive Spiritualities: How Rituals Enact the World available in press through the Oxford University Press, New York.
Pramod Parajuli
Ph.D., Stanford University
Born and raised in the Nepalese Himalayan foothills, professor Pramod Parajuli is an award-winning sustainability educator, a visionary, and a curricular and social innovator. Over the last 30 years, he has designed and developed various programs in critical literacy, sustainability studies, sustainable food systems, farm and garden-based ecological literacy, and “soil-to supper pedagogy” through the learning gardens. Through these programs in higher education settings as well as in the communities, Prof. Parajuli has been able to prepare a new generation of educators and leaders who are creating a society that is not only ecologically sustainable, but also socially equitable, and bio-culturally diverse.
As the next phase of his efforts, he has recently launched the global initiative, Annapurna Pluriversity: Collaborative for Abundance, Creativity, and Resilience in collaboration with Frédérique Apffel-Marglin. Through Sachamama, Prof. Parajuli is eager to co-create ecological learning and curricular environments within the Amazonian argroecological systems.
A permaculture practitioner in his own ten-acre forest-farm in Prescott, Arizona, and also in Nepal (www.ajamvarifarm.org), Prof. Parajuli works with the enthusiasm that teaching and learning around what he called the “soil to supper” journey can bring; it also brings pathways to abundance, creativity and resilience that are not only “deep” but also “delicious.”
For his pioneering work, Prof. Parajuli has received fellowships, awards and grants from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the MacArthur Foundation, Portland State University, Oregon Community Foundation, City of Portland, and Portland Metro. You can find more about Prof. Parajuli’s research and writing here and www.eternalfarming.blogspot.com.
