Naturvölker, Ethnomedizin etc.

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Ein kleiner Ausschnitt von einem Interview mit Wulf Schiefenhövel:

Naturvölker «Heiler ist der älteste ­Beruf der Menschheit»

Wohl keiner kennt die Rezepte und Tricks der Heiler auf Neuguinea so gut wie Wulf Schiefenhövel. Der Ethnomediziner hat die Naturvölker während Jahrzehnten erforscht.

...

BeobachterNatur: Hat das Anrufen der Geister Erfolg?
Schiefenhövel: Natürlich. Es ist ja nicht nur die Psychosomatik, die hier zum Tragen kommt. Diese Heilkunst ist zum Teil auch knallharte Pharmakologie. Die indigenen Völker kennen sich oft sehr gut mit Heilpflanzen aus. Fast alle Völker haben eine ­Taxonomie entwickelt, ein System von Pflanzen­namen, das dem unsrigen entspricht. Sie geben nicht einfach alle rot oder gelb blühenden Pflanzen in einen Topf, sondern ordnen Korbblütler und Steinbrechgewächse eigenen Gruppen zu – das ist das Unglaubliche, Verrückte. Es gibt bei solchen Stämmen Pflanzenkundige, die stecken jeden Botaniker mit links in die Tasche. Wir hatten einmal zwei Botanikprofessoren im Team, die erst nach einem halben Jahr ­Arbeit mit Herbarexemplaren herausfanden, dass die Einheimischen doch mit ihrer Klassifizierung recht gehabt hatten.

BeobachterNatur: Und haben diese Pflanzen tatsächlich eine Wirkung?
Schiefenhövel: Der Urwald ist quasi eine Apotheke. In vielen Pflanzen stecken pharmakologisch aktive Stoffe, wie sie sich auch in unseren Medikamenten finden. Ich selber hatte mal eine infizierte Wunde am Knie. Ein Heiler spuckte einen Pflanzenbrei darauf, den er zuvor sorgfältig gekaut hatte. Ich war da als Arzt sehr skeptisch. Doch nach ein paar Tagen war die Wunde wunderbar verkrustet und heilte prima.

BeobachterNatur: Sind die exotischen Heiler den westlichen Medizinern gar überlegen?
Schiefenhövel: Nein. Man darf sie nicht zu ­Superärzten hochjubeln. Vieles, was dort in der tradi­tionellen ­Therapie ­geschieht, besteht aus Taschen­spielertricks.

...

Q: http://www.beobachter.ch/natur/forschun ... enschheit/

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Danke für das Interview, ein Thema das ich auch interessant finde.

Hier könnte vielleicht, wenn es nicht stört, auch ein Platz für weitere Fundstücke zum Thema Ethnomedizin sein:

Curare. Zeitschrift für Medizinethnologie
http://www.agem-ethnomedizin.de/index.php/curare.html
http://www.vwb-verlag.com/reihen/Periodika/curare.html

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So wars gedacht

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Many First Nations in British Columbia see themselves as "guardians" of marine life. Some have come together to create this groundbreaking conservation and research programme.
Tribal peoples have been dependent on and managed their environments for millennia. Their lands are not wilderness. Evidence proves that tribal peoples are better at looking after their environment than anyone else.
They are the best conservationists and guardians of the natural world.
They should be at the forefront of the environmental movement.

Full length release coming June 30th.

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Heartwood: A West Coast Forestry Documentree

On the west coast of British Columbia, First Nations and coastal communities are uniting to take back control of their local forestlands from an industrial behemoth that has reduced our coastal temperate rainforests to scattered remnants. A diverse movement and a growing consensus is spreading up and down the coast – that the way forestry is done in this province is simply not working for the vast majority of its citizens – environmentally or economically.

Against a backdrop of runaway climate change and indigenous awakening, B.C. is a microcosm of a world in crisis. With our ancient forests depleted and the demands of the global market becoming ever more vociferous, communities are taking a stand against foreign investors with no connection to the land. These tenacious citizens will lead us deep into the woods to show us why their forests are worth saving and how they feel forestry should be done in B.C.

deadline for episode one: 2017



http://www.heartwoodfilm.com/

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What do the “Rights of Nature” have to do with Indigeneity?

By Alexis Bunten

The idea that a feature of nature, like a river, is a living being might seem like a strange concept to some, but it is nothing new to Indigenous and other traditional peoples around the world. While the Western philosophical system is underpinned by the idea that man is separate from nature and in dominion over it, Indigenous philosophical systems tend to conceive of humans as a part of nature, often in a stewardship role to help maintain its balance.

The “Rights of Nature,” which codifies this Indigenous philosophy, has been in the news lately. On March 15, the the New Zealand parliament passed the Te Awa Tupua Bill, which granted the Whanganui River the rights of legal personhood. Less than a week later, on March 20, the Ganges, and Yamuna Rivers in India were also granted legal personhood status. As such, these rivers have protected rights. Should these rights be threatened by human activity, legal cases on behalf of these rivers can be brought before a court to uphold their rights.

Mari Margil, Associate Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) and head of the organization’s International Center for the Rights of Nature, explained,

“Recognition of personhood rights are an important step forward toward the recognition of the full rights of the rivers to be healthy, natural ecosystems. Such rights would include the rights of the rivers to pure water, to flow, to provide habitat for river species, and other rights essential to the health and well-being of these ecosystems.”

For more, read CELDF’s press statement on the Uttarakhand High Court decision.

Though the political and historical contexts underpinning each policy decision are different, all three rivers share these basic features in common:

1. The local peoples have a deep spiritual connection with the rivers, and consider them as living entities.
2. Since colonization, these rivers have been highly polluted by toxic chemicals released into them from farming and industry.
3. Local people’s ability to steward the rivers have been violated through commercial interference (pollution, diverting water, over-fishing, etc.).

Indigenous Foundations

Because the Whanganui decision influenced the Ganges and Yamuna ruling, it’s important to understand the role that New Zealand’s Indigenous Maori people played in catalyzing the legal personhood status of rivers (the Whanganui directly, and Ganges and Yamana indirectly). In a brilliant turn of events, Maori claimants wielded the Western legal system, essentially formed to protect the property of the “have’s”, on its head to recognize the Rights of Nature.

By granting the Whanganui River the rights of legal personhood, the Te Awa Tupua Bill affirmed the Maori relationship with the river as a life force of its own, a spiritual place of cleansing and renewal that must be protected for the sake of its own existence. If this seems like a radical idea to pass through a national governing body, it is. The bill came on the heels of the 2016 Whanganui River Settlement between the Crown and the Whanganui Iwi [Maori tribe]. Marking the longest running legal case in New Zealand history, the case closed 148 years after Maori made a settlement claim for land surreptitiously alienated from them. As part of the settlement, the Whanganui River was granted full legal rights, $30 million was provided to restore its health, and $80 million in redress was granted to the Iwi.

The testimonies of countless Maori helped the court to understand that the river and the people are inexorably intertwined, that the process of colonization disrupted both the river and the people’s health, well-being and ability to survive. Because the river and nearby lands were wrested from Maori stewards in a less-than-legal manner (and we can’t go back in time), the settlement became a symbolic means to remediate for the irreparable damage done –the lives lost, systems disrupted, and cycles broken involving the river and all that depends upon it. To learn more, check out the trailer for the moving documentary film, Te Awa Tupua — Voices from the River (2014).

We are witnessing a shift in global consciousness

Indigenous peoples’ understanding of the Rights of Nature is a part of our worldviews, reflected in our languages, songs, art, traditional economies, and customary law. But you don’t have to belong to an Indigenous tribe or practice Hinduism to understand that nature has a right to exist.

Rights of Nature is a growing movement of like-minded allies from every culture, background and walk of life, as our colleagues at CELDF have proven through their work with communities around the world. Nearly ten years before the Whanganui, Ganges and Yamana rivers gained the rights of personhood, Ecuador and Bolivia adopted Rights of Nature provisions into their constitutions. In the US, more than three dozen communities have now enacted Rights of Nature laws, with communities now joining together in several states to drive such rights through state constitutional amendments.

Until we are able to shift mainstream perceptions of nature from something to be exploited to something to be protected for the benefit of generations to come, this strategy could at least buy us time to protect parts of the planet from immediate, and specific threats. Inspired by the the Ho-Chunk Nation, the first US tribe to vote to amend their tribal constitution to include the Rights of Nature, the Bioneers Indigeneity Program is partnering with CELDF to share this groundbreaking legal strategy with tribal partners. We feel that with our deep knowledge of natural systems combined with sovereign legal status, Native American peoples are in a unique position to advance the Rights of Nature. Stay tuned for more updates from the Indigeneity team!



https://medium.com/bioneers/what-do-the ... d35f3d1968

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Eine junge Vaporadora heilt mit Pflanzendämpfen.
Interessant.

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Forgotten Tribes of the Amazon: Biopiracy & the Story of the Urueu-Wau-Wau

The year was 1986. National Geographic photographer Jesco von Puttkamer was on assignment deep in the frontier of Western Brazil to take pictures of a recently contacted tribe, known as the Urueu-Wau-Wau, that had emerged from the forest. Among the images he captured were striking photographs of tribesmen engaged in the hunt with bows and arrows. Tapirs, large mammals of the forest, were bleeding to death, lying in pools of blood.

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Few outsiders had as much experience with Amazonian tribes as von Puttkamer. He recognized immediately that the Urueu-Wau-Wau arrow poison was something novel. Amazonian curares kill through paralysis of muscle, hence their adoption into medicine that revolutionized the practice of surgery. But these animals were bleeding out, not dying through suffocation. Most Amazonian arrow poisons are extracted from jungle vines or lianas. Yet, the poison coating the tips of Urueu-Wau-Wau arrows came from the blood-red resin of a tall tree.

Puttkamer’s photos of Urueu-Wau-Wau and their arrow poison were featured in a 1988 National Geographic Magazine piece entitled “Last Days of Eden: Rondônia’s Urueu-Wau-Wau Indians”. The arrow poison caught the attention of Merck Pharmaceuticals, who arranged for additional material to be collected and sent to their New Jersey laboratories. Blood thinners or anticoagulants are big business. Today, the global market share for anticoagulants exceeds 9 billion dollars, the United States accounting for over 60% of that market.

Experts at the New York Botanical Garden were able to identify the tree as Cariniana domestica, a member of the Brazil nut tree family. Although C. domestica was first described by botanists in the early 19th century, it was not considered remarkable, just another Amazonian tree. In fact, the entire Brazil nut plant family was generally regarded to be chemically inert and not thought to harbor potentially valuable pharmaceuticals.

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At Merck laboratories, the active principle was isolated from collected material and determined to be a potent anticoagulant inhibiting the thrombin, the basic protein of blood clots. When scientists from Merck published their findings, the tribe was not credited by name, the arrow poison was cited ‘used by the native individuals of Rondônia, Brazil’. In the acknowledgements, multiple contributors were credited but not a single indigenous person.

For Acaté’s conservation partners, the Matsés people of the Peruvian Amazon, it is a story all too familiar.

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This frog holds a secret. Locked within its skin secretions are several novel peptides with narcotic, antibiotic, and vasoactive properties that hold much promise in medicine. Although the giant monkey tree frog (Phyllomedusa bicolor) has been known to naturalists for centuries, this secret was only recently revealed to the outside world when the Matsés tribe was first encountered deep in the Peruvian Amazon.

The Matsés know the frog as acaté and have long used its potent skin secretions in hunting rituals. For the Matsés, ceremonial use of acaté confers not only strength and courage to an individual but is a medium for transmission of knowledge among participants. For these reasons, we adopted Acaté as the name for our organization in recognition of the wisdom of our conservation partners, the Matsés people.

After reports of its use emerged from the forest, investigations of the frog’s secretions in the laboratory revealed a complex cocktail of peptides with potent vasoactive, narcotic, and antimicrobial properties. Several pharmaceutical companies and universities filed patents on the peptides without recognition of indigenous peoples for which it has long held a unique and important role in their culture. The gene for one of the frog’s antibiotic peptides has even been transgenetically placed into the potato plant to enhance resistance to pathogens.

The eminent Yale anthropologist Weston La Barre, who worked with indigenous peoples in Colombia, wrote:

As scientists, we cannot afford the luxury of an ethnocentric snobbery which assumes that primitive cultures have nothing whatsoever to contribute to civilization. Our civilization is, in fact, a compendium of such borrowings. Indeed, a good case could probably be made that, in the long run, it is the ‘higher’ culture which benefits, the more thoroughly being enriched, while the ‘lower’ culture not uncommonly disappears entirely as a result of the contact.

In the decade that followed contact, most of Urueu-Wau-Wau population was killed off as a result of conflicts and a series of respiratory diseases that struck their villages. Today, only 115 remain. The Urueu-Wau-Wau, who refer to themselves as the Jupaú, have done much to regain their identity and footing. However, as is the case for many tribes, much of traditional knowledge of the elders was lost in the waves of disease and through the impact of missionary activities. The vast territory of Rondônia was overrun in a massive gold rush. Today, the region maintains the highest rates of deforestation in Brazil as well as continues to be plagued by violent conflicts between indigenous peoples and land grabbers, diamond prospectors, and cattle ranchers.

Each tribe is part of the tapestry of humanity. Acaté works with some of the remaining tribes in the forest – living on the knife-edge and struggling for their cultural survival amidst a profoundly shifting world – to return control of their cultural and environmental destiny back into their hands where it once belonged.

https://acateamazon.org/forgotten-tribe ... -rondonia/