Abstract:

The running fresh water of the Amazon River is a welcoming sound to the peoples of the indigenous resguardo (reserve) in Puerto Nariño, southern Colombia. This watercourse is the only access to the banks of rivers, lakes, flood plains and mainland areas that connect the 22 communities where the Tikuna, Cocama and Yagua peoples live. To obtain food according to each season, the Tikuna, Cocama and Yagua peoples combine different practices, such as fishing, hunting and chagras farming, an ancestral, diversified productive system in which annual and perennial species are cultivated and where trees are selectively cut and burned to replicate healthy forest succession.