Despite evangelization, many preserved fragments of their ancestral mystical universe, where the world is divided into three layers, water, air, and land, but where the aquatic fauna plays a central role. And it is in this context that, for Lilia, the conservation and defense of the river fauna, such as the manatee, the dolphin, the otter or the alligator, signifies not only defending the forest and the ecosystem, but also the ways of life of the indigenous peoples and their spirituality.
Off all the rich Amazonian aquatic fauna, it is the pink dolphin that occupies the central place in the indigenous imagination. Lilia says it appears in ritual celebrations such as the “pelazón,” a painful rite of passage that consists of pulling out all the hair of girls as they enter puberty. The dolphin then materializes to the community as a person, sporting identifying attributes such as a hat, a wristwatch, a belt, or shoes. “In these meetings,” Lilia continues, “the only one capable of determining which of the people present is a dolphin is the shaman. The mysterious person, who attends these festive rites undercover, disappears in the early hours of the morning, leaving hardly a trace.
“Until one day, the shaman says to the organizers of the celebration’, Lilia recounts, ‘if you don’t believe that this is an animal, not a person, that it is Yakuruna, the mother of the water, take note: we will get him drunk with chicha (a ritual fermented drink). So, the party started, and all the girls danced. The visitor was given chicha and got drunk. He then went to the river and fell asleep on the riverbank. When the sun came up, he was transformed into a dolphin. And the shaman said: look, the hat of this person is a ray, the watch is a crab and the belt is a boa snake. The shoes are fish. And that is how Yakuruna is”.
“And from then on they also discovered that the women who lived on the banks of the rivers were beginning to disappear” – continues Lilia with a tear in her eye and a voice broken by the emotion that the story rouses in her. “They were enchanted, they went into the water, and Yakuruna took them away. They had fallen in love with the dolphin. Some became pregnant, and the babies were born in the shape of dolphins.”
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Francesc Badia i Dalmases | Radio Free (2020-11-04T23:00:00+00:00) Lilia: preserving the Amazon river's fauna is preserving Planet Earth. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/11/04/lilia-preserving-the-amazon-rivers-fauna-is-preserving-planet-earth/
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