Thoughts on "From the Heart of the World: The Elder Brother's Warning"

This evening on Link TV I watched the documentary "From the Heart of the World: The Elder Brother's Warning." It was a film about the South American indigenous tribe, the Kogi, who are believed to be the oldest existing civilization in the world, linked as the filmmaker Alan Ereira said, to the high civilizations of pre-Columbian South America. The filmmaker recounted bits of his extraordinary journey encountering and interacting with the Kogi, detailing the way this very old culture is struggling to continue on in spite of the vastly changing modern landscape.

More interesting to me than the visual juxtaposition of the native culture with the encroaching modern city, machinery, and the grave robbers of ancient burial sites, was the way the Kogi remained calm, reserved and yet confident in their assessment of modern man's destruction of the planet. Without arrogance they referred to the people of the so called advanced societies as their "younger brothers." They were able to let in a few members of the West to be able to deliver the message that became the documentary, yet they consciously kept the outside influence to a minimum. While some people may see this as backward or superstitious, the vast majority of their people were slaughtered in the 1500's by Westerners who simply wanted their gold and their bodies for forced labor. Today, the Kogi see the descendants of that legacy literally destroying the planet, observable to them in the form of polluting machinery and the disappearance of the glaciers in their area that feed the rivers and support all life where they live. Without traveling abroad, they knew from their ancient wisdom that man had cut down too many trees and extracted too many minerals from the earth. They predict the emergence of incurable diseases and the ultimate destruction of the planet if things do not change drastically. In spite of this, they remain steadfast in their own belief that they are protectors of the planet, tending to all life. It was after much consideration that they decided to be filmed, not even knowing what a camera was, in order to deliver their message. These people are living and existing on this planet right now, even as we are accessing the internet. I think it is truly worthy in our own spiritual explorations to consider them deeply, and ask what it is that we can do in a reality that is so radically different from the one they exist in.

The filmmaker Alan Ereira, when asked in a Link TV interview what we in the West can do, suggested that we might donate to Tairona Heritage Trust, which supports the purchase and protection of sacred land for the descendants of the Gonavindua Tairona, including the Kogi, who are truly a threatened people who face the destruction and usurpation of their land by governments and paramilitaries. But more importantly, he said, was that we need to change our ways. Which means not simply throwing money at the problem and breathing a sigh of relief, but actually transforming our own lives so that we exist in a more harmonious relationship with mother Earth.