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Brilio.net/en - Have you heard of Matss people? There are over 2,200 of Matss live in Brazil and Peru, in the deep Amazon rainforest. They have been passing down the knowledge of medicinal plants for centuries, of which we urban people may not know anything about. We are so caught up with modernization and its development all around the world that we forget that the nature provides all the supplies we need to live, and to heal.
Recently the Acat Amazon Conservation, a non-profit organization dedicating to helping the indigenous peoples of the Amazon live sustainably and protect their rainforest, helped five elder Shamans of the Matss in creating an encyclopedia of their traditional medicine. This is the first time ever a project like this has been accomplished, with all details of plants used in the medicinal system for a wide variety of ailments.
The Acat Amazon Conservation realized that the tribes hold such important and useful information that would help many people in the world therefore they decided to realize this book project, because once the tribes are gone the knowledge goes with them. Like any other tribes in the world, traditional knowledge is never written down but passed on through by word of mouth. So this is project is the first to visualize all the knowledge in the form of a 500-page book.
It took two years to gather all the information of the natural medicine, using the Matss languages, and turned it into an encyclopedia. The use of original languages is not for foreign corporations to exploit, but to preserve the information for their own next generations. There is still no plan to translate the encyclopedia into English or Spanish, but then again the purpose of making this book is to protect the tribes knowledge and heritage before it is completely eroded by evolving times.
(brl/tis)
