Indigenous Amazon Storytelling and Music
Ayuy Yu, a traditional healer of the Kichwa and Shuar Peoples of the Western Amazon (Ecuador), is visiting Salt Spring with his wife Beatriz to raise money for the recovery of sacred sites in their territory.
Ayuy carries a hereditary medicine tradition from his grandfather, travelling north with stories, teachings, and messages of alliance. This is his third visit to Canada, bringing ceremony and community work to BC, Yukon and NWT.
We are fundraising for the final 25ha section of “Tijun Urcu” Walks Alone Mountain – a traditional place of initiations, healings, and headwaters that we have been recovering from colonized territory in three purchases over the last 9 years. This is the final purchase necessary to conglomerate the separate titles into a single ancestral landholding of Ayuy’s community. This will finally return this sacred place to its original stewards after 60 years of aggressive settlement and industrial pressure around Puyo, Pastaza. The territory is suffering a renewed pertroleum invasion and faces the loss of thousands of these traditional sacred sites. Ayuy’s family have been quietly recovering their land for over 30 years, guided by their visions and spiritual practices, to create the intercultural knowledge exchange project the Wayusa School (www.wayusaschool.com).
Come to taste Ayuy’s wayusa tea, an Amazon cousin of yerba mate. It is a gentle stimulant and subtle medicine understood to clarify nightly dreaming. Enter the ancestral dreamscape to discover the origins of the medicine plants and the prophecies they carry, told through the old words of traditional stories accompanied by Ayuy’s flute.
We will also screen a snapshot of an upcoming documentary exploring Ayuy’s family and their important work building spiritual alliances between North and South. Amazon crafts and jewellery made by Ayuy’s family will be for sale.
Come join!
Attendance $10-15 (sliding scale). All funds go to the Wayusa School.