WEBVTT

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[sil.]

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[music]

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Long ago a man went into
the forest to hunt.

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He had no luck and it grew late.
On his way home,

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he met Aware the old person.
Aware said better stay with me.

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A snake might bite you. Let\'s
go to sleep and let us dream.

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\"What are you talking about,
grandfather?\" said the man.

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You see long ago there were no dreams.
People never had dreams.

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Dreaming is giving yourself
a soul said, Aware.

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Now go to sleep.

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Soon the man began to dream.

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Help, he moaned, a Jaguar. Help. He
woke up and cried, \"Oh, grandfather,

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I saw myself being caught by a Jaguar.\"

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Now you have a Jaguar soul said, Aware.
Now you are the master of dreams.

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[music]

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[sil.]

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One of my earliest memories was being a child
in Louisiana sitting on the linoleum floor

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staring up at my grandmother injecting
herself with insulin to combat her diabetes.

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[music]

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This was not a cure. Western medicine
at that time had no effective cure.

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Still doesn\'t. This worked
for a couple of years,

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and then the diabetes took over,
and she died a miserable death.

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There was nothing Western medicine
could do. Absolutely nothing.

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[music]

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Watching someone close to you die of a disease, which the
most modern medicine cannot cure or treat successfully

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I think has an impact and makes you want to
look for things that may hold a solution.

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Diabetes is on the
increase around the world.

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I have kids. I\'m worried about diabetes.

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When I came to this village
and found out that

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these people claim to be able to treat diabetes
using local plants, I realized it was something

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that needed to be followed up.

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In the Amazon, I\'m a plant hunter.

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I\'m an ethnobotanist. I\'m studying
how people are using plant

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for medicinal purposes. I\'m studying how
people relate to the plant kingdom.

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[music]

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I learned ethnobotany from the
great Harvard ethnobotanist

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Richard Evans Schultes.

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Well, I had dropped out of college and
was working in a museum at Harvard.

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And a friend of mine said as long as you\'re working at a university,
you might as well get an education. So I got the night school catalog

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and opened it up and there was a course on the
botany and chemistry of hallucinogenic plants.

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Well, this being the end of the 60s,
it had a certain appeal at that time.

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The course was taught by Professor Schultes known
as the father of the science of ethnobotany,

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a Harvard professor who went
down to the Amazon in 1941

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and stayed there for 14 years living
with the Indians as an Indian.

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He was a legend in terms of understanding both
the plants and the peoples of the rainforest.

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It was this incredible lecture

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the very first night at these extraordinary
scenes of these nearly naked people

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under the influence of these powerful
hallucinogens doing these incredible dances.

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You had pictures of these ancient shamans performing these
bizarre rituals, working with these incredible plants

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from a man who had been there, who\'d
lived there, who\'d worked there.

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It was opening a door to another world

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and it was one slide that did it for me.
And he said

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here you see three Indians of the Yucuna tribe.
All of them are doing the Kai-yah-ree dance

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to keep away the forces of darkness.
All of them are totally intoxicated

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on a hallucinogenic potion. The one
on the left has a Harvard degree.

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Next slide please.

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I remember very vividly

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professor Schulte standing in front of the class pointing his finger
us and saying you will be the last generation to see these forests

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in a pristine condition. You
will be the last generation

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to see these people in their
true aboriginal setting.

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Now is the time to see it. Now is the
time to document it. And it\'s your job

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to get down there, work with these people, learn this
knowledge, and try and protect these forests and these cultures

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before they forever disappear.

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[music]

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Well, they got me hooked… hooked on plants,
hooked on people\'s, hooked on the Amazon.

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[music]

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Long ago before humans, before birds even,
the rainforests grew like green velvet

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all around the Earth\'s
middle, warm and moist,

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a womb for the planet. The earth shook

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and the ice came and went and the greatest
forest of all was born, the Amazon.

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She filled her trees with bedazzlement.

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And humans came to live
with her, millions of them.

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But those were the old days.

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Today, I speak of death, not life.

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In a 100 years, over half
the ancient rainforests

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have vanished. In India 80,

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Bangladesh all gone.

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In Thailand, Guatemala, Madagascar, West
Africa, Oceania, China near to die.

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The Amazon\'s people consumed

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in a Holocaust of war, starvation and
disease until only a handful walked

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the lonely glades in sorrow.

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Each year a forest the size of Florida

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lives only in the dreams of the newly
homeless. Each year, another tribe

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leaves no trace.

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Each day 10 million trees breathe
their last into the choking air.

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How many have died while I am speaking?

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[music]

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My first trip to the Amazon was in 1977.

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I was really interested in following in my
mentor\'s footsteps in the northwest Amazon

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and Richard Schultes who came back from Columbia and said there\'s a drug
war that\'s broken out in that River Valley. He says, why don\'t you go

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to the Northeast Amazon? Nobody\'s ever
worked there. So I came down to Suriname.

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I went to the local airstrip

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and found a pilot and I asked him if he could fly me
to the closest Indian village to the Brazilian border?

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He said if you got the money,
I\'ll make space for you.

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My first trip to the
rainforest struck me as

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what a magical, mysterious and spiritual
place the rainforest truly is.

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It was like entering the sixth dimension because
everything I had heard, everything I\'d seen on TV

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or read in books didn\'t
begin to really capture

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the majesty and wonder of these forests.
The colors, the sounds, the smells

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was just mind expanding.

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Kwamala is one of the most isolated
villages in all the Amazon

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and you can only get there by bush
plane flying for several hours.

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There\'s no roads. The rapids make the
river impassable. So it is a paradise

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cut off from the outside world.

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I was greeted by a lot of
Tiriyos and Redbridge class,

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some of the most friendly,
wonderful, magical, generous people

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I had ever seen or ever would see.

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It was one of the happiest
times of my life.

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[sil.]

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Well, you know, the old Jaguar Shaman was one of my first
mentors down here, the Jaguar Shaman who was described as

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the greatest healer. It was a very ambivalent
relationship because he resented the fact that

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I\'d come to learn his secrets. In
fact, he called me the pananakiri,

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which means \"The alien.\" I was another
species as far as he was concerned.

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Shaman is a medicine man or a woman who combines
different skills. He or she is a doctor,

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a philosopher, a singer of
songs, a keeper of legend,

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even the person who conveys
souls to the underworld.

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It\'s fashionable amongst the scientific
community to sort of look down at Shamanism.

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It\'s not scientific. It\'s not really valid. It\'s
an outdated worldview. But I prefer to think of it

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as a parallel worldview, one which is internally
coherent, makes a great deal of sense,

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which allows us to explain phenomena that we can\'t
understand before the prism of Western science.

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Professor Schultes wrote that Shamanism is the oldest
profession in the world contrary to popular opinion.

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Once shaman\'s and shamanistic
medicine dominated the planet,

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but through a variety of different
factors, shamanism has been extinguished

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either intentionally or by accident. Now we
have to go to the far corners of the world

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to find shaman\'s practicing
their sacred craft.

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As a saying I learned in Suriname which is Na boesi, ingi
sabe ala sani, in the bush the Indian knows everything.

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[sil.]

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And that really struck home with me because that paraphrase
something that Professor Schultes taught all of his students

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which is that in the forest these people
are the teachers and we are the students.

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[sil.]

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People dismiss these Native American
cultures in the rainforest as primitive,

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but I challenge anybody who thinks that to be
dropped in the rainforest and eke out a living.

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These Indians can find their food. They can make their weapons.
They can make their musical instruments. They can make their boats.

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They can make their houses. They can make their
hammocks out of local plants and we cannot do that.

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[sil.]

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[music]

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Schultes said that these native healers

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were nature\'s greatest geniuses when it came to
understanding plants and their healing abilities.

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[music]

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This plant is used as a snakebite medicine.
I\'ve only seen it three times in 20 years.

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It\'s never been examined in the laboratory.

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[music]

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This is the We-de tree, a tropical
nutmeg found throughout the Amazon.

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Schultes found the Indians using it to paint on fungal
infections of the skin. It seems to be very effective.

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[music]

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80% of the world\'s population relies
on plants in primary healthcare.

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That is four out of every five people living on planet
Earth use plants for medicine. Not the drugstore.

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Not the hospital. Not the medicine chest.
It\'s plants around the world.

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[music]

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[music]

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The Amazon is the largest, most
wonderful, most mysterious,

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least explored terrestrial
ecosystem in the world.

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The rainforest is the result of 3 billion years
of evolution and we destroy it at our peril.

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[music]

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When I was a kid going to school
in New Orleans, Louisiana,

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we learned that the rain forests were the bread baskets
of the future. They had all this great vegetation

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and they were gonna feed the world. Well, if you look at
the soils of the Amazon, they\'re amongst the most ancient,

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the most weathered. They\'re almost sand.
So when you destroy that forest,

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you\'re left with a sandbox. Nobody wants
to try and grow their crops in a sandbox.

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The life is locked into the forest.
When you remove the forest,

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it does not come back.

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Rainforests everywhere are under siege. Colleagues
at Harvard found the bark of a tree in Sarawak

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that had a compound which seemed to
knock HIV-1 right out of the test tube.

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When they went back to get more of the bark, they were
unable to do so because the tree had been cut down.

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Extinctions do happen and
everyone that does happen

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that we know about probably represents
100 more that we don\'t know about.

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That\'s how ignorant we are of the natural world
and that\'s how we are in a very real sense

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fouling our own nest.

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[music]

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The first shamans stood in the doorway

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between the worlds. The little
spirits of the rainforest plants

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spoke to him from the other side.
Tamo, they said,

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\"Grandfather, your people are hungry and
sick. We will teach you how to live.\"

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That\'s how the people learned.
They passed on the knowledge

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from parent to child. The river of light
flowed through the years without seasons.

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When the white man came to the forests,

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he took the gifts of the plant spirits back
across the ocean. There were wonderful new foods.

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Chocolate, food of the Gods,

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cassava, which feeds millions
of humans every day,

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chilies, pineapples, papayas,
peanuts and more, much more.

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The Indians showed the newcomer the
white blood of the forest, rubber,

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which made the wheels that drove the
engines of the strangers noisy world,

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and gifts of healing, flowers for fever,

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roots for parasites, fungi for infections,

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the bark of the cinchona tree made
bitter quinine to treat malaria

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the greatest man killer of them all.
From the poison called Curare

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made from a twisting vine, the
white man made a medicine

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that transformed his surgeries
and the plant spirits

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speak to the shamans still. They say,
Tamo, we bring you the energy of the Sun.

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We bring you gifts of things unknown.
Heal your aching soul with our beauty.

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[music]

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[sil.]

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[sil.]

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Fritz Van Troon has been

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a friend, a mentor, a teacher,
a father figure for me

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for much of the past 20 years.

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[sil.]

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Fritz\'s the maroon, a bush Negro. The Maroons
are brought over as slaves from Africa.

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They looked around and said hey, this is equatorial
rainforests. We\'ll see you white boys later.

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They set up these African cultures deep
in the jungles of the northeast Amazon.

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[sil.]

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[music]

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Fritz is the greatest botanical
genius I\'ve ever met.

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Fritz is somebody who
when you show him a tree

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gives you not only the maroon name for the tree,
he gives you the Indian name for the tree,

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the Dutch name, the English name, the
scientific name, the ecology of the tree,

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the pollination biology of the tree, the soil preference
of the tree, when it fruits, when it flowers,

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and when animal distributes the seeds.

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Botanists are trained to identify plants
by looking at the fruits or the flowers,

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essentially the reproductive part.
There\'s so many species in the Amazon

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it can be hard to tell these things apart especially since
they only produce fruit of flowers maybe one week a year.

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[music]

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Fritz can identify thousands
of plants to species

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just by looking at them, and not only identify them,
but tell you where they grow, how they\'re used,

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who uses them and for what purpose.
I\'m fond of saying

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who needs computers in the rain
forest when you have Fritz Van Troon.

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[music]

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We estimate that about 90% of the flowering plants
of the Amazon have already been identified.

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That means they have scientific names. Less
than 5% have been looked at in the laboratory

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in a really in-depth way and very few
of those have been studied to see

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what local peoples were using them for.

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[music]

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When you read the accounts of what
the Colonials here in Suriname did,

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it\'s pretty gruesome. Clearly,
these people had to flee

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the forest to survive, and it wasn\'t a
happy-go-lucky Garden of Eden existence

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because they didn\'t have that ancient tradition
to draw down on that the Indians had.

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So they had to use their own devices,
their own resources to learn new things.

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And it\'s just an absolutely incredible human experiment
if you think about it. But if they hadn\'t been so smart

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and they hadn\'t been so tough and they hadn\'t been
so resourceful, there wouldn\'t be any maroons today.

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[sil.]

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The great advantage of working with native peoples in the
forest is they understand these plants better than we do.

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They know these plants as living beings.

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Shamanic wisdom comes about in many ways.

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Clearly, they learn from watching the animals.
Clearly, they learn from generic experimentation.

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You slash the bark of a tree with your machete and sap
comes out red. It turns orange and it turns yellow.

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You know there\'s some wild chemistry happening there. Clearly, they
learn from the concept of bitters which is found in all cultures.

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If it\'s bitter, it may be good for you. Bitterness
often indicates the presence of alkaloids.

00:24:35.000 --> 00:24:39.999
Their medicine differs quite
a bit from the Indians.

00:24:40.000 --> 00:24:45.880
They may use the same species. They use it for a different purpose. They
use a different dosage. They use it to treat different medical conditions.

00:24:50.000 --> 00:24:54.999
For instance, the Indians don\'t get sickle-cell anemia.
So if you want to find new leads in the laboratory

00:24:55.000 --> 00:24:59.999
for treating sickle cell anemia in the United States of America,
you don\'t go work with the Indians. You work with the Maroons.

00:25:00.000 --> 00:25:08.000
[music]

00:25:30.000 --> 00:25:35.000
[sil.]

00:25:40.000 --> 00:25:44.999
Western medicine does not have good cures
for fungal infections of the skin.

00:25:45.000 --> 00:25:49.999
If you live in the rainforest, the hottest most humid environment
on earth, and you cannot cure fungal infections of the skin,

00:25:50.000 --> 00:25:55.000
you are a fungal infection of the skin.

00:26:25.000 --> 00:26:33.000
[music]

00:27:05.000 --> 00:27:13.000
[sil.]

00:27:25.000 --> 00:27:29.999
The great thing about ethnobotany is like the Chinese
box puzzle most of us had as kids where you open it up

00:27:30.000 --> 00:27:34.999
and there\'s another box inside, and you open it up and there\'s
another box inside. You open it up, there\'s another box inside.

00:27:35.000 --> 00:27:39.999
And just when you get to the smallest
box possible which you think

00:27:40.000 --> 00:27:44.999
holds the ultimate answer to the question, to the quest
you are on, to the question you\'re trying to have answer,

00:27:45.000 --> 00:27:49.999
you open it up and there\'s another box inside.
That\'s what working with shamans is really like.

00:27:50.000 --> 00:27:54.999
[sil.]

00:27:55.000 --> 00:27:59.999
Well, the Wayana Shaman once told me that

00:28:00.000 --> 00:28:04.999
we all have a sort of invisible blindfold over our eyes
and that\'s what keeps us from seeing into other worlds.

00:28:05.000 --> 00:28:09.999
To become a Shaman, he said, one simply
has to learn to remove that blindfold.

00:28:10.000 --> 00:28:14.999
[sil.]

00:28:15.000 --> 00:28:19.999
Shamans often attribute illness to the invasion of the body
by an evil spirit. But if you think in terms of analogy,

00:28:20.000 --> 00:28:24.999
couldn\'t that evil spirit be a bacteria?
Couldn\'t it be a virus?

00:28:25.000 --> 00:28:29.999
We shouldn\'t be so quick to dismiss
things we don\'t understand.

00:28:30.000 --> 00:28:34.999
Our system of medicine is as puzzling and baffling
to shamans as their system of healing is to us.

00:28:35.000 --> 00:28:40.000
And it\'s our arrogance which is denigrated
and even wiped out the shamanistic medicine.

00:28:45.000 --> 00:28:49.999
The shamans of European
culture in the Middle Ages

00:28:50.000 --> 00:28:54.999
were female herbalist who
applied moldy bread to wounds.

00:28:55.000 --> 00:28:59.999
If we hadn\'t labeled them as witches, we might have
had antibiotics long before Fleming\'s so-called

00:29:00.000 --> 00:29:04.999
discovery of penicillin
in moldy bread in 1929.

00:29:05.000 --> 00:29:09.999
What else would we have learned if we hadn\'t burned
them at the stake? And what else might we learn

00:29:10.000 --> 00:29:14.999
if we don\'t burn down the rainforest that
these modern herbalists are working in today?

00:29:15.000 --> 00:29:19.999
In the age of high-tech medicine,
in the age of new technology,

00:29:20.000 --> 00:29:24.999
there\'s many people who believe that this
technological approach has all the answers.

00:29:25.000 --> 00:29:29.999
But I don\'t believe that. I don\'t
see Western medicine able to heal

00:29:30.000 --> 00:29:34.999
all of our ills. Where\'s the cure for AIDS?
Where\'s the cure for diabetes?

00:29:35.000 --> 00:29:39.999
I believe that these shamans may hold
some of the secrets that can lead to

00:29:40.000 --> 00:29:44.999
new and effective cures.

00:29:45.000 --> 00:29:49.999
Nobody has a good scientific explanation of how the
Indians can mix together very different plants

00:29:50.000 --> 00:29:54.999
to create a hallucinogen and
arrow poison, a medicine?

00:29:55.000 --> 00:29:59.999
What we find now is that these combinations

00:30:00.000 --> 00:30:04.999
which have been dismissed in the past like curare
are actually very sophisticated chemical mixtures

00:30:05.000 --> 00:30:09.999
where plants that are inert when added to these poisons potentiate
the poison. That is they make them in effect more poisonous.

00:30:10.000 --> 00:30:14.999
So we now have to go back and re-examine
all of these shamanic potions

00:30:15.000 --> 00:30:19.999
because these guys in breach cloths and penis strings turn
out to be better chemists than we are in certain instances.

00:30:20.000 --> 00:30:24.999
[sil.]

00:30:25.000 --> 00:30:29.999
The rainforest is the greatest medical school on the planet and it\'s
only having the greatest teachers who know this University well

00:30:30.000 --> 00:30:34.999
who are the shamans themselves that allow you to understand
their system of healing and what it may offer to us

00:30:35.000 --> 00:30:39.999
here in the Western world.

00:30:40.000 --> 00:30:44.999
There are over 80,000 species of
flowering plants in the Amazon.

00:30:45.000 --> 00:30:49.999
How would you know what species
to use for what illness

00:30:50.000 --> 00:30:54.999
at what dosage level and what part of the
plant without the guidance of the shamans?

00:30:55.000 --> 00:30:59.999
Every useful plant

00:31:00.000 --> 00:31:04.999
that\'s come from the Amazon was first learned
of from medicine men and medicine women.

00:31:05.000 --> 00:31:09.999
[sil.]

00:31:10.000 --> 00:31:14.999
Ethnobotany unfortunately has been
something of a rape and run exercise,

00:31:15.000 --> 00:31:19.999
whether it\'s medicinal plants like quinine
or industrial plants like rubber,

00:31:20.000 --> 00:31:24.999
we took these from the Indians without compensating
for their knowledge or the use of these plants.

00:31:25.000 --> 00:31:30.000
This is no longer an acceptable
way of doing business.

00:31:50.000 --> 00:31:54.999
You know these are secrets. These… this is sacred.
I\'ve been criticized in the academic establishment

00:31:55.000 --> 00:31:59.999
for not publishing this stuff.
Well, I don\'t care.

00:32:00.000 --> 00:32:04.999
My job as I see it is to talk about the importance of it and if the
Indians want to share it, if the Indians want to have it analyzed

00:32:05.000 --> 00:32:09.999
in a laboratory, that\'s completely
up to them. What I want to do is

00:32:10.000 --> 00:32:14.999
help them make an informed choice to know the value of
what they have and to get them to do something about it.

00:32:15.000 --> 00:32:19.999
But unless they realize the
value of what they have,

00:32:20.000 --> 00:32:24.999
which many of them don\'t, unless the outside
world realizes the value of what they have,

00:32:25.000 --> 00:32:29.999
it\'s all gonna go up in smoke.

00:32:30.000 --> 00:32:38.000
[music]

00:32:40.000 --> 00:32:44.999
When the world began,
there was only one man.

00:32:45.000 --> 00:32:49.999
He had three pets a howler monkey,

00:32:50.000 --> 00:32:54.999
a parrot, and a vulture.

00:32:55.000 --> 00:32:59.999
One day, he returned from hunting to find
that someone had made cassava bread.

00:33:00.000 --> 00:33:04.999
In the morning he hid, and he watched
as his pets turn themselves into people

00:33:05.000 --> 00:33:09.999
and began to prepare the bread.
The monkey changed itself

00:33:10.000 --> 00:33:14.999
into a beautiful woman, and
she and the man were married.

00:33:15.000 --> 00:33:19.999
One day in the forest, a harpy eagle
showed the man his talons and said,

00:33:20.000 --> 00:33:24.999
\"This is my Curare.\" He showed
the man a vine and said,

00:33:25.000 --> 00:33:29.999
\'This is your Curare.\' The eagle
taught him how to prepare the poison

00:33:30.000 --> 00:33:34.999
and place it on his arrows.

00:33:35.000 --> 00:33:39.999
In the forest, the man killed all the
howler monkeys with his new arrows

00:33:40.000 --> 00:33:44.999
until there was only one left, a female.
Please don\'t shoot me, she begged.

00:33:45.000 --> 00:33:49.999
But the man killed her anyway.

00:33:50.000 --> 00:33:54.999
When she fell to the ground dead, the monkey
turned into the body of the man\'s beautiful wife.

00:33:55.000 --> 00:33:59.999
Oh, it was a high price to pay

00:34:00.000 --> 00:34:04.999
for such powerful knowledge.

00:34:05.000 --> 00:34:09.999
[music]

00:34:10.000 --> 00:34:14.999
Well, we hear a lot about the disappearance of the rainforest has been on
the cover of Time magazine. It\'s been on the cover of The New York Times.

00:34:15.000 --> 00:34:19.999
But what is less widely realized is
that the peoples of the rainforest

00:34:20.000 --> 00:34:24.999
are disappearing much faster
than the rainforest itself.

00:34:25.000 --> 00:34:29.999
In the 20th century, over
90 tribes of Indians

00:34:30.000 --> 00:34:34.999
went extinct in Brazil alone that we know
about. Who knows how many others disappeared?

00:34:35.000 --> 00:34:39.999
Every one of these tribes had a
knowledge about medicinal plants,

00:34:40.000 --> 00:34:44.999
and that knowledge is gone.
It will never be recaptured.

00:34:45.000 --> 00:34:49.999
The Tiriyos were missionized

00:34:50.000 --> 00:34:54.999
in the 60s by American missionaries.
They were essentially taught that

00:34:55.000 --> 00:34:59.999
their religion was backwards primitive and wrong
and they needed to accept Western religion.

00:35:00.000 --> 00:35:04.999
They were taught they couldn\'t sing their songs. They
couldn\'t wear their dress that their culture, their medicine,

00:35:05.000 --> 00:35:09.999
their language, their dress was
something to be ashamed of.

00:35:10.000 --> 00:35:14.999
When the Explorer Farabee made contact with the Tiriyos in
the 1800s, he wrote that he didn\'t speak a word of Tiriyo.

00:35:15.000 --> 00:35:19.999
But they danced these dances off
all the animals of the forest

00:35:20.000 --> 00:35:24.999
and they were so good at it that he
recognized every animal immediately.

00:35:25.000 --> 00:35:29.999
Well, here we are now over a century later

00:35:30.000 --> 00:35:34.999
and the last few old men who remember those dances are still
there, but they haven\'t done those dances for over 30 years.

00:35:35.000 --> 00:35:39.999
They were discouraged or
even forbidden to do so

00:35:40.000 --> 00:35:44.999
either by missionary activity or by the chief who was
convinced that they shouldn\'t be doing that anymore

00:35:45.000 --> 00:35:49.999
by the activity of outsiders.

00:35:50.000 --> 00:35:54.999
[sil.]

00:35:55.000 --> 00:35:59.999
Well, the Indians really suffered from a two-fisted
assault. We introduced diseases like tuberculosis,

00:36:00.000 --> 00:36:04.999
which as far as we know the Shaman\'s cannot
cure and then we gave them Western medicines

00:36:05.000 --> 00:36:09.999
to treat some of the diseases we introduced.
But the fact of the matter is we undercut

00:36:10.000 --> 00:36:14.999
the belief in the ability of the Shaman to
heal. We undercut many of the belief systems

00:36:15.000 --> 00:36:19.999
that held these cultures in place and then these cultures
were in essence cut adrift. And it\'s hardly surprising that

00:36:20.000 --> 00:36:24.999
they think that we have all the answers.

00:36:25.000 --> 00:36:29.999
[sil.]

00:36:30.000 --> 00:36:34.999
It\'s very seductive Western civilization,

00:36:35.000 --> 00:36:39.999
boom boxes, electricity,
electric razors, VCRs.

00:36:40.000 --> 00:36:44.999
And I don\'t think we should be denying people that I don\'t think
it\'s right for us to decide what people get and what they don\'t get.

00:36:45.000 --> 00:36:49.999
But seeing people trade an entire culture
for the geegaws of Western culture,

00:36:50.000 --> 00:36:54.999
trading in all their traditional music for
Madonna, it shouldn\'t be an either/or situation.

00:36:55.000 --> 00:36:59.999
[sil.]

00:37:00.000 --> 00:37:04.999
I fear for these people.

00:37:05.000 --> 00:37:09.999
I fear for the future of all people.

00:37:10.000 --> 00:37:14.999
We turn the planet in one giant cesspool. When I hear
these pinheads say, well, extinction has always happened,

00:37:15.000 --> 00:37:19.999
well, excuse me, but I don\'t want to live in a world
which is populated only by roaches and pigeons

00:37:20.000 --> 00:37:24.999
in terms of wildlife. And
that\'s the price we pay

00:37:25.000 --> 00:37:29.999
unless we have better practices at
managing and protecting the Earth.

00:37:30.000 --> 00:37:34.999
So, yeah, I fear for these people. They\'re on the cutting
edge. They\'re likely to disappear a lot faster than we are.

00:37:35.000 --> 00:37:39.999
But I believe that our culture, our
future, our heritage, our medicine

00:37:40.000 --> 00:37:44.999
is intricately intertwined with their future.
So it\'s not them or us. It\'s both of us.

00:37:45.000 --> 00:37:53.000
[music]

00:38:10.000 --> 00:38:14.999
The basic first step of botanical research in the
rainforest is collecting a plant, putting it in your press,

00:38:15.000 --> 00:38:19.999
drying out the specimen and storing it in
a herbarium with the name of the plant

00:38:20.000 --> 00:38:25.000
where it grows and perhaps
what the people use it for.

00:38:30.000 --> 00:38:34.999
Herbaria are in a sense
botanical libraries.

00:38:35.000 --> 00:38:39.999
This is where people store dried specimens from around the
world. And when you want to do research on a particular specimen

00:38:40.000 --> 00:38:44.999
or in a particular country, you go
into the herbaria and find the plants

00:38:45.000 --> 00:38:49.999
that come from the area in
which you want to research.

00:38:50.000 --> 00:38:54.999
Schultes collected somewhere in the
neighborhood of 24,000 different species

00:38:55.000 --> 00:38:59.999
of flowering plants, many of which were new to
science. When they tested them in the laboratory

00:39:00.000 --> 00:39:04.999
some of the active principle, some of the chemicals
that made them medicinally valuable didn\'t work.

00:39:05.000 --> 00:39:09.999
Technology has in a sense caught up with him because
we can now find, analyze and manipulate molecules

00:39:10.000 --> 00:39:14.999
from these plants in ways that weren\'t
possible when he was doing the research

00:39:15.000 --> 00:39:19.999
in an age where we don\'t have a cure for schizophrenia,
deep depression, impotence, most viruses,

00:39:20.000 --> 00:39:24.999
drug-resistant bacteria, it makes all
the sense in the world to go back

00:39:25.000 --> 00:39:29.999
to those riches that he collected
and documented so many years ago.

00:39:30.000 --> 00:39:34.999
When I started in 1982

00:39:35.000 --> 00:39:39.999
the chief said, \"Why do you want to learn this stuff?\" He said,
\"This is old-fashioned. We don\'t use this stuff much anymore.

00:39:40.000 --> 00:39:44.999
We now have Western medicine.\" And I said, \"Well, I
heard that you almost died of malaria.\" And he said,

00:39:45.000 --> 00:39:49.999
\"Yes, that\'s true.\" And I said, \"Well, what… what… what did
you do?\" He says, \"Well, the missionaries gave me quinine.\"

00:39:50.000 --> 00:39:54.999
And I said, \"Really.\" I said, \"Do you know that the quinine
is an Indian medicine? It was taught to the white man

00:39:55.000 --> 00:39:59.999
by native peoples to the west of here.\"
Well, nobody ever told him that.

00:40:00.000 --> 00:40:04.999
And I knew that he was a religious man. I
said, \"Well, you know, chief, I\'m Jewish.

00:40:05.000 --> 00:40:09.999
Jesus is from my tribe. \" And I said,
\" If my ancestors hadn\'t written down

00:40:10.000 --> 00:40:14.999
Jesus\' sermons and if my ancestors hadn\'t written down the Bible,
you wouldn\'t have these things to read in church on Sunday.\"

00:40:15.000 --> 00:40:19.999
And I said, \"If we don\'t work together write down your
wisdom, then your grandchildren and my grandchildren

00:40:20.000 --> 00:40:24.999
won\'t be able to learn from it in the future.\" Well, that made a pretty
good impression on him and he gave me permission to work in the village.

00:40:25.000 --> 00:40:29.999
Well, I kept my part of the bargain

00:40:30.000 --> 00:40:34.999
and after year eight, I presented him
with a manuscript of 300 different plants

00:40:35.000 --> 00:40:39.999
that his people had used traditionally for medicinal purposes.
He called a meeting in the jungle to which I was not invited.

00:40:40.000 --> 00:40:44.999
And the next day my friend (inaudible) came out and said chief
says this stuff is important. He says I\'m to work with you

00:40:45.000 --> 00:40:49.999
in the Jaguar Shaman to translate
this into our language.

00:40:50.000 --> 00:40:54.999
So we will have it to use on our own to perpetuate
our own traditions. Up until then they had one book

00:40:55.000 --> 00:40:59.999
in their language. Well, now they
have two books in their language:

00:41:00.000 --> 00:41:05.000
the Holy Bible and the (inaudible)
the Tiriyo plant medicine handbook.

00:41:35.000 --> 00:41:43.000
[non-English narration]

00:41:55.000 --> 00:41:59.999
This diabetes medicine seemed to work. I worked with a
physician on this. He said her blood sugar level was 536

00:42:00.000 --> 00:42:04.999
and the potion dropped it to 136 in 12 hours. But
when I took it back to the laboratory in the States,

00:42:05.000 --> 00:42:09.999
they couldn\'t figure out how it worked
because they tested chemical one,

00:42:10.000 --> 00:42:14.999
then chemical two, then chemical three,
they couldn\'t find the magic bullet.

00:42:15.000 --> 00:42:19.999
When I asked the Shaman, he said, \"There is no magic bullet.
It\'s all of those different things working together.\"

00:42:20.000 --> 00:42:24.999
Western medicine, Western science isn\'t
geared up to deal with that complexity.

00:42:25.000 --> 00:42:29.999
And so in looking for that magic
bullet, we may have lost everything.

00:42:30.000 --> 00:42:34.999
Maybe in the future, we\'ll have the technology that will
allow us to replicate all of these natural products

00:42:35.000 --> 00:42:39.999
in the laboratory. But at this point the Shaman
understands things that I believe we do not.

00:42:40.000 --> 00:42:44.999
[sil.]

00:42:45.000 --> 00:42:53.000
[music]

00:42:55.000 --> 00:42:59.999
Perhaps the hardest for Westerners to fathom
understand accept are the language of dreams.

00:43:00.000 --> 00:43:04.999
I\'ve had Shamans say to me uh… they took a hallucinating
plant and they dreamed a cure for something.

00:43:05.000 --> 00:43:09.999
I\'ve had Shaman say to me they took a nap and they dreamed
about a plant and that\'s a successful treatment for something.

00:43:10.000 --> 00:43:14.999
Well, if you think about the history of Western
science and Kekulé was trying to figure out

00:43:15.000 --> 00:43:19.999
the structure of the benzene molecule, he couldn\'t figure out,
couldn\'t figure out, couldn\'t figure it out. So he went to sleep

00:43:20.000 --> 00:43:24.999
and in his sleep he had a dream and in his
dream he saw some snakes. And in his dream

00:43:25.000 --> 00:43:29.999
the snakes started chasing each other and he
woke up and said Eureka, Benzene is a ring

00:43:30.000 --> 00:43:34.999
as indeed it is. So when witch
doctors dream of things,

00:43:35.000 --> 00:43:39.999
we say, \"Oh, that\'s mumbo-jumbo.\" When Westerners
dream of something, we say, \"Oh, scientific process.\"

00:43:40.000 --> 00:43:44.999
[music]

00:43:45.000 --> 00:43:49.999
I had a particularly unnerving experience
once with a Shaman and a dream.

00:43:50.000 --> 00:43:58.000
[music]

00:44:25.000 --> 00:44:29.999
[sil.]

00:44:30.000 --> 00:44:34.999
In the morning when I
saw Tamo and said that

00:44:35.000 --> 00:44:39.999
I have had this incredible dream about the
Jaguar, he broke into a big smile and said,

00:44:40.000 --> 00:44:44.999
\"That was me.\" I think
that was a turning point

00:44:45.000 --> 00:44:49.999
in our relationship. It really broke through the
barrier between the different realities we lived in

00:44:50.000 --> 00:44:54.999
and gave me a glimpse, just a glimpse into the fact that,
you know, people who could turn themselves into Jaguars,

00:44:55.000 --> 00:44:59.999
people who could roam the jungle at
night or as real to them as lawyers

00:45:00.000 --> 00:45:04.999
and mortgages are to us. And dismissing something
I couldn\'t understand, dismissing something

00:45:05.000 --> 00:45:09.999
that may seem strange or weird or silly to me
would have been the absolute worst thing to do.

00:45:10.000 --> 00:45:14.999
Just by accepting something I could not explain and
understand through the prism of Western science

00:45:15.000 --> 00:45:19.999
I think created something of a bond uh… and has facilitated
a relationship which continues 17 years later.

00:45:20.000 --> 00:45:28.000
[sil.]

00:45:30.000 --> 00:45:34.999
Nothing breaks my heart more than to walk into these
villages and see these ancient shamanic geniuses possessors

00:45:35.000 --> 00:45:39.999
of 50,000 years of healing wisdom who\'ve
been marginalized and shunted aside

00:45:40.000 --> 00:45:44.999
because the kids have been taught that
Western culture is where it\'s at.

00:45:45.000 --> 00:45:49.999
When you teach people that everything they know in terms of
healing is wrong and backwards and primitive and stupid,

00:45:50.000 --> 00:45:54.999
it\'s hardly surprising that the kids don\'t
wanna follow the sacred path of the Shaman.

00:45:55.000 --> 00:45:59.999
[sil.]

00:46:00.000 --> 00:46:04.999
It\'s not too much of an exaggeration to
say that the most endangered species

00:46:05.000 --> 00:46:09.999
in the Amazon is the Shaman himself.

00:46:10.000 --> 00:46:14.999
[non-English narration]

00:46:15.000 --> 00:46:19.999
When the shaman dies, in a preliterate
culture, it\'s like a library burning down.

00:46:20.000 --> 00:46:24.999
In fact, it\'s worse because everything that\'s
in the Library of Congress is found elsewhere.

00:46:25.000 --> 00:46:29.999
There\'s Gutenberg Bibles found elsewhere. There are
transcripts of the Declaration of Independence

00:46:30.000 --> 00:46:34.999
found everywhere. So if the archives burns down, it would
be a terrible loss, but we still know what\'s in there.

00:46:35.000 --> 00:46:39.999
We have copies of it. When these oral
traditions are gone, they are gone for ever.

00:46:40.000 --> 00:46:44.999
There\'s no bringing them back.

00:46:45.000 --> 00:46:53.000
[non-English narration]

00:46:55.000 --> 00:46:59.999
We\'re standing at the edge of a precipice.
Here we are scrambling

00:47:00.000 --> 00:47:04.999
to save the rainforest, scrambling to find
new medicines for diseases that plague us,

00:47:05.000 --> 00:47:09.999
and thousands and thousands and thousands
of years of accumulated human wisdom

00:47:10.000 --> 00:47:14.999
is gonna disappear over the edge of
that precipice and the next generation

00:47:15.000 --> 00:47:19.999
unless we work to protect it.

00:47:20.000 --> 00:47:24.999
[music]

00:47:25.000 --> 00:47:29.999
I realize that not only could I not collect all of this
ethnobotanical wisdom, but then an army of ethnobotanists

00:47:30.000 --> 00:47:34.999
wouldn\'t be sufficient to collect all this wisdom. I had
to work with the Indians to come up with another plan.

00:47:35.000 --> 00:47:39.999
The Shaman\'s Apprentice Program.

00:47:40.000 --> 00:47:44.999
The Shaman\'s Apprentice Program works to get the young kids in
these tribes throughout the Amazon to take on the task themselves

00:47:45.000 --> 00:47:49.999
of learning from the ancients and
being able to transmit that knowledge

00:47:50.000 --> 00:47:54.999
on to the next generations from there.

00:47:55.000 --> 00:47:59.999
In the case of the Jaguar Shaman, I was the only one who wanted to work
with him. Everybody else thought this information was old-fashioned,

00:48:00.000 --> 00:48:04.999
but by starting the Shaman\'s Apprentice Program and
getting the young people of the tribe interested,

00:48:05.000 --> 00:48:09.999
he\'s not only considered once
again a cherished wise elder,

00:48:10.000 --> 00:48:14.999
but his grandson is now working with him as
are other kids in the village to collect, use

00:48:15.000 --> 00:48:19.999
and pass on his ancient healing wisdom.

00:48:20.000 --> 00:48:24.999
The Shaman\'s Apprentice Program works

00:48:25.000 --> 00:48:29.999
throughout the Amazon by giving the shamans
a stipend to cover the cost of their time

00:48:30.000 --> 00:48:34.999
to put aside their labors to work with the
young people to transmit this knowledge

00:48:35.000 --> 00:48:39.999
and by giving the apprentices a small stipend
so they can afford to focus on their studies,

00:48:40.000 --> 00:48:44.999
which are very rigorous, very demanding. And I might
add that not all of the apprentices make the cut.

00:48:45.000 --> 00:48:49.999
Hey, not everybody gets
into med school either.

00:48:50.000 --> 00:48:54.999
[non-English narration]

00:48:55.000 --> 00:48:59.999
It\'s not just about whether they have the cure for cancer, AIDS
or… or whether they don\'t. That\'s not gonna save the culture.

00:49:00.000 --> 00:49:04.999
Every human culture has an inherent worth.

00:49:05.000 --> 00:49:09.999
There\'s something we can learn from it. There\'s something
that can benefit us and if it\'s not in material terms,

00:49:10.000 --> 00:49:14.999
that\'s not the ultimate measure of it. And the
point of the Shaman\'s Apprentice Program is

00:49:15.000 --> 00:49:19.999
to help them realize it.

00:49:20.000 --> 00:49:24.999
I would say the great
success of my research

00:49:25.000 --> 00:49:29.999
and of my work has been learning from
these people and being able to help them

00:49:30.000 --> 00:49:34.999
to seize control of their environmental and
cultural destiny and to make sure that

00:49:35.000 --> 00:49:39.999
the world into which their kids and their grandkids,
and my kids and my grandkids are born into

00:49:40.000 --> 00:49:44.999
is hopefully as rich and as interesting
as the world that we were born into.

00:49:45.000 --> 00:49:49.999
I\'ve seen so much in terms of opportunity

00:49:50.000 --> 00:49:54.999
and I\'ve seen so much in terms of destruction
and loss. Having seen both ends of the spectrum

00:49:55.000 --> 00:49:59.999
pushes me on to try and make a difference.
Individuals do make a difference,

00:50:00.000 --> 00:50:04.999
but not by themselves. These
Indians need our help

00:50:05.000 --> 00:50:09.999
in protecting their lands
and their culture.

00:50:10.000 --> 00:50:14.999
But we need their help in protecting our
culture, our medicine, our world as well.

00:50:15.000 --> 00:50:23.000
[music]

00:50:35.000 --> 00:50:39.999
The first Tiriyo went for a walk in
the forest. Old Aware stopped him.

00:50:40.000 --> 00:50:44.999
\"You can speak to a rock\" he warned.
\"But if a tree talks to you,

00:50:45.000 --> 00:50:49.999
don\'t answer.\" In the forest

00:50:50.000 --> 00:50:54.999
the man heard a big sound. He thought it was
a rock calling to him. So he answered it.

00:50:55.000 --> 00:50:59.999
But there in his path was a tree

00:51:00.000 --> 00:51:04.999
which had just fallen.

00:51:05.000 --> 00:51:09.999
Aware said to the Tiriyo, \"Now you
will be like the trees. You will die.

00:51:10.000 --> 00:51:14.999
If only you had waited to speak to a rock,

00:51:15.000 --> 00:51:19.999
you would be immortal like the spirits.\"

00:51:20.000 --> 00:51:25.000
[music]

00:51:30.000 --> 00:51:35.000
[music]