Integrating Medical Systems

Integrating Medical Systems: Acaté supporting the integration of traditional medicine practices and enhancing external health care delivery to the Matsés people in the Peruvian Amazon!

The erosion of traditional medicine and culture has imparted a devastating effect on the self-sufficiency and health of indigenous peoples worldwide. The acculturation of Amazonian peoples has been, at best, a difficult transition. Most tribes usually suffer a profound loss of cultural identity and social cohesion, if not extinction. Traditional knowledge and beliefs are no longer valued and passed down to younger generations. As a result, much of the wisdom of the elders, including the healing knowledge of the shamans, is being irreplaceably lost at a rapid pace. Lacking their own systems of healing, these tribes become totally dependent on the rudimentary external health care available in remote and low external resource settings.

Before Acaté’s traditional medicine initiatives, none of the remaining elder Matsés shamans had apprentices to pass on their ancestral knowledge of the rainforest accumulated over countless generations. Their entire ancestral healing knowledge was inarguably on the precipice of extinction. Now a decade later, the Matsés have created the historic first indigenous medicinal encyclopedia to worldwide attention and acclaim and now have restored Healing Forests in all of their villages. We are seeing young Matsés men and women, who constantly face racism and discrimination in their interactions with the outside world, emerge as the next generation of Matsés healers with a renewed pride in their culture and determination to carry on the proud legacy of their people. Acaté has provided support for their advanced training with the elder healers.

Integrating Medical Systems

The next phase is to build collaboration through integrating traditional medical practices and enhancing external health care delivery, based on a successful and replicable model developed and implemented by project team members in other Amazonian communities.

In 2020, Acaté and the Peruvian Ministry of Health (Ministerio de Salud) signed a Memorandum of Understanding for collaboration to advance initiatives to improve health care delivery to Matsés communities.

Learn more about Acaté’s Integrating Medical Systems programs in the following links and field reports:

July 2020 Field Report – Emergency relief efforts in the COVID-19 pandemic

The Matsés are revitalizing a living heathcare system

Acaté Amazon Conservation is a non-profit conservation organization based in the United States and Perú that is an extraordinary partnership of the Matsés indigenous people and dedicated conservationists with decades of experience. The Matsés indigenous people live along the tributaries of the upper Javari River, in the heart of the Amazon Basin of what is now the present day border between northeastern Peru and Brazil. The Matsés are famed as fierce warriors due to their defeat of the rubber tappers who invaded their territory early in the 20th century and their long conflict against frontier colonizers backed by the Peruvian military. Peaceful contact with the outside world began in 1969 when they accepted a meeting with missionaries. Today, the Matsés still live by hunting, fishing and farming but in family homes in permanent villages instead of in communal longhouses in temporary villages.

The Matsés safeguard a vast and biodiverse corridor of intact primary rainforest as well as shield some of the last remaining uncontacted tribal groups in isolation from unwanted encroachment from the outside world.

All of Acaté’s projects are developed in a close partnership with, led, and implemented by the Matsés indigenous people. We operate through implementing strategic programs and real-on-the-ground initiatives that help them protect their chosen way of life, traditions, their ancestral lands and ecology. The on-the-ground conservation initiatives are capacity-building and designed to support their self-sufficiency and independence. Acaté operates with unparalleled integrity and transparency in its operations, partnerships, and reporting.

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