THE KOGUI
“The Earth is a living body. It has veins and blood. Damaging certain places is like cutting off a limb. It damages the whole body.”
- Mamo Pedro Juan
Who they are
The Kogui are a spiritually connected community located in the northern coast of Colombia.
They are one of the four remaining Indigenous peoples in this region, who survived colonisation and have since then been pushed up to the highlands of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, where they live in isolation, caring for this territory.
They believe their purpose in life is to be “Guardians of the Earth”, caring for her through sacred sites (la linea negra or black line) located across the Sierra Nevada, which act as sites of balance for the rest of the world.
What they do
The Kogui people have a very deep and special connection to Earth. They believe that we are an intricate part of nature, and so her wellbeing is our wellbeing and caring for her is also caring for ourselves. This also means that everything we take from her should always be reciprocated, in this way we are able to maintain planetary balance and keep the natural cycle of life.
Through pagamentos (spiritual offerings) they keep this energetic flow and reciprocity between humanity and nature. They see how nature offers us all we need; water, air, and food. So in exchange we should look after her and practice these spiritual offerings.
Their work has been crucial for environmental protection and climate change and their ancestral system of knowledge is now recognised as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity by the UNESCO.
We work collectively with the Kogui community to support their projects on recovering the ancestral land that has been taken away from them through colonisation and years of internal conflict.
These lands are not only sacred, but are also lands where they grew Cacao traditionally. They are slowly recovering some of these territories where they are now able to grow Cacao, other fruit and medicinal plants.
Due to modern culture and government-maintained education systems, the Kogui knowledge is under threat of disappearing. Through our projects we aim to support them so that this ancestral wisdom is passed on to younger generations.
