Serä Foundation
The Serä Foundation is an NGO founded by six young people from Siekoya Remolino to meet the grassroots needs of the Siekopai people. We work to strengthen the cultural and spiritual identity of the Siekopai Nation, as well as to defend our territory from extractive threats.
We named the Foundation after the swallow-tailed kite, a bird that in our cosmovision represents the spirit of heaven that arrives every Kakotëkawë (summer) to bring hope and announce a new beginning.
The Sëra Foundation dates back to 2016, when two young cinematographers, Jimmy Piaguaje and Ribaldo Piaguaje, began videoing our elders when they were harvesting medicinal plants. They published the videos online as an innovative way to safeguard ancestral shamanic knowledge. They then branched out into running school workshops for intergenerational exchange between the elders, parents and children, to discuss ancestral knowledge, medicinal plants, and the threats that we face.
In 2018, four other young people - Liliana Piaguaje, Yadira Ocuguaje, Ruth Piaguaje and Joffre Piaguaje - joined the project, each bringing different skills. Liliana focuses on alternative education; Yadira is passionate about ancestral Siekopai ceramics; Ruth is completing a degree in administration; and Joffre is a key figure in our ecotourism project. British author and activist Beth Pitts has been helping us to organize since 2020.
The Foundation was legally established in 2022 after three years of battling against endless bureaucratic obstacles and discrimination by the State. We are eternally grateful to our allies at Fundación Raíz for providing us with free legal assistance with this, and for supporting us in many other ways.
Our areas of focus have broadened and now include:
• Conservation of our territory
• Food sovereignty
• Alternative education
• Regenerative economy
Much of our work is made possible thanks to the amazing generosity of the donors to our crowdfunding campaign, who have contributed over $17,000 in the last three years. We have used these funds in a variety of ways, from organising traditional crafts workshops, to purchasing bottles and jars for our morete products. In 2022, we coordinated a visit for 18 people in the community to learn about sustainable fish farming, installed a satellite internet connection, and provided two of our young people with laptops. In 2023, we contributed funds towards the construction of our new nursery school, and organized a two-day social media course for 20 of our young people. For detailed information on how we use our donations, see our crowdfunding campaign.
Since the Foundation was established, our greatest allies have been the amazing people at Big Canopy Campout. BCC raises funds for the protection of native forests by selling custom climbing equipment and organizing the world’s largest annual treetop camping event. When BCC chose the Sëra Foundation as their cause to support in 2021, we used the funds to organise a ten-day research tour. First, we visited the Bosque Escuela Pambiliño, a forest school that offers experiential education and sees the forest as the main source of knowledge. Next, we visited the indigenous Kichwa community of Sarayaku, which has been at the forefront of the battle to defend the Amazon for three decades. It was a historic occasion, the first time that representatives of the Siekopai Nation had visited Sarayaku. The tour was a milestone for the Sëra Foundation and was a springboard for much of our work to come. It showed us so many inspiring possibilities and we formed some wonderful alliances that continue to flourish. For some of us, it was the first time we had travelled outside our local area.
We were thrilled when BCC chose the Sëra Foundation as their cause to support again in 2022! We used the funds raised to purchase distillation equipment for our medicinal plants laboratory, which was handmade for us by our great ally Juan Arcos. The Sëra Foundation arranged for Juan to visit the community several times, to conduct experiments on medicinal plants with our wise elder Fanny and her daughter Maricela, who has become a member of our group.
In 2023, when BCC decided to support us for the third year, we asked them to raise funds to build a plants laboratory that will meet the standards required for a government-issued hygiene certificate. This will enable us to sell our products in stores and deliver nationwide via courier. We already have the designs for the lab; the next step is to build it!
In September 2023, the Sëra Foundation coordinated an expedition with BCC, who visited Siekoya Remolino to train eight people in the community to climb trees using professional equipment. This enables us to safely harvest fruit from the morete palm, which we use to make jams, juices and oils. These products will improve our food sovereignty and provide us with a sustainable source of income. Until now, we have been unable to harvest much morete fruit because, while it grows abundantly in our territory, the trees are tall and don’t have branches for climbing. While it is possible to climb the palms using the ancestral technique of vines, it is extremely dangerous. In the interests of conserving our territory, we have been unwilling to fell the trees to harvest the fruit. Thanks to the training and equipment provided by BCC, we can now safely harvest morete. The climbing skills will also be invaluable in harvesting ayahuasca, and the kopal that we use for our ceramics. In the future, we hope to install camera traps in our canopy to investigate the treetop fauna, and possibly even incorporate climbing into our ecotourism project!
Accompanying the BCC expedition was an expert web designer who helped us to create this beautiful website with the assistance of two young women in our community, Ruth and Edna Piaguaje. An expert herbalist was also present, to help us develop new products using ingredients from our territory. These include clay face masks with powdered medicinal plants, and moisturising creams made with cacao butter and plant oils.
In 2024, we will be very focused on the construction of our plant laboratory and finalising our range of natural products.
More information on the Sëra Foundation will soon be available on our website , which is still under construction and is for now available only in Spanish.