A Kichwa Perspective on Climate Action from Johnson Cerda

“I was born in the middle of the jungle, where we are connected by river—not by road.”

By the time he was eight years old, Johnson Cerda found himself alone at Lake Limoncocha every day after school. His household chores were to fish for his family’s meals, and he took it upon himself to catch extra for families in need. One day, he met two kittens on his walk home. Their fluffy and spotted fur framed large blue eyes and tickled his underarms as he tucked one beneath each arm. He walked back, without any fish, but with two new pets.

“No, no, no. You have to put them back. Why did you bring these home?” his mother asked as soon as he headed inside.

Johnson wanted to protest, but he did not question his mother when she said, “You must put them back. Otherwise, the mom will come here at night to get her kids, and you will face problems.”

That night, Johnson went with his friends to drop off the fuzzy kittens where he found them. The floor of the jungle was covered in footprints from a mother jaguar who had paced back and forth, searching for her little ones.

Johnson Cerda is Kichwa, a diverse group of Indigenous peoples who inhabit both highland and Amazonian regions of Ecuador. He grew up in the Amazonian village of Limoncocha, where the forest was his home, the rivers were his roads, and the wildlife were his playmates. Protecting them would become his life’s work.

Now, Cerda lives and works mainly in Washington, D.C., where he is a senior director for the Global Executing Agency for Conservation International and a member of the Board of Trustees for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. After weeks of online correspondence, I met with him under the shaded covering of the Narrative Stage at the 2024 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, which focused on Indigenous Voices of the Americas.

In the time leading up to the Festival, Cerda had been in and out of climate conferences in Germany and had facilitated cross-cultural teachings in the Brazilian Amazon. In the remaining weeks of summer, he would travel to his village of Limoncocha, to Guatemala, and to South Africa. His life is filled with intercultural connections and jet lag, and he carries his Indigenous Amazon background with him through every step of his work in global climate negotiations.

Growing up in the jungle, where he developed his enthusiasm for community work, has informed Cerda’s work in international climate negotiations. He told me that recognizing the importance of community work is critical to the climate movement.

“When I’m invited to speak in Amazonian high schools, the first thing I do is ask the students if they believe their community work is important. Most of them say ‘no,’” he said, but in his experience, every grassroots action in climate change mitigation or environmental care is directly related to work happening at the political level. “Sometimes we don’t see that connection, and we don’t care about community work because it feels unimportant.”

Cerda’s introduction to climate advocacy was rooted in such engagement. His father served as the community president in Limoncocha for many years, involving his son wherever he could. Cerda found he had a passion for helping people and animals alike; he fished for needy families and tore snakes from vulnerable bird nests with his bare hands. This passion, and his experience with his father, sparked Cerda’s initial aspirations to become a lawyer. He received a master’s in political science from Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja but decided, instead, to focus on activism and community engagement.

Largely, Cerda’s job is to bridge the gap between Indigenous peoples globally and the governmental proceedings of dominant societies through an exchange of knowledge.

“We are trying to use this platform to bring up knowledge holders to share our practices for resilience, adaptation, mitigation, in order to contribute and create policy,” he said.

Indigenous people are and have been attuned to their environments and the practices necessary to maintain them for centuries. “We know how to avoid disasters in our communities,” Cerda said. “We are connected with the signals that we receive from the river, from the birds, from the snails.”

For Cerda, wild boar is an important signal of environmental change in the Amazon as well. A typical wet season in the jungle means fruit and more fruit. The diverse number of birds in Limoncocha and the rodents feast on the fruit, swelling to an optimal plumpness for the hungry wild boar. Kichwa people in Limoncocha hunt and prepare wild boar for dinner. But recently, when Cerda sat down to eat with his friends, the uncharacteristic lack of fat on a particular boar caused them to scrap the meal entirely. This boar did not have its pick of plump rodents, because the rodents did not have their pick of juicy fruits, because the rainy season had lasted too long, because of a changing climate. In these communities, assessing the impacts of climate change has become a part of daily life, as Kichwa culture in the Amazon is rooted within the physical environment.

“For us, the forest is sacred,” Cerda declared to the audience when he joined a narrative session on “Sacred Spaces and Industrial Development” during this year’s Folklife Festival. From what he told me, the greens and browns and vibrant pops of vegetation and wildlife in Limoncocha are overwhelming. Wind, rain, bird, and animal sounds create a soundscape of peace and nature. It is hard to enter the Amazon without feeling the spirituality in the air, he said. Just as the forest is full of living and changing beings, for the people who live there, its spirituality is dynamic as well.

Community leaders of Limoncocha warn of areas in the forest where one must tread carefully or avoid, and the people listen. At times, they have identified monsters in their lake; the community leaders know and warn the village. Some spaces within the forest are sacred for the shaman, where they practice and nobody else enters. There are spaces designated as sacred to the women where they go to plant and pick fruits. And a space exists, near a lake, where everyone goes to learn about medicinal plants, to hunt, fish, and be immersed in the spiritual atmosphere of their sacred forest. But as Cerda described, when Indigenous communities lose sovereignty over their land, they have no control over what might happen to it and where and when they can conduct their own cultural practices.

Cerda, once again, used the wild boar to illuminate this reality for his community. Across the river from Limoncocha is Yasuní National Park, where the Ecuadorian government owns and protects everything within its boundaries. Before the national park was established and before climate change wreaked havoc on migration patterns, boars would migrate from the land the park now encompasses to Limoncocha in groups of hundreds. Traditionally, the Kichwa people hunt boar for food and ceremony, but now they are unsure if they can continue this cultural practice. The boar within the park are protected by the government, but this status becomes unclear once they leave those boundaries. These wild boars exemplify governmental sovereignty over the land and its resources and the confusion that ensues when cultural traditions and rights conflict with state-sanctioned preservation efforts.

Governments worldwide have agreed to protect lands and create more areas for conservation of natural resources. These actions can reduce deforestation and other environmental degradation. But Cerda opened my eyes to another perspective. In Ecuador, most of the land is inhabited and maintained by Indigenous people. If those lands were to become protected areas, they would be owned by the government, which diminishes the sovereignty of Indigenous communities that have lived on and maintained them for centuries. By some standards, conservation zones are a success in environmental protection efforts, but by others, these zones are taking away from Indigenous culture.

The United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, ratified by Ecuador in 2008, gave Indigenous peoples the right of self-development, which Cerda said is an essential piece to sovereignty. However, despite the importance the Ecuadorian government places on consulting with Indigenous communities prior to developing on their lands, the state still maintains complete control of what ultimately happens to it.

Even as the state moves to create conservation zones for the wellbeing of the environment, they simultaneously move to use their ownership of those zones for resource extraction.

“They make decisions as a government because they get revenue,” Cerda said, “but it is affecting Indigenous people.”

Recently, in Limoncocha, an iridescent reminder of the attacks on Indigenous land sovereignty and traditional ways of life was seen in the thick, rainbow film left atop their drinking water by a broken oil pipeline.

For many Kichwa people, spirituality is rooted in the environment, and environmental processes nurture spirituality. Cerda told me about a ritual used in the Andes to bring or stop rain. It consists of taking a turtle shell and rubbing pepper on top. The shell gets boiled, the steam rises in the air, and about half an hour later, rain descends. A person with a background in science, as we know it in a Eurocentric sense, might call this a coincidence. Dominantly recognized scientific methods demand proof that it work to recognize its validity, but as Cerda put it, “that’s just how we do it.”

The reactions to this ritual emulate differences in worldview that Cerda confronts in his career of making cross-cultural connections. “Western science methodologies are missing the spiritual aspect from Indigenous communities,” he said. “And what is missing from negotiations is that most of our Indigenous peoples’ practices and knowledge are not recognized by the government as important for contributing to climate action.”

Climate advocacy at the global level frequently centers around governmental proceedings and the methodologies of dominant societies. In addition to adjusting to a dominant society’s worldview, Cerda and other Indigenous people involved in advocacy are required to adjust to a new language.

“The first challenge that we have, at least from Latin America, is the language,” he said. “Everything at the international level is based in English. If we don’t learn the language, we have a big barrier to negotiations.”

This not only adds a layer of inaccessibility for Indigenous people who do not speak English to get involved, but it also severely limits the scope of understanding generated within diplomatic spaces.

The Kichwa people were colonized by the Inka and then the Spanish; while many Indigenous Ecuadorians, like Cerda, learn the Kichwa language from birth, it remains somewhat endangered. Cerda told me about a town, south of the capital of Quito, with a Kichwa name: Turubamba, which translates to “like a swamp.” In recent years, it has been in the news repeatedly for issues regarding flooding, but that flooding is in large part due to a lack of appropriate infrastructure. Kichwa language loss is a part of the broader loss or minimization of Indigenous knowledge which is largely relevant to environmental care.

The recognition of Indigenous culture, knowledge, language, spirituality, and political organization by dominant society is essential to foster a deeper understanding of environmental issues and needs. For dominant societies to find success in their creation of climate change policy, expanding their methods and approach by diversifying perspectives at the table is key. Even as Indigenous people are increasingly included in policy forums, organizers tend to have a limited view of what perspectives and expertise they can offer.

According to Cerda, global climate conferences are inviting Indigenous people to participate more and more, but the role they fill remains limited. They are pigeonholed as a representation of environmental devastation amid a changing climate. But, when it comes down to the issues Cerda discusses regarding protected lands, as well as the value he places on integrating spirituality into scientific methodologies, and preserving cultural heritage, Indigenous perspectives are often swept to the side.

“We are invited to speak, but we are just being invited to say the same thing and the same thing always,” Cerda said. This is what he is working to change. By diversifying and enlarging the story of Indigenous knowledge, spirituality, and environmental crises that dominant societies receive, he and Indigenous people like him are strengthening the global network of climate advocacy.

Cerda advocates for this kind of integration, but he also believes the expansion of knowledge and methodology goes both ways.

“We have to accept that we need some integration and not be isolated in our own methods,” he said about his own community. “We are starting to use drones to monitor our land. We don’t have to use the Western methods exactly, but we need to adopt some things.

“These global organizations have additional information which makes a difference. I’m not saying that we don’t have sciences, but these guys do a lot of research,” he continued. “It’s important for us, as Indigenous people, to conduct the kind of research that influences policy. This is something that is currently missing from climate negotiations.”

Cerda aims to increase the diffusion of Indigenous knowledge, while also increasing its validity in the eyes of dominant societies, by developing a network of Indigenous ideas and their practitioners. The exchange of stories, knowledge, and practices, even one region at a time, can only strengthen the condition of the Earth.

Naomi Skiles is a writing intern at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. She is a senior at American University studying anthropology and creative writing and is passionate about human connection in and out of her studies.