Language loss threatens ancient knowledge of healing plants in many regions, study shows

_SCIENCE

DAVOS, SWITZERLAND—Uldarico Matapí Yucuna, 63, is often called the last shaman of the Matapi, an Indigenous group of fewer than 70 people living along the Mirití-Paraná River in the Colombian Amazon rainforest. His father was a shaman and taught him ancestral knowledge, including how to use plants to treat all kinds of maladies. But Uldarico rejects the title because instead of living with his people, for the past 30 years he has been in Bogotá documenting in writing what is left of this knowledge.

Once a nomadic people, in the 1980s the Matapi were forced to live on a reservation with five other ethnic groups, where traditions and language, already threatened by colonization, withered further. “We are losing the essence of our spiritual knowledge of medicinal plants,” says Uldarico, whose last name is that of his tribe. “A knowledge that cannot translate into other languages.”

A study presented at the 2022 World Biodiversity Forum here last week reveals that many Indigenous groups face Uldarico’s dilemma. By linking linguistic and biological information, the authors show that most Indigenous knowledge about medicinal plants is linked to threatened languages, and that language loss is an even greater danger to the survival of such knowledge than biodiversity loss. “Every time an Indigenous language dies, it’s like a library is burning, but we don’t see it because it’s silent,” says study co-author Rodrigo Cámara Leret, a biologist at the University of Zürich (UZH).

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*This story was produced as part of the Internews’ Earth Journalism Network’s Biodiversity Media Initiative travel grant to the 2022 World Biodiversity Forum.