The story of four children’s 40-day survival after a plane crash, in a remote stretch of the Amazon rainforest in Colombia, has gripped the world’s imagination since their rescue on June 9. Traumatized by the loss of their mother a few days after the crash, the siblings were stranded, left to fend for themselves, with no immediate access to water, at continuous risk of encountering predators, venomous snakes, and poisonous plants. Conjuring images of hope and resilience in such a remote place, this story has left many in a state of admiration and surprise.
As a scholar working in the Amazon (Francesca) and an Indigenous person who often got lost as a child in the forest himself (Franks), the story has gripped us too. But, as it’s been told in the flurry of news articles, we feel that a crucial aspect of the story has been overlooked. Western commentators have (rightly) praised the children for their resilience and skill. But the lifeways that equipped these children to make it through this experience are often regarded with disapproval, if not utter disdain, by the Euro-American middle classes in other contexts. The children’s courageous feat—particularly the achievement of the eldest, Lesly—should bring attention to the fact that many Amazonian Indigenous children have a vast array of skills and capacities that often go completely unrecognized and undervalued, because they do not fit in with mainstream and narrow ideas of what constitutes “optimal child development” according to aid organizations and child experts.
The children, Lesly, Soleiny, Tien, and Cristin Mucutuy (age 13, 9, 4, and 11 months, respectively), are members of the Huitoto, an Indigenous group living in the Colombian Amazon. On the day of the accident, they were traveling with their mother from Araracuara to San José del Guaviare. According to the father of two of the children, they fled from their home region to avoid recruitment by an armed group operating in the area. Since the news broke, it has become clear that Indigenous forms of knowledge played a fundamental role in the children’s survival. Most journalists and readers wondered about factual ecological knowledge of the kind that is transmitted through explicit training and rote learning: What did they eat? How did they protect themselves from jaguars and snakes? What had their maternal grandmother, with whom the children lived, taught them?
Of course, these are all important questions. However, they only scratch the surface of the complex set of skills that enabled these children to stay alive for so long in the forest. Indigenous knowledge is much more than a list of know-how and technical procedures that you are explicitly taught. It consists of a specific bodily orientation that makes the difference between someone like Francesca, who would not survive alone in the rainforest for more than a couple of days, and Franks, who can orient himself by looking at how plants grow, knows how to climb trees safely, and notices things that untrained senses could never recognize: the smell of a nearby peccary, the footsteps of a jaguar, the passage of other people through the thick vegetation. To put such knowledge into words, to say what exactly it consists of, is impossible, because it lies between one’s flesh and the environment, not inside the head.
It is to a form of this ineffable knowledge that we wish to draw attention. It is a type of knowledge that we think is key to fully appreciating Amazonian Indigenous cultures. This consists of an embodied, moral orientation toward others, a readiness to respond to others. It is what enabled a young girl like Lesly to see her siblings through such a hardship. María Fátima Valencia, her grandmother, explicitly referred to this sensibility when she said, in an interview with reporters, that Lesly knew how to take care of babies because she had often looked after them while her mother was at work. Her aunt Damari Mutucuy, on El Espectador newspaper, reiterated how Lesly had learned for herself how to change diapers and how to respond in the best way to a baby’s cry, as she helped to raise one of her brothers. Mutucuy emphasized how, during those 40 days, Lesly played a key role in taking care of her siblings.
Children growing up in Amazonian Indigenous communities have a great degree of freedom, autonomy, and independence. In Indigenous villages across the Ecuadorian Amazon, where Franks grew up, 3- and 4-year-olds can be seen roaming in bands, fishing by themselves in the river, climbing high on trees to gather fruit, and handling rusty machetes without an adult to instruct or oversee their activities. This hands-off approach, widely documented across the Amazon, as well as in other Indigenous communities around the world, is related to a specific understanding of children’s capabilities: the idea that even very young children can take to everyday tasks like fish to water. Danger or failure is thought to be a normal part of the learning process, not a deterrent to action. In fact, as Franks would say, it is the only way to learn anything.
Learning to care for other children is a striking example. Amazonian Indigenous children (again, like many young people across the world) are expected, from an early age, to look after their siblings. In the village where Franks was raised, children as young as 5 carry their siblings around, feed them, wash them in the river, and entertain them while their parents are busy working in the garden or elsewhere. So strong is the expectation that children will take care of younger ones that they often do this without being solicited or compelled to. Even toddlers seem to be careful observers of babies, and are so used to attending to them that they actively preempt a baby’s fussing by handing her food, and holding or entertaining her.
Equally common for children is helping with household work—gutting fish and bigger animal carcasses, preparing food, carrying wood, and washing the dishes and clothes. Participation in such “adult” tasks, as many readers might think of them, encourages children to develop two essential qualities: autonomy and social responsibility. Cross-cultural research on the development of responsibility among young children has shown that participating in household tasks helps foster responsibility and social responsiveness. Sibling care, because it promotes attention to the needs and perspectives of others, has been shown to contribute to the moral development of responsibility.
Substantial participation in housework and child care: These are exactly the kinds of practices that many middle-class people would judge as irrelevant for a child’s development, if not simply wrong to require of a child. UNICEF even considers household work to be a form of child labor if it exceeds four hours per day. Most children in the U.S. and Europe are not deemed capable of taking care of themselves (let alone others) until they are tweens, and even then, parents often intervene to lift the burden of such responsibility from their children.
We think it’s safe to say that Lesly was able to survive and help her younger siblings for over a month because, as a child, she was allowed to be self-reliant, while also being expected to take on responsibility for others. Appreciating this does not diminish her courageous feat. Rather, it brings attention to the fact that many Amazonian Indigenous children have a vast array of skills and capacities that are often lost in a mainstream culture predominantly focused on literacy and academic achievements. To acknowledge this richness is particularly important in Latin America, where for so long Indigenous children have been seen as “behind” in relation to their non-Indigenous counterparts, and in need of “correction” or “civilization” through formal schooling. Perhaps the words of Colombian President Gustavo Petro—who said that Lesly and her brothers are “children of the jungle, and now they are also children of Colombia”—signal a new turn on a continent where structural racism against Indigenous people is rampant.
The moral orientation that enables children like Lesly to be simultaneously autonomous and socially responsible is not something that can be isolated and packaged out from the context in which emerges life in a close-knit community, where work in the forest, in the garden, and work with and for other people is central to ideas about living well. As Indigenous leaders have insisted for a long time, the only way to effectively protect the skills and knowledge that underpin this extraordinary story is to ensure that Indigenous people, in the Amazon and beyond, can live, fully sovereign, on their land.
