Page 43 - UD Research Magazine Vol5-No1

More About the Project
See the team and the Ese’Eja at work
As participants in the project continue their work, one tangible result of the expedition can already be seen, a seven-minute video titled The Ese’Eja: From a Cotton Thread in the Sky to Protectors of the Amazon. The title refers to the tradi- tional belief that the Ese’Eja people traveled down to Earth on a cotton thread.
The video, hosted on the National Geographic website, can also be viewed via a link on the overall project website, “The Ancestral Lands of the Ese’Eja—The True People,” at www.eseeja.org.
The video shows such practices as traditional hunting
and fishing, preparing and cooking food, harvesting bark and fashioning it into cloth and then into clothing, gathering vines to make baskets and carving a bow for hunting. The cultural mapping team can be seen recording oral histories, and draw- ings are shown that elders made to illustrate some
of their stories.
“Facing a range of challenges, the Ese’Eja community is taking steps to protect their history and preserve their natural resources,” according to a description of the video by the Genographic Project Legacy Fund. The description quotes Carlos Dejaviso Poje, president of the Ese’Eja Nation:
“I worry most about losing the indigenous knowledge of our people. It would be a cultural genocide if we lost our customs and we didn’t know how to value what our ancestors valued.”
The Ancestral Lands of the Ese’Eja—The True People www.eseeja.org
cloth—andsamplesoftheraw materialsthatwentintotheir creation—alongwithcarved wooden bows, a necklace made of wild-pig teeth, items dyed from red berries and other natural materials, arrows with elaborate feather arrangements on their shafts, bags used to carry Brazil nuts and drawings by elders illustrating the Ese’Eja creation stories.
“They came to see what we were doing with the artifacts,” says Vicki Cassman, associate professor of art conservation, whose students are preparing condition reports on the objects. “I think they were surprised at how interested we were in all the items and the effort we were put- ting into caring for them.”
Planscallfortheobjectsto becomethebasisofanexhi- bitionhighlightingtheEse’Eja culture, traditions and challenges they are facing from develop- ment, industry and government restrictions on access to their ancestral lands.
The exhibition is planned for public view at UD at University Museums’ Old College West Gallery in fall 2016. It will travel after that, ultimately returning to Peru. The Ese’Eja want the exhibit, and relat- ed projects, to help preserve their traditional culture while also shar- ing knowledge of it with others.
In addition to the exhibition, participants expect the cultural mapping project to produce such results as:
• Adocumentarybook;
• Comicbooksorotheredu-
cationalmaterialsgearedto young Ese’Eja children, teach- ing them about their culture;
• Legalactiontoprotectterritori- alrights;and
• PlandeVida,asustainableplan to support the Ese’Eja’s future survival.
Students Michele Marino, Julianna Ly and Rebecca Selig (left to right) have written condition reports on the Ese'Eja objects in their art conservation classes.
UD's Jon Cox is leading the team in the devel-
opment of a book about the Ese’Eja. He previously contributed the photos for a book about another endan- gered group, the Hadzabe people of Tanzania.
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