For a people who view the world as covered with forest, to destroy the forest is to destroy their world (Boremanse 1991).

The family with whom Cook and Carlson stayed and worked in 2000.
Back: (L-R): K'in, Sako', Cook, Koh Maria, Carlson, Koh Paniagua, Chaxnuk
Front (L-R): Rosa, Leandro, Chanuk, Daniel.

That world is the Selva Lacandona, and the people are the Lacandones. A small community of approximately 600 Mayas, they are the descendents of Mayas who escaped capture and extermination by the Spanish and fled into the lowland forest covering Chiapas, Mexico. Their survival depended on a keen sensitivity to the rhythms of the forest and extensive knowledge of the natural world. They learned how to locate, harvest, and process plants and animals for food, ritual, and shelter. They also drew on the forest and its creatures for inspiration, incorporating them into their spiritual beliefs, mythology and folklore. They passed this knowledge down through an oral tradition to their present-day heirs.

Today, the Lacandon Forest is under grave threat; and so is the Lacandones’ traditional ecological knowledge. Due to deforestation, burgeoning colonization, and the pressures of the modern world, many of contexts in which traditional instruction took place have either lost their relevance or disappeared altogether. Many Lacandones have expressed a deep concern that their children are losing their cultural heritage, and are seeking help to preserve it.

To this end, Cook is proposing developing materials for an educational program that focuses on Lacandon traditional ecological knowledge.

Cook is a linguist working in the northern Lacandon community in Naha’ since 1990, filming their cultural traditions and documenting their language and traditional knowledge. The project will build on the Lacandón Cultural Heritage corpus that contains over 250 audio-video recordings of chants, songs, traditional narratives, ceremonies and other cultural events that were collected by her and Dr. Barry Carlson from the northern Lacandones in Naha’ between 2002 and 2006, with the support of the Volkswagen Stiftung Dokumentation Bedrohter Sprachen (Volkswagen Documentation of Endangered Languages Program).

Click here to download the Lacandon Eco-literacy Program Summary.

For more information about Cook's Lacandon Cultural Heritage Project, please visit:
http://web.uvic.ca/lacandon