Association Center Sachamama (ACS)
Is a non-profit organization in the Peruvian Upper Amazon with a field station in the city of Lamas, Department of San Martín, Peru. The association, in collaboration with the indigenous Kichwa-Lamas, descendants of the pre-Columbian inhabitants, works to regenerate the so-called “anthropogenic” pre-Columbian Amazonian soil, a fertile and ancient soil, also known as Amazonian Dark Earth (ADE) and in Brazil as Terra Preta do Indio (Black earth of the Indians, in Portuguese) or Yana Allpa (black soil in Quechua). ACS was founded in 2009 by anthropologist Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, PhD. The current president is Randy Chung Gonzles, and the vice president is the Peruvian archaeologist Ricardo Chirinos Portocarrera.
The center also shares with the Kichwa-Lamas a worldview where humans, non-humans, as well as the community of spirits, are kin to each other. ACS treats nature as a "you" rather than an "it."
The non-profit organization also exists in the US under the name “Sachamama Center for Biocultural Regeneration” with its office in Cambridge Massachusetts, presided by Frédérique Apffel-Marglin. By "biocultural regeneration" we mean to honor the integration of all life, as well as the cyclicality of its rhythms. It is also intended to obviate backward/advance implications of more linear formulations.
Today the center is bringing together an expanding collective of academics, activists and students who cross the North-South divide. The center's mission is to integrate knowledge and spirituality, activism and research, biocultural regeneration and fair economic practices, with the aim of promoting intercultural dialogue. The mission is to strengthen the ancestral legacies and other practices of the Kichwa-Lamas and other local groups in dialogue with them, as well as to regenerate the pre-Columbian Amazonian Black Earth. This soil is called by archaeologists “anthropogenic”, that is, made by humans. However, we at the center prefer to call it a “cosmogenic soil”, because it is made by humans as well as by all the spirits of the cosmos.
OUR TEAM
Dra. Frédérique Apffel-Marglin
Dra. Frédérique Apffel-Marglin
Dra. Frédérique Apffel-Marglin
Anthropologist
President of Sachamama Center for Biocultural Regeneration
(Cambridge - USA)
Randy Chung Gonzales
Dra. Frédérique Apffel-Marglin
Dra. Frédérique Apffel-Marglin
Artist
President of Asociación Centro Sachamama
Ricardo Chirinos Portocarrera
Dra. Frédérique Apffel-Marglin
Ricardo Chirinos Portocarrera
Master in Archeology
Vice president of Asociación Centro Sachamama
Dr. Stefano Varese
Royner Sangama Sangama
Ricardo Chirinos Portocarrera
Professor Eméritus of Native American Studies/Estudios Indígenas, University of California, Davis
Secretary of Asociación Centro Sachamama
Royner Sangama Sangama
Royner Sangama Sangama
Royner Sangama Sangama
Kechwa - Spanish
Bilingual Teacher
Member of Asociación Centro Sachamama
This “black soil of the Indians” contains a very special type of charcoal baptized in the early 21stcentury as “biochar”, a charcoal produced with little or no oxygen and at high temperatures. This biochar has the capacity to sequester some 20% of carbon dioxide or CO2 from the atmosphere according to Dr. Johannes Lehmann of Cornell University, the world expert on biochar. ACS produces biochar in its own backyard ovens. Our homemade ovens produce biochar which allows us not only to sequester 20% of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere but consists in a soil regeneration technology that has a positive influence on the climate as well as insuring a sustainable food production. Biochar is one of the few technologies that can capture and neutralize atmospheric CO2 for centuries, thereby making a crucial contribution to solving the climate crisis.
We also practice and teach a simpler method, called Regenerative Agriculture, that does not require biochar ovens. Both methods were taught to new generations in a program ACS developed with the local provincial education board (UGEL in its Spanish abbreviation) to stop deforestation, improve local agriculture, and help solve the climate crisis. The ACS uses and promotes regenerative agriculture using composting and terracing to achieve greater food security for small farmers and mitigate the climate crisis.
We learned that to build a backyard biochar oven was not possible in native communities or for small farmers, it being out of their financial reach.
HISTORY
We also practice and teach a simpler method, called Regenerative Agriculture, that does not require biochar ovens. Both methods were taught to new generations in a program ACS developed with the local provincial education board (UGEL in its Spanish abbreviation) to stop deforestation, improve local agriculture, and help solve the climate crisis. The ACS uses and promotes regenerative agriculture using composting and terracing to achieve greater food security for small farmers and mitigate the climate crisis.
We learned that to build a backyard biochar oven was not possible in native communities or for small farmers, it being out of their financial reach.
The cosmogenic black soils are still fertile today. The key to the amazing sustainability of these soils is a mixture of biochar, microorganisms such as mycelia (microscopic mushrooms), organic matter, and many broken ceramics. Nutrients adhere to the biochar since biochar does not decompose in the soil, as well as to the broken ceramics. Mycelia give life to the soil and broken ceramics allow a positive exchange of ions that increases fertility.
The regeneration of this pre-Columbian Amazonian technology, together with regenerative agriculture, offers a simple, appropriate, and economically accessible alternative to slash and burn agriculture and the very high rate of deforestation in this region, as well as a high rate of polluting greenhouse gases.
Experts have calculated that the black earth could support a population approximately equal to that of the Amazon basin today. This statement radically changes the knowledge we had about the pre-Columbian Amazon basin: that of a small population of primitive and nomadic tribes.
An investigation, led by Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, which was initiated thanks to one of her indigenous collaborators, found that some indigenous Kichwa-Lamas elders continue to offer broken ceramics to the spirits of the food field at the time of planting, in a small ritual. They maintain that their ancestors made such offerings and that, furthermore, when they open a new clearing in an old food field, they discover that it is full of potsherds. The practice of these offerings, unfortunately, has been succumbing to the gaze of the dominant mestizo society, which overall considers such practices to be mere superstition.
It is also important to highlight how a pre-Columbian technology, which was interrupted in such a catastrophic way more than five hundred years ago, can provide concrete solutions to problems generated by modernity. If we want, then, to adopt pre-Columbian technology, it is important to pay attention to the wisdom and knowledge of this people. The Kichwa-Lamasand the indigenous peoples of other places consider the Earth, the Cosmos, as well as the mountains, rivers and more as being alive and conscious and, like humans, possessing volition. For the Kichwa-Lamas, one addresses the spirits of the food field with kinship terms such as: Mama Allpa (the soil), Pachamama (the Earth), Mama Killa (the Moon), Yakumama (the rains/water), Sachamama (the rain forest) and Tayta Inti (the Sun) among others. In such offerings, humans who invoke them as relatives simultaneously express that they are part of the Earth and the Cosmos, and that these non-human spirit relatives nourish and keep them alive. Such awareness generates the desire to reciprocate and strive to care for the world on which all humans depend. Likewise, this conception of indigenous peoples teaches us, in times of a serious global ecological crisis, to develop a radically different way to look at nature, which, unfortunately, became in the eyes of modernity an insensitive machine, without will, without consciousness, that must be dominated and who’s so-called “natural resources” must be used only by and for humans.
In the Association Center Sachamama, the Yana Allpa project (name of the black earth in local Quechua) successfully developed the recreation of the terra preta. However, due to the cost of building a biochar oven as well as to the fact that a family’s food garden is usually located in the forest, far away from the community’s center, it’s acceptance by communities has been minimal. Carrying biochar from communities’ centers to the food field is a serious impediment to accepting this pre-Columbian technology.
The Yana Allpa project aims to share the center's experience in the regeneration of this pre-Columbian black earth and contribute to taking steps away from agrochemical agriculture towards regenerative agriculture that promises to benefit us all. The center has also been disseminating or training interested institutions or people about the Yana Allpa regeneration process, as well as transferring this technology from pre-Columbian peoples to those interested today.
Lastly, numerous courses and university programs have been held in the past at the ACS, including programs with the University of Massachusetts, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Victoria. Today the emphasis has shifted to sponsoring academic research and gatherings.
GALLERY
