MARIA FERNANDA GEBARA
Beinghood: on indigenous cosmologies and ancestral futures
This piece is adapted from Chanting Spring: Indigenous Wisdom for Ancestral Futures by Fernanda Gebara.
People often reach for cosmology when they want grand answers: creation stories, gods, the meaning of life. But in many Indigenous contexts, cosmology also does something more immediate. It works like a map for the dangerous parts of reality, and as a memory system designed to prevent collective amnesia.
Every landscape has verges. A river can feed you and kill you. A forest can shelter you and swallow you. A hunt can nourish a community and still disturb what should not be disturbed. Certain places, times and encounters demand more than technique; they demand protocol. Indigenous cosmologies hold these protocols. They teach how to cross boundaries without pretending boundaries do not exist: how to enter the forest without treating it as mere ‘nature’, how to take life without turning it into pure commodity, how to heal without reducing sickness to malfunction.
Modern life, by contrast, trains a different kind of forgetting. We forget where food comes from, where water goes, where waste ends up, whose labour makes comfort possible. We also forget the speed of destruction until it becomes irreversible. This is not only a lack of information – it is the effect of a worldview that treats the world as external, something we use, then replace.
Many Indigenous cosmologies resist that forgetting. They keep the past close as a form of answerability. They embed history in landscape. They store warnings in myth and restraint in ritual. They make certain acts – overhunting, violating a place, ignoring a principle – feel not only imprudent but relationally wrong. This is why ritual matters here: as a technology of relationship. Chant, ornamentation and ceremony calibrate attention. They remind people, again and again, that the world is a field of encounters – some generous, some dangerous, all consequential.
The words that follow offer cosmology in action: living archives and working worlds that provide practical guidance for crossing thresholds, sustaining reciprocity and keeping life possible in a world that modernity has trained itself to forget. These are ways of living that have survived different genocides and still carry instructions for ancestral futures.
Beinghood
Modern language often reaches for a single explanation of Indigenous animism and relationality: anthropomorphism – as if Indigenous peoples simply ‘project’ human traits onto other beings. Anthropologists often reach for another: personhood, a concept meant to capture how many worlds extend social life beyond the human. Both terms can be useful. Both can also become traps. They risk keeping the human as the hidden measure of everything, turning Indigenous realities into variations of our own categories rather than allowing them to unsettle those categories themselves. Perhaps another word is needed here: beinghood. By beinghood, I mean a mode of existence grounded not in resemblance to the human, but in relation, presence, agency and participation in a world of many beings.
You can see how quickly the ‘projection’ story collapses if you look at coronavirus. During the pandemic, political leaders and journalists described the virus as if it had character: ‘an invisible enemy’, ‘brilliant’, ‘tough’, ‘sneaky’, ‘merciless’. Modernity, too, animates what it fears. When uncertainty hits, people reach for agency. The impulse is human.
The difference is what comes next.
In many Indigenous worlds, more-than-human beings do not become ‘like humans’ because humans imagine them that way. They arrive already as presences with perspective, intention and social consequence. The question is not ‘Do they have agency?’ It is: what kind of being is this? What does it require of us? What are the terms of relationship here? And this is where responsibility takes on its older meaning: response-ability – the practiced capacity to notice, to listen, to adjust, to answer. To act ethically is not to stand above the world and manage it, but to become skilled at responding to many kinds of beings.
Among some Jê-speaking peoples of Brazil, the cosmos is not a single flat stage but layered realms: underwater, subterranean, terrestrial, celestial. Time itself emerges from the friction and overlap of these domains, shaped by primordial figures such as the Sun and Moon, who leave guidance behind before returning to their own worlds. The Kayapó, living over a vast area across the states of Pará and Mato Grosso, make this cosmology tangible in everyday geography. Their village is not just where people live; it is the most ‘socialized’ space in the cosmos. The forest around it is not ‘nature’ – it is a space where humans can become something else: fall sick, lose themselves, encounter spirits, return transformed. Because the forest can absorb the social, hunting and planting require mediation. Before opening new land, Kayapó dancers move with the structure of a war ritual, not to celebrate conquest, but to acknowledge the seriousness of entering a living domain. After a hunt, men sing to the animals’ spirits, so their presence remains in the forest. These acts keep relationships from breaking.
Further northwest, Tukano peoples of the Upper Rio Negro tell of ancestors emerging from a great serpent whose body carved the riverbeds, shaping territory and social order. Harmony is a lived responsibility, not an abstract philosophical ideal. Pajés (shamans) do not only heal people; they help keep rivers flowing ‘properly’ and animal populations stable, and they work to prevent the consequences of taking too much, too carelessly.
The Wari (Pakaa Nova) living in Rondônia link existence to anima and recognize that many animals, and even elements of the world, share this quality, along with their own ways of life. The Manxineru in the Western Amazon speak of rivers, trees and animals as beings with spirit, and in some accounts humans receive names through these entities. The Xerente in the Central Amazon extend soul beyond humans as well, describing protective spirits that shape daily life. Among the Kayapó, vital energy – karon – runs through beings; master spirits oversee animals and plants, and ceremonial practice maintains the conditions for coexistence.
In the Pano worlds of the western Amazon – Kaxinawá (Huni Kuin), Yawanawá, Katukina – ‘beinghood’ does not stop at the skin. A being forms through flesh and yuxin (soul), and many beings carry body and soul. Knowledge moves between species. In Kaxinawá origin narratives, the squirrel teaches humans the art of planting, its practice of storing food offering a lesson in cultivation. The capuchin monkey teaches humans to copulate face to face. Even the most intimate aspects of human life emerge through relationships with other beings. These are memories of apprenticeship, lessons from the ancestors: humans learning from others, rather than crowning themselves masters.
Katukina relationships with animals and spirits often resemble relationships within the community: bonds, obligations, forms of address. Here, ‘beinghood’ is understood as a field of relations rather than a biological category. It belongs to those who can enter social life, who can respond, refuse, teach, withdraw, retaliate or bless.
This is why anthropomorphism misleads. It implies projection. It implies that humans remain the measure. Even ‘personhood’, for all its usefulness, can smuggle in the same bias if it quietly assumes that being a ‘person’ means being more like us. As stated by Canadian anthropologist Eduardo Kohn in his remarkable book How Forests Think, ‘We are colonized by certain ways of thinking about relationality’ that are framed by ‘our assumptions about the forms of associations that structure human language. Then, in ways that often go unnoticed, we project these assumptions onto nonhumans. Without realizing it, we attribute to nonhumans properties that are our own (…).’
Indigenous cosmologies refuse the mirror. They refuse a single, universal reality. They point toward a pluriverse guided by ancestrality: many worlds living side by side, each with its own agreements, dangers, responsibilities and ways of knowing. This is an ethical-ancestral demand. A pluriversal world requires humility and restraint. It requires learning response-ability: how to live among beings who do not exist for us and who may not forgive our ignorance.
If today’s crises are partly crises of relationships – ecological, spiritual, epidemiological – then these cosmologies offer more than ‘wisdom’ as inspiration. They offer training: a disciplined way of re-entering a living world, where nothing is mere scenery, and where responsibility begins with recognizing the knowledge of our ancestors and developing our ability to respond and relate to it.
Ancestral intelligence
What does it take to learn to respond? In the Yawanawá rituals I write about, chant and ritual created conditions in which participants could attend to presences they might ordinarily overlook. For some, the encounter unsettled the sense that their lives ended at the skin. A plant could be encountered as a teacher. The forest could be felt as a place where one’s actions had consequences for beings with lives of their own. What mattered was how that change in attention might carry into life after the ritual.
As Indigenous spiritual practices travel, those responsibilities can become harder for visitors to see. Davi Kopenawa’s description of the ‘people of the merchandise’ invites us to ask what habits we carry into ceremony and ritual. We may arrive hoping for healing, and the experience may indeed change us. We can also come away with a powerful story about ourselves while knowing very little about the people who made the encounter possible, the land that sustains the practice or the obligations that come with receiving it. Learning to hear what is asked of us is part of what I mean by response-ability.
This is where I would place ancestral intelligence. It lives in the practices through which people remember how to respond to and learn from different beings, in diverse places, over generations. A chant can carry a way of listening. A cosmology can remember what happened the last time someone took too much. A protocol can teach when to ask, when to wait and when to leave a place alone.
When Ailton Krenak speaks of an ancestral future, I think of these forms of memory and what they make possible. A ceremony may last a night. Learning to answer for what we receive takes longer. It continues in what we take, what we return and what we leave for those who come after us. As we turn to machines for answers, will we still recognise the knowledge carried by a chant, a forest or a cosmology? And how will we protect forms of intelligence whose value exceeds what a machine can measure?
Beinghood: on indigenous cosmologies and ancestral futures
This piece is adapted from Chanting Spring: Indigenous Wisdom for Ancestral Futures by Fernanda Gebara.
People often reach for cosmology when they want grand answers: creation stories, gods, the meaning of life. But in many Indigenous contexts, cosmology also does something more immediate. It works like a map for the dangerous parts of reality, and as a memory system designed to prevent collective amnesia.
Every landscape has verges. A river can feed you and kill you. A forest can shelter you and swallow you. A hunt can nourish a community and still disturb what should not be disturbed. Certain places, times and encounters demand more than technique; they demand protocol. Indigenous cosmologies hold these protocols. They teach how to cross boundaries without pretending boundaries do not exist: how to enter the forest without treating it as mere ‘nature’, how to take life without turning it into pure commodity, how to heal without reducing sickness to malfunction.
Modern life, by contrast, trains a different kind of forgetting. We forget where food comes from, where water goes, where waste ends up, whose labour makes comfort possible. We also forget the speed of destruction until it becomes irreversible. This is not only a lack of information – it is the effect of a worldview that treats the world as external, something we use, then replace.
Many Indigenous cosmologies resist that forgetting. They keep the past close as a form of answerability. They embed history in landscape. They store warnings in myth and restraint in ritual. They make certain acts – overhunting, violating a place, ignoring a principle – feel not only imprudent but relationally wrong. This is why ritual matters here: as a technology of relationship. Chant, ornamentation and ceremony calibrate attention. They remind people, again and again, that the world is a field of encounters – some generous, some dangerous, all consequential.
The words that follow offer cosmology in action: living archives and working worlds that provide practical guidance for crossing thresholds, sustaining reciprocity and keeping life possible in a world that modernity has trained itself to forget. These are ways of living that have survived different genocides and still carry instructions for ancestral futures.
Beinghood
Modern language often reaches for a single explanation of Indigenous animism and relationality: anthropomorphism – as if Indigenous peoples simply ‘project’ human traits onto other beings. Anthropologists often reach for another: personhood, a concept meant to capture how many worlds extend social life beyond the human. Both terms can be useful. Both can also become traps. They risk keeping the human as the hidden measure of everything, turning Indigenous realities into variations of our own categories rather than allowing them to unsettle those categories themselves. Perhaps another word is needed here: beinghood. By beinghood, I mean a mode of existence grounded not in resemblance to the human, but in relation, presence, agency and participation in a world of many beings.
You can see how quickly the ‘projection’ story collapses if you look at coronavirus. During the pandemic, political leaders and journalists described the virus as if it had character: ‘an invisible enemy’, ‘brilliant’, ‘tough’, ‘sneaky’, ‘merciless’. Modernity, too, animates what it fears. When uncertainty hits, people reach for agency. The impulse is human.
The difference is what comes next.
In many Indigenous worlds, more-than-human beings do not become ‘like humans’ because humans imagine them that way. They arrive already as presences with perspective, intention and social consequence. The question is not ‘Do they have agency?’ It is: what kind of being is this? What does it require of us? What are the terms of relationship here? And this is where responsibility takes on its older meaning: response-ability – the practiced capacity to notice, to listen, to adjust, to answer. To act ethically is not to stand above the world and manage it, but to become skilled at responding to many kinds of beings.
Among some Jê-speaking peoples of Brazil, the cosmos is not a single flat stage but layered realms: underwater, subterranean, terrestrial, celestial. Time itself emerges from the friction and overlap of these domains, shaped by primordial figures such as the Sun and Moon, who leave guidance behind before returning to their own worlds. The Kayapó, living over a vast area across the states of Pará and Mato Grosso, make this cosmology tangible in everyday geography. Their village is not just where people live; it is the most ‘socialized’ space in the cosmos. The forest around it is not ‘nature’ – it is a space where humans can become something else: fall sick, lose themselves, encounter spirits, return transformed. Because the forest can absorb the social, hunting and planting require mediation. Before opening new land, Kayapó dancers move with the structure of a war ritual, not to celebrate conquest, but to acknowledge the seriousness of entering a living domain. After a hunt, men sing to the animals’ spirits, so their presence remains in the forest. These acts keep relationships from breaking.
Further northwest, Tukano peoples of the Upper Rio Negro tell of ancestors emerging from a great serpent whose body carved the riverbeds, shaping territory and social order. Harmony is a lived responsibility, not an abstract philosophical ideal. Pajés (shamans) do not only heal people; they help keep rivers flowing ‘properly’ and animal populations stable, and they work to prevent the consequences of taking too much, too carelessly.
The Wari (Pakaa Nova) living in Rondônia link existence to anima and recognize that many animals, and even elements of the world, share this quality, along with their own ways of life. The Manxineru in the Western Amazon speak of rivers, trees and animals as beings with spirit, and in some accounts humans receive names through these entities. The Xerente in the Central Amazon extend soul beyond humans as well, describing protective spirits that shape daily life. Among the Kayapó, vital energy – karon – runs through beings; master spirits oversee animals and plants, and ceremonial practice maintains the conditions for coexistence.
In the Pano worlds of the western Amazon – Kaxinawá (Huni Kuin), Yawanawá, Katukina – ‘beinghood’ does not stop at the skin. A being forms through flesh and yuxin (soul), and many beings carry body and soul. Knowledge moves between species. In Kaxinawá origin narratives, the squirrel teaches humans the art of planting, its practice of storing food offering a lesson in cultivation. The capuchin monkey teaches humans to copulate face to face. Even the most intimate aspects of human life emerge through relationships with other beings. These are memories of apprenticeship, lessons from the ancestors: humans learning from others, rather than crowning themselves masters.
Katukina relationships with animals and spirits often resemble relationships within the community: bonds, obligations, forms of address. Here, ‘beinghood’ is understood as a field of relations rather than a biological category. It belongs to those who can enter social life, who can respond, refuse, teach, withdraw, retaliate or bless.
This is why anthropomorphism misleads. It implies projection. It implies that humans remain the measure. Even ‘personhood’, for all its usefulness, can smuggle in the same bias if it quietly assumes that being a ‘person’ means being more like us. As stated by Canadian anthropologist Eduardo Kohn in his remarkable book How Forests Think, ‘We are colonized by certain ways of thinking about relationality’ that are framed by ‘our assumptions about the forms of associations that structure human language. Then, in ways that often go unnoticed, we project these assumptions onto nonhumans. Without realizing it, we attribute to nonhumans properties that are our own (…).’
Indigenous cosmologies refuse the mirror. They refuse a single, universal reality. They point toward a pluriverse guided by ancestrality: many worlds living side by side, each with its own agreements, dangers, responsibilities and ways of knowing. This is an ethical-ancestral demand. A pluriversal world requires humility and restraint. It requires learning response-ability: how to live among beings who do not exist for us and who may not forgive our ignorance.
If today’s crises are partly crises of relationships – ecological, spiritual, epidemiological – then these cosmologies offer more than ‘wisdom’ as inspiration. They offer training: a disciplined way of re-entering a living world, where nothing is mere scenery, and where responsibility begins with recognizing the knowledge of our ancestors and developing our ability to respond and relate to it.
Ancestral intelligence
What does it take to learn to respond? In the Yawanawá rituals I write about, chant and ritual created conditions in which participants could attend to presences they might ordinarily overlook. For some, the encounter unsettled the sense that their lives ended at the skin. A plant could be encountered as a teacher. The forest could be felt as a place where one’s actions had consequences for beings with lives of their own. What mattered was how that change in attention might carry into life after the ritual.
As Indigenous spiritual practices travel, those responsibilities can become harder for visitors to see. Davi Kopenawa’s description of the ‘people of the merchandise’ invites us to ask what habits we carry into ceremony and ritual. We may arrive hoping for healing, and the experience may indeed change us. We can also come away with a powerful story about ourselves while knowing very little about the people who made the encounter possible, the land that sustains the practice or the obligations that come with receiving it. Learning to hear what is asked of us is part of what I mean by response-ability.
This is where I would place ancestral intelligence. It lives in the practices through which people remember how to respond to and learn from different beings, in diverse places, over generations. A chant can carry a way of listening. A cosmology can remember what happened the last time someone took too much. A protocol can teach when to ask, when to wait and when to leave a place alone.
When Ailton Krenak speaks of an ancestral future, I think of these forms of memory and what they make possible. A ceremony may last a night. Learning to answer for what we receive takes longer. It continues in what we take, what we return and what we leave for those who come after us. As we turn to machines for answers, will we still recognise the knowledge carried by a chant, a forest or a cosmology? And how will we protect forms of intelligence whose value exceeds what a machine can measure?
Fernanda Gebara is a mother, writer, scientist, and lifelong learner, raised between Brazil’s Atlantic Forest and the city of Rio de Janeiro. With two decades of experience working on Indigenous rights, biodiversity conservation, climate change, and behaviour change, her work focuses on weaving Indigenous and scientific knowledges and supporting Indigenous communities in sharing their cosmologies. She collaborates with the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute and the Runyn Pupykary Yawanawá Institute to support Indigenous elders in creating an independent framework to preserve ancestral knowledge for future generations. Fernanda is the author of Chanting Spring: Indigenous Wisdom for Ancestral Futures.
MARIA FERNANDA GEBARA
Beinghood: on indigenous cosmologies and ancestral futures
This piece is adapted from Chanting Spring: Indigenous Wisdom for Ancestral Futures by Fernanda Gebara.
People often reach for cosmology when they want grand answers: creation stories, gods, the meaning of life. But in many Indigenous contexts, cosmology also does something more immediate. It works like a map for the dangerous parts of reality, and as a memory system designed to prevent collective amnesia.
Every landscape has verges. A river can feed you and kill you. A forest can shelter you and swallow you. A hunt can nourish a community and still disturb what should not be disturbed. Certain places, times and encounters demand more than technique; they demand protocol. Indigenous cosmologies hold these protocols. They teach how to cross boundaries without pretending boundaries do not exist: how to enter the forest without treating it as mere ‘nature’, how to take life without turning it into pure commodity, how to heal without reducing sickness to malfunction.
Modern life, by contrast, trains a different kind of forgetting. We forget where food comes from, where water goes, where waste ends up, whose labour makes comfort possible. We also forget the speed of destruction until it becomes irreversible. This is not only a lack of information – it is the effect of a worldview that treats the world as external, something we use, then replace.
Many Indigenous cosmologies resist that forgetting. They keep the past close as a form of answerability. They embed history in landscape. They store warnings in myth and restraint in ritual. They make certain acts – overhunting, violating a place, ignoring a principle – feel not only imprudent but relationally wrong. This is why ritual matters here: as a technology of relationship. Chant, ornamentation and ceremony calibrate attention. They remind people, again and again, that the world is a field of encounters – some generous, some dangerous, all consequential.
The words that follow offer cosmology in action: living archives and working worlds that provide practical guidance for crossing thresholds, sustaining reciprocity and keeping life possible in a world that modernity has trained itself to forget. These are ways of living that have survived different genocides and still carry instructions for ancestral futures.
Beinghood
Modern language often reaches for a single explanation of Indigenous animism and relationality: anthropomorphism – as if Indigenous peoples simply ‘project’ human traits onto other beings. Anthropologists often reach for another: personhood, a concept meant to capture how many worlds extend social life beyond the human. Both terms can be useful. Both can also become traps. They risk keeping the human as the hidden measure of everything, turning Indigenous realities into variations of our own categories rather than allowing them to unsettle those categories themselves. Perhaps another word is needed here: beinghood. By beinghood, I mean a mode of existence grounded not in resemblance to the human, but in relation, presence, agency and participation in a world of many beings.
You can see how quickly the ‘projection’ story collapses if you look at coronavirus. During the pandemic, political leaders and journalists described the virus as if it had character: ‘an invisible enemy’, ‘brilliant’, ‘tough’, ‘sneaky’, ‘merciless’. Modernity, too, animates what it fears. When uncertainty hits, people reach for agency. The impulse is human.
The difference is what comes next.
In many Indigenous worlds, more-than-human beings do not become ‘like humans’ because humans imagine them that way. They arrive already as presences with perspective, intention and social consequence. The question is not ‘Do they have agency?’ It is: what kind of being is this? What does it require of us? What are the terms of relationship here? And this is where responsibility takes on its older meaning: response-ability – the practiced capacity to notice, to listen, to adjust, to answer. To act ethically is not to stand above the world and manage it, but to become skilled at responding to many kinds of beings.
Among some Jê-speaking peoples of Brazil, the cosmos is not a single flat stage but layered realms: underwater, subterranean, terrestrial, celestial. Time itself emerges from the friction and overlap of these domains, shaped by primordial figures such as the Sun and Moon, who leave guidance behind before returning to their own worlds. The Kayapó, living over a vast area across the states of Pará and Mato Grosso, make this cosmology tangible in everyday geography. Their village is not just where people live; it is the most ‘socialized’ space in the cosmos. The forest around it is not ‘nature’ – it is a space where humans can become something else: fall sick, lose themselves, encounter spirits, return transformed. Because the forest can absorb the social, hunting and planting require mediation. Before opening new land, Kayapó dancers move with the structure of a war ritual, not to celebrate conquest, but to acknowledge the seriousness of entering a living domain. After a hunt, men sing to the animals’ spirits, so their presence remains in the forest. These acts keep relationships from breaking.
Further northwest, Tukano peoples of the Upper Rio Negro tell of ancestors emerging from a great serpent whose body carved the riverbeds, shaping territory and social order. Harmony is a lived responsibility, not an abstract philosophical ideal. Pajés (shamans) do not only heal people; they help keep rivers flowing ‘properly’ and animal populations stable, and they work to prevent the consequences of taking too much, too carelessly.
The Wari (Pakaa Nova) living in Rondônia link existence to anima and recognize that many animals, and even elements of the world, share this quality, along with their own ways of life. The Manxineru in the Western Amazon speak of rivers, trees and animals as beings with spirit, and in some accounts humans receive names through these entities. The Xerente in the Central Amazon extend soul beyond humans as well, describing protective spirits that shape daily life. Among the Kayapó, vital energy – karon – runs through beings; master spirits oversee animals and plants, and ceremonial practice maintains the conditions for coexistence.
In the Pano worlds of the western Amazon – Kaxinawá (Huni Kuin), Yawanawá, Katukina – ‘beinghood’ does not stop at the skin. A being forms through flesh and yuxin (soul), and many beings carry body and soul. Knowledge moves between species. In Kaxinawá origin narratives, the squirrel teaches humans the art of planting, its practice of storing food offering a lesson in cultivation. The capuchin monkey teaches humans to copulate face to face. Even the most intimate aspects of human life emerge through relationships with other beings. These are memories of apprenticeship, lessons from the ancestors: humans learning from others, rather than crowning themselves masters.
Katukina relationships with animals and spirits often resemble relationships within the community: bonds, obligations, forms of address. Here, ‘beinghood’ is understood as a field of relations rather than a biological category. It belongs to those who can enter social life, who can respond, refuse, teach, withdraw, retaliate or bless.
This is why anthropomorphism misleads. It implies projection. It implies that humans remain the measure. Even ‘personhood’, for all its usefulness, can smuggle in the same bias if it quietly assumes that being a ‘person’ means being more like us. As stated by Canadian anthropologist Eduardo Kohn in his remarkable book How Forests Think, ‘We are colonized by certain ways of thinking about relationality’ that are framed by ‘our assumptions about the forms of associations that structure human language. Then, in ways that often go unnoticed, we project these assumptions onto nonhumans. Without realizing it, we attribute to nonhumans properties that are our own (…).’
Indigenous cosmologies refuse the mirror. They refuse a single, universal reality. They point toward a pluriverse guided by ancestrality: many worlds living side by side, each with its own agreements, dangers, responsibilities and ways of knowing. This is an ethical-ancestral demand. A pluriversal world requires humility and restraint. It requires learning response-ability: how to live among beings who do not exist for us and who may not forgive our ignorance.
If today’s crises are partly crises of relationships – ecological, spiritual, epidemiological – then these cosmologies offer more than ‘wisdom’ as inspiration. They offer training: a disciplined way of re-entering a living world, where nothing is mere scenery, and where responsibility begins with recognizing the knowledge of our ancestors and developing our ability to respond and relate to it.
Ancestral intelligence
What does it take to learn to respond? In the Yawanawá rituals I write about, chant and ritual created conditions in which participants could attend to presences they might ordinarily overlook. For some, the encounter unsettled the sense that their lives ended at the skin. A plant could be encountered as a teacher. The forest could be felt as a place where one’s actions had consequences for beings with lives of their own. What mattered was how that change in attention might carry into life after the ritual.
As Indigenous spiritual practices travel, those responsibilities can become harder for visitors to see. Davi Kopenawa’s description of the ‘people of the merchandise’ invites us to ask what habits we carry into ceremony and ritual. We may arrive hoping for healing, and the experience may indeed change us. We can also come away with a powerful story about ourselves while knowing very little about the people who made the encounter possible, the land that sustains the practice or the obligations that come with receiving it. Learning to hear what is asked of us is part of what I mean by response-ability.
This is where I would place ancestral intelligence. It lives in the practices through which people remember how to respond to and learn from different beings, in diverse places, over generations. A chant can carry a way of listening. A cosmology can remember what happened the last time someone took too much. A protocol can teach when to ask, when to wait and when to leave a place alone.
When Ailton Krenak speaks of an ancestral future, I think of these forms of memory and what they make possible. A ceremony may last a night. Learning to answer for what we receive takes longer. It continues in what we take, what we return and what we leave for those who come after us. As we turn to machines for answers, will we still recognise the knowledge carried by a chant, a forest or a cosmology? And how will we protect forms of intelligence whose value exceeds what a machine can measure?
Beinghood: on indigenous cosmologies and ancestral futures
This piece is adapted from Chanting Spring: Indigenous Wisdom for Ancestral Futures by Fernanda Gebara.
People often reach for cosmology when they want grand answers: creation stories, gods, the meaning of life. But in many Indigenous contexts, cosmology also does something more immediate. It works like a map for the dangerous parts of reality, and as a memory system designed to prevent collective amnesia.
Every landscape has verges. A river can feed you and kill you. A forest can shelter you and swallow you. A hunt can nourish a community and still disturb what should not be disturbed. Certain places, times and encounters demand more than technique; they demand protocol. Indigenous cosmologies hold these protocols. They teach how to cross boundaries without pretending boundaries do not exist: how to enter the forest without treating it as mere ‘nature’, how to take life without turning it into pure commodity, how to heal without reducing sickness to malfunction.
Modern life, by contrast, trains a different kind of forgetting. We forget where food comes from, where water goes, where waste ends up, whose labour makes comfort possible. We also forget the speed of destruction until it becomes irreversible. This is not only a lack of information – it is the effect of a worldview that treats the world as external, something we use, then replace.
Many Indigenous cosmologies resist that forgetting. They keep the past close as a form of answerability. They embed history in landscape. They store warnings in myth and restraint in ritual. They make certain acts – overhunting, violating a place, ignoring a principle – feel not only imprudent but relationally wrong. This is why ritual matters here: as a technology of relationship. Chant, ornamentation and ceremony calibrate attention. They remind people, again and again, that the world is a field of encounters – some generous, some dangerous, all consequential.
The words that follow offer cosmology in action: living archives and working worlds that provide practical guidance for crossing thresholds, sustaining reciprocity and keeping life possible in a world that modernity has trained itself to forget. These are ways of living that have survived different genocides and still carry instructions for ancestral futures.
Beinghood
Modern language often reaches for a single explanation of Indigenous animism and relationality: anthropomorphism – as if Indigenous peoples simply ‘project’ human traits onto other beings. Anthropologists often reach for another: personhood, a concept meant to capture how many worlds extend social life beyond the human. Both terms can be useful. Both can also become traps. They risk keeping the human as the hidden measure of everything, turning Indigenous realities into variations of our own categories rather than allowing them to unsettle those categories themselves. Perhaps another word is needed here: beinghood. By beinghood, I mean a mode of existence grounded not in resemblance to the human, but in relation, presence, agency and participation in a world of many beings.
You can see how quickly the ‘projection’ story collapses if you look at coronavirus. During the pandemic, political leaders and journalists described the virus as if it had character: ‘an invisible enemy’, ‘brilliant’, ‘tough’, ‘sneaky’, ‘merciless’. Modernity, too, animates what it fears. When uncertainty hits, people reach for agency. The impulse is human.
The difference is what comes next.
In many Indigenous worlds, more-than-human beings do not become ‘like humans’ because humans imagine them that way. They arrive already as presences with perspective, intention and social consequence. The question is not ‘Do they have agency?’ It is: what kind of being is this? What does it require of us? What are the terms of relationship here? And this is where responsibility takes on its older meaning: response-ability – the practiced capacity to notice, to listen, to adjust, to answer. To act ethically is not to stand above the world and manage it, but to become skilled at responding to many kinds of beings.
Among some Jê-speaking peoples of Brazil, the cosmos is not a single flat stage but layered realms: underwater, subterranean, terrestrial, celestial. Time itself emerges from the friction and overlap of these domains, shaped by primordial figures such as the Sun and Moon, who leave guidance behind before returning to their own worlds. The Kayapó, living over a vast area across the states of Pará and Mato Grosso, make this cosmology tangible in everyday geography. Their village is not just where people live; it is the most ‘socialized’ space in the cosmos. The forest around it is not ‘nature’ – it is a space where humans can become something else: fall sick, lose themselves, encounter spirits, return transformed. Because the forest can absorb the social, hunting and planting require mediation. Before opening new land, Kayapó dancers move with the structure of a war ritual, not to celebrate conquest, but to acknowledge the seriousness of entering a living domain. After a hunt, men sing to the animals’ spirits, so their presence remains in the forest. These acts keep relationships from breaking.
Further northwest, Tukano peoples of the Upper Rio Negro tell of ancestors emerging from a great serpent whose body carved the riverbeds, shaping territory and social order. Harmony is a lived responsibility, not an abstract philosophical ideal. Pajés (shamans) do not only heal people; they help keep rivers flowing ‘properly’ and animal populations stable, and they work to prevent the consequences of taking too much, too carelessly.
The Wari (Pakaa Nova) living in Rondônia link existence to anima and recognize that many animals, and even elements of the world, share this quality, along with their own ways of life. The Manxineru in the Western Amazon speak of rivers, trees and animals as beings with spirit, and in some accounts humans receive names through these entities. The Xerente in the Central Amazon extend soul beyond humans as well, describing protective spirits that shape daily life. Among the Kayapó, vital energy – karon – runs through beings; master spirits oversee animals and plants, and ceremonial practice maintains the conditions for coexistence.
In the Pano worlds of the western Amazon – Kaxinawá (Huni Kuin), Yawanawá, Katukina – ‘beinghood’ does not stop at the skin. A being forms through flesh and yuxin (soul), and many beings carry body and soul. Knowledge moves between species. In Kaxinawá origin narratives, the squirrel teaches humans the art of planting, its practice of storing food offering a lesson in cultivation. The capuchin monkey teaches humans to copulate face to face. Even the most intimate aspects of human life emerge through relationships with other beings. These are memories of apprenticeship, lessons from the ancestors: humans learning from others, rather than crowning themselves masters.
Katukina relationships with animals and spirits often resemble relationships within the community: bonds, obligations, forms of address. Here, ‘beinghood’ is understood as a field of relations rather than a biological category. It belongs to those who can enter social life, who can respond, refuse, teach, withdraw, retaliate or bless.
This is why anthropomorphism misleads. It implies projection. It implies that humans remain the measure. Even ‘personhood’, for all its usefulness, can smuggle in the same bias if it quietly assumes that being a ‘person’ means being more like us. As stated by Canadian anthropologist Eduardo Kohn in his remarkable book How Forests Think, ‘We are colonized by certain ways of thinking about relationality’ that are framed by ‘our assumptions about the forms of associations that structure human language. Then, in ways that often go unnoticed, we project these assumptions onto nonhumans. Without realizing it, we attribute to nonhumans properties that are our own (…).’
Indigenous cosmologies refuse the mirror. They refuse a single, universal reality. They point toward a pluriverse guided by ancestrality: many worlds living side by side, each with its own agreements, dangers, responsibilities and ways of knowing. This is an ethical-ancestral demand. A pluriversal world requires humility and restraint. It requires learning response-ability: how to live among beings who do not exist for us and who may not forgive our ignorance.
If today’s crises are partly crises of relationships – ecological, spiritual, epidemiological – then these cosmologies offer more than ‘wisdom’ as inspiration. They offer training: a disciplined way of re-entering a living world, where nothing is mere scenery, and where responsibility begins with recognizing the knowledge of our ancestors and developing our ability to respond and relate to it.
Ancestral intelligence
What does it take to learn to respond? In the Yawanawá rituals I write about, chant and ritual created conditions in which participants could attend to presences they might ordinarily overlook. For some, the encounter unsettled the sense that their lives ended at the skin. A plant could be encountered as a teacher. The forest could be felt as a place where one’s actions had consequences for beings with lives of their own. What mattered was how that change in attention might carry into life after the ritual.
As Indigenous spiritual practices travel, those responsibilities can become harder for visitors to see. Davi Kopenawa’s description of the ‘people of the merchandise’ invites us to ask what habits we carry into ceremony and ritual. We may arrive hoping for healing, and the experience may indeed change us. We can also come away with a powerful story about ourselves while knowing very little about the people who made the encounter possible, the land that sustains the practice or the obligations that come with receiving it. Learning to hear what is asked of us is part of what I mean by response-ability.
This is where I would place ancestral intelligence. It lives in the practices through which people remember how to respond to and learn from different beings, in diverse places, over generations. A chant can carry a way of listening. A cosmology can remember what happened the last time someone took too much. A protocol can teach when to ask, when to wait and when to leave a place alone.
When Ailton Krenak speaks of an ancestral future, I think of these forms of memory and what they make possible. A ceremony may last a night. Learning to answer for what we receive takes longer. It continues in what we take, what we return and what we leave for those who come after us. As we turn to machines for answers, will we still recognise the knowledge carried by a chant, a forest or a cosmology? And how will we protect forms of intelligence whose value exceeds what a machine can measure?
Fernanda Gebara is a mother, writer, scientist, and lifelong learner, raised between Brazil’s Atlantic Forest and the city of Rio de Janeiro. With two decades of experience working on Indigenous rights, biodiversity conservation, climate change, and behaviour change, her work focuses on weaving Indigenous and scientific knowledges and supporting Indigenous communities in sharing their cosmologies. She collaborates with the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute and the Runyn Pupykary Yawanawá Institute to support Indigenous elders in creating an independent framework to preserve ancestral knowledge for future generations. Fernanda is the author of Chanting Spring: Indigenous Wisdom for Ancestral Futures.
MARIA FERNANDA GEBARA
Beinghood: on indigenous cosmologies and ancestral futures
This piece is adapted from Chanting Spring: Indigenous Wisdom for Ancestral Futures by Fernanda Gebara.
People often reach for cosmology when they want grand answers: creation stories, gods, the meaning of life. But in many Indigenous contexts, cosmology also does something more immediate. It works like a map for the dangerous parts of reality, and as a memory system designed to prevent collective amnesia.
Every landscape has verges. A river can feed you and kill you. A forest can shelter you and swallow you. A hunt can nourish a community and still disturb what should not be disturbed. Certain places, times and encounters demand more than technique; they demand protocol. Indigenous cosmologies hold these protocols. They teach how to cross boundaries without pretending boundaries do not exist: how to enter the forest without treating it as mere ‘nature’, how to take life without turning it into pure commodity, how to heal without reducing sickness to malfunction.
Modern life, by contrast, trains a different kind of forgetting. We forget where food comes from, where water goes, where waste ends up, whose labour makes comfort possible. We also forget the speed of destruction until it becomes irreversible. This is not only a lack of information – it is the effect of a worldview that treats the world as external, something we use, then replace.
Many Indigenous cosmologies resist that forgetting. They keep the past close as a form of answerability. They embed history in landscape. They store warnings in myth and restraint in ritual. They make certain acts – overhunting, violating a place, ignoring a principle – feel not only imprudent but relationally wrong. This is why ritual matters here: as a technology of relationship. Chant, ornamentation and ceremony calibrate attention. They remind people, again and again, that the world is a field of encounters – some generous, some dangerous, all consequential.
The words that follow offer cosmology in action: living archives and working worlds that provide practical guidance for crossing thresholds, sustaining reciprocity and keeping life possible in a world that modernity has trained itself to forget. These are ways of living that have survived different genocides and still carry instructions for ancestral futures.
Beinghood
Modern language often reaches for a single explanation of Indigenous animism and relationality: anthropomorphism – as if Indigenous peoples simply ‘project’ human traits onto other beings. Anthropologists often reach for another: personhood, a concept meant to capture how many worlds extend social life beyond the human. Both terms can be useful. Both can also become traps. They risk keeping the human as the hidden measure of everything, turning Indigenous realities into variations of our own categories rather than allowing them to unsettle those categories themselves. Perhaps another word is needed here: beinghood. By beinghood, I mean a mode of existence grounded not in resemblance to the human, but in relation, presence, agency and participation in a world of many beings.
You can see how quickly the ‘projection’ story collapses if you look at coronavirus. During the pandemic, political leaders and journalists described the virus as if it had character: ‘an invisible enemy’, ‘brilliant’, ‘tough’, ‘sneaky’, ‘merciless’. Modernity, too, animates what it fears. When uncertainty hits, people reach for agency. The impulse is human.
The difference is what comes next.
In many Indigenous worlds, more-than-human beings do not become ‘like humans’ because humans imagine them that way. They arrive already as presences with perspective, intention and social consequence. The question is not ‘Do they have agency?’ It is: what kind of being is this? What does it require of us? What are the terms of relationship here? And this is where responsibility takes on its older meaning: response-ability – the practiced capacity to notice, to listen, to adjust, to answer. To act ethically is not to stand above the world and manage it, but to become skilled at responding to many kinds of beings.
Among some Jê-speaking peoples of Brazil, the cosmos is not a single flat stage but layered realms: underwater, subterranean, terrestrial, celestial. Time itself emerges from the friction and overlap of these domains, shaped by primordial figures such as the Sun and Moon, who leave guidance behind before returning to their own worlds. The Kayapó, living over a vast area across the states of Pará and Mato Grosso, make this cosmology tangible in everyday geography. Their village is not just where people live; it is the most ‘socialized’ space in the cosmos. The forest around it is not ‘nature’ – it is a space where humans can become something else: fall sick, lose themselves, encounter spirits, return transformed. Because the forest can absorb the social, hunting and planting require mediation. Before opening new land, Kayapó dancers move with the structure of a war ritual, not to celebrate conquest, but to acknowledge the seriousness of entering a living domain. After a hunt, men sing to the animals’ spirits, so their presence remains in the forest. These acts keep relationships from breaking.
Further northwest, Tukano peoples of the Upper Rio Negro tell of ancestors emerging from a great serpent whose body carved the riverbeds, shaping territory and social order. Harmony is a lived responsibility, not an abstract philosophical ideal. Pajés (shamans) do not only heal people; they help keep rivers flowing ‘properly’ and animal populations stable, and they work to prevent the consequences of taking too much, too carelessly.
The Wari (Pakaa Nova) living in Rondônia link existence to anima and recognize that many animals, and even elements of the world, share this quality, along with their own ways of life. The Manxineru in the Western Amazon speak of rivers, trees and animals as beings with spirit, and in some accounts humans receive names through these entities. The Xerente in the Central Amazon extend soul beyond humans as well, describing protective spirits that shape daily life. Among the Kayapó, vital energy – karon – runs through beings; master spirits oversee animals and plants, and ceremonial practice maintains the conditions for coexistence.
In the Pano worlds of the western Amazon – Kaxinawá (Huni Kuin), Yawanawá, Katukina – ‘beinghood’ does not stop at the skin. A being forms through flesh and yuxin (soul), and many beings carry body and soul. Knowledge moves between species. In Kaxinawá origin narratives, the squirrel teaches humans the art of planting, its practice of storing food offering a lesson in cultivation. The capuchin monkey teaches humans to copulate face to face. Even the most intimate aspects of human life emerge through relationships with other beings. These are memories of apprenticeship, lessons from the ancestors: humans learning from others, rather than crowning themselves masters.
Katukina relationships with animals and spirits often resemble relationships within the community: bonds, obligations, forms of address. Here, ‘beinghood’ is understood as a field of relations rather than a biological category. It belongs to those who can enter social life, who can respond, refuse, teach, withdraw, retaliate or bless.
This is why anthropomorphism misleads. It implies projection. It implies that humans remain the measure. Even ‘personhood’, for all its usefulness, can smuggle in the same bias if it quietly assumes that being a ‘person’ means being more like us. As stated by Canadian anthropologist Eduardo Kohn in his remarkable book How Forests Think, ‘We are colonized by certain ways of thinking about relationality’ that are framed by ‘our assumptions about the forms of associations that structure human language. Then, in ways that often go unnoticed, we project these assumptions onto nonhumans. Without realizing it, we attribute to nonhumans properties that are our own (…).’
Indigenous cosmologies refuse the mirror. They refuse a single, universal reality. They point toward a pluriverse guided by ancestrality: many worlds living side by side, each with its own agreements, dangers, responsibilities and ways of knowing. This is an ethical-ancestral demand. A pluriversal world requires humility and restraint. It requires learning response-ability: how to live among beings who do not exist for us and who may not forgive our ignorance.
If today’s crises are partly crises of relationships – ecological, spiritual, epidemiological – then these cosmologies offer more than ‘wisdom’ as inspiration. They offer training: a disciplined way of re-entering a living world, where nothing is mere scenery, and where responsibility begins with recognizing the knowledge of our ancestors and developing our ability to respond and relate to it.
Ancestral intelligence
What does it take to learn to respond? In the Yawanawá rituals I write about, chant and ritual created conditions in which participants could attend to presences they might ordinarily overlook. For some, the encounter unsettled the sense that their lives ended at the skin. A plant could be encountered as a teacher. The forest could be felt as a place where one’s actions had consequences for beings with lives of their own. What mattered was how that change in attention might carry into life after the ritual.
As Indigenous spiritual practices travel, those responsibilities can become harder for visitors to see. Davi Kopenawa’s description of the ‘people of the merchandise’ invites us to ask what habits we carry into ceremony and ritual. We may arrive hoping for healing, and the experience may indeed change us. We can also come away with a powerful story about ourselves while knowing very little about the people who made the encounter possible, the land that sustains the practice or the obligations that come with receiving it. Learning to hear what is asked of us is part of what I mean by response-ability.
This is where I would place ancestral intelligence. It lives in the practices through which people remember how to respond to and learn from different beings, in diverse places, over generations. A chant can carry a way of listening. A cosmology can remember what happened the last time someone took too much. A protocol can teach when to ask, when to wait and when to leave a place alone.
When Ailton Krenak speaks of an ancestral future, I think of these forms of memory and what they make possible. A ceremony may last a night. Learning to answer for what we receive takes longer. It continues in what we take, what we return and what we leave for those who come after us. As we turn to machines for answers, will we still recognise the knowledge carried by a chant, a forest or a cosmology? And how will we protect forms of intelligence whose value exceeds what a machine can measure?
Beinghood: on indigenous cosmologies and ancestral futures
This piece is adapted from Chanting Spring: Indigenous Wisdom for Ancestral Futures by Fernanda Gebara.
People often reach for cosmology when they want grand answers: creation stories, gods, the meaning of life. But in many Indigenous contexts, cosmology also does something more immediate. It works like a map for the dangerous parts of reality, and as a memory system designed to prevent collective amnesia.
Every landscape has verges. A river can feed you and kill you. A forest can shelter you and swallow you. A hunt can nourish a community and still disturb what should not be disturbed. Certain places, times and encounters demand more than technique; they demand protocol. Indigenous cosmologies hold these protocols. They teach how to cross boundaries without pretending boundaries do not exist: how to enter the forest without treating it as mere ‘nature’, how to take life without turning it into pure commodity, how to heal without reducing sickness to malfunction.
Modern life, by contrast, trains a different kind of forgetting. We forget where food comes from, where water goes, where waste ends up, whose labour makes comfort possible. We also forget the speed of destruction until it becomes irreversible. This is not only a lack of information – it is the effect of a worldview that treats the world as external, something we use, then replace.
Many Indigenous cosmologies resist that forgetting. They keep the past close as a form of answerability. They embed history in landscape. They store warnings in myth and restraint in ritual. They make certain acts – overhunting, violating a place, ignoring a principle – feel not only imprudent but relationally wrong. This is why ritual matters here: as a technology of relationship. Chant, ornamentation and ceremony calibrate attention. They remind people, again and again, that the world is a field of encounters – some generous, some dangerous, all consequential.
The words that follow offer cosmology in action: living archives and working worlds that provide practical guidance for crossing thresholds, sustaining reciprocity and keeping life possible in a world that modernity has trained itself to forget. These are ways of living that have survived different genocides and still carry instructions for ancestral futures.
Beinghood
Modern language often reaches for a single explanation of Indigenous animism and relationality: anthropomorphism – as if Indigenous peoples simply ‘project’ human traits onto other beings. Anthropologists often reach for another: personhood, a concept meant to capture how many worlds extend social life beyond the human. Both terms can be useful. Both can also become traps. They risk keeping the human as the hidden measure of everything, turning Indigenous realities into variations of our own categories rather than allowing them to unsettle those categories themselves. Perhaps another word is needed here: beinghood. By beinghood, I mean a mode of existence grounded not in resemblance to the human, but in relation, presence, agency and participation in a world of many beings.
You can see how quickly the ‘projection’ story collapses if you look at coronavirus. During the pandemic, political leaders and journalists described the virus as if it had character: ‘an invisible enemy’, ‘brilliant’, ‘tough’, ‘sneaky’, ‘merciless’. Modernity, too, animates what it fears. When uncertainty hits, people reach for agency. The impulse is human.
The difference is what comes next.
In many Indigenous worlds, more-than-human beings do not become ‘like humans’ because humans imagine them that way. They arrive already as presences with perspective, intention and social consequence. The question is not ‘Do they have agency?’ It is: what kind of being is this? What does it require of us? What are the terms of relationship here? And this is where responsibility takes on its older meaning: response-ability – the practiced capacity to notice, to listen, to adjust, to answer. To act ethically is not to stand above the world and manage it, but to become skilled at responding to many kinds of beings.
Among some Jê-speaking peoples of Brazil, the cosmos is not a single flat stage but layered realms: underwater, subterranean, terrestrial, celestial. Time itself emerges from the friction and overlap of these domains, shaped by primordial figures such as the Sun and Moon, who leave guidance behind before returning to their own worlds. The Kayapó, living over a vast area across the states of Pará and Mato Grosso, make this cosmology tangible in everyday geography. Their village is not just where people live; it is the most ‘socialized’ space in the cosmos. The forest around it is not ‘nature’ – it is a space where humans can become something else: fall sick, lose themselves, encounter spirits, return transformed. Because the forest can absorb the social, hunting and planting require mediation. Before opening new land, Kayapó dancers move with the structure of a war ritual, not to celebrate conquest, but to acknowledge the seriousness of entering a living domain. After a hunt, men sing to the animals’ spirits, so their presence remains in the forest. These acts keep relationships from breaking.
Further northwest, Tukano peoples of the Upper Rio Negro tell of ancestors emerging from a great serpent whose body carved the riverbeds, shaping territory and social order. Harmony is a lived responsibility, not an abstract philosophical ideal. Pajés (shamans) do not only heal people; they help keep rivers flowing ‘properly’ and animal populations stable, and they work to prevent the consequences of taking too much, too carelessly.
The Wari (Pakaa Nova) living in Rondônia link existence to anima and recognize that many animals, and even elements of the world, share this quality, along with their own ways of life. The Manxineru in the Western Amazon speak of rivers, trees and animals as beings with spirit, and in some accounts humans receive names through these entities. The Xerente in the Central Amazon extend soul beyond humans as well, describing protective spirits that shape daily life. Among the Kayapó, vital energy – karon – runs through beings; master spirits oversee animals and plants, and ceremonial practice maintains the conditions for coexistence.
In the Pano worlds of the western Amazon – Kaxinawá (Huni Kuin), Yawanawá, Katukina – ‘beinghood’ does not stop at the skin. A being forms through flesh and yuxin (soul), and many beings carry body and soul. Knowledge moves between species. In Kaxinawá origin narratives, the squirrel teaches humans the art of planting, its practice of storing food offering a lesson in cultivation. The capuchin monkey teaches humans to copulate face to face. Even the most intimate aspects of human life emerge through relationships with other beings. These are memories of apprenticeship, lessons from the ancestors: humans learning from others, rather than crowning themselves masters.
Katukina relationships with animals and spirits often resemble relationships within the community: bonds, obligations, forms of address. Here, ‘beinghood’ is understood as a field of relations rather than a biological category. It belongs to those who can enter social life, who can respond, refuse, teach, withdraw, retaliate or bless.
This is why anthropomorphism misleads. It implies projection. It implies that humans remain the measure. Even ‘personhood’, for all its usefulness, can smuggle in the same bias if it quietly assumes that being a ‘person’ means being more like us. As stated by Canadian anthropologist Eduardo Kohn in his remarkable book How Forests Think, ‘We are colonized by certain ways of thinking about relationality’ that are framed by ‘our assumptions about the forms of associations that structure human language. Then, in ways that often go unnoticed, we project these assumptions onto nonhumans. Without realizing it, we attribute to nonhumans properties that are our own (…).’
Indigenous cosmologies refuse the mirror. They refuse a single, universal reality. They point toward a pluriverse guided by ancestrality: many worlds living side by side, each with its own agreements, dangers, responsibilities and ways of knowing. This is an ethical-ancestral demand. A pluriversal world requires humility and restraint. It requires learning response-ability: how to live among beings who do not exist for us and who may not forgive our ignorance.
If today’s crises are partly crises of relationships – ecological, spiritual, epidemiological – then these cosmologies offer more than ‘wisdom’ as inspiration. They offer training: a disciplined way of re-entering a living world, where nothing is mere scenery, and where responsibility begins with recognizing the knowledge of our ancestors and developing our ability to respond and relate to it.
Ancestral intelligence
What does it take to learn to respond? In the Yawanawá rituals I write about, chant and ritual created conditions in which participants could attend to presences they might ordinarily overlook. For some, the encounter unsettled the sense that their lives ended at the skin. A plant could be encountered as a teacher. The forest could be felt as a place where one’s actions had consequences for beings with lives of their own. What mattered was how that change in attention might carry into life after the ritual.
As Indigenous spiritual practices travel, those responsibilities can become harder for visitors to see. Davi Kopenawa’s description of the ‘people of the merchandise’ invites us to ask what habits we carry into ceremony and ritual. We may arrive hoping for healing, and the experience may indeed change us. We can also come away with a powerful story about ourselves while knowing very little about the people who made the encounter possible, the land that sustains the practice or the obligations that come with receiving it. Learning to hear what is asked of us is part of what I mean by response-ability.
This is where I would place ancestral intelligence. It lives in the practices through which people remember how to respond to and learn from different beings, in diverse places, over generations. A chant can carry a way of listening. A cosmology can remember what happened the last time someone took too much. A protocol can teach when to ask, when to wait and when to leave a place alone.
When Ailton Krenak speaks of an ancestral future, I think of these forms of memory and what they make possible. A ceremony may last a night. Learning to answer for what we receive takes longer. It continues in what we take, what we return and what we leave for those who come after us. As we turn to machines for answers, will we still recognise the knowledge carried by a chant, a forest or a cosmology? And how will we protect forms of intelligence whose value exceeds what a machine can measure?
Fernanda Gebara is a mother, writer, scientist, and lifelong learner, raised between Brazil’s Atlantic Forest and the city of Rio de Janeiro. With two decades of experience working on Indigenous rights, biodiversity conservation, climate change, and behaviour change, her work focuses on weaving Indigenous and scientific knowledges and supporting Indigenous communities in sharing their cosmologies. She collaborates with the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute and the Runyn Pupykary Yawanawá Institute to support Indigenous elders in creating an independent framework to preserve ancestral knowledge for future generations. Fernanda is the author of Chanting Spring: Indigenous Wisdom for Ancestral Futures.
MARIA FERNANDA GEBARA
Beinghood: on indigenous cosmologies and ancestral futures
This piece is adapted from Chanting Spring: Indigenous Wisdom for Ancestral Futures by Fernanda Gebara.
People often reach for cosmology when they want grand answers: creation stories, gods, the meaning of life. But in many Indigenous contexts, cosmology also does something more immediate. It works like a map for the dangerous parts of reality, and as a memory system designed to prevent collective amnesia.
Every landscape has verges. A river can feed you and kill you. A forest can shelter you and swallow you. A hunt can nourish a community and still disturb what should not be disturbed. Certain places, times and encounters demand more than technique; they demand protocol. Indigenous cosmologies hold these protocols. They teach how to cross boundaries without pretending boundaries do not exist: how to enter the forest without treating it as mere ‘nature’, how to take life without turning it into pure commodity, how to heal without reducing sickness to malfunction.
Modern life, by contrast, trains a different kind of forgetting. We forget where food comes from, where water goes, where waste ends up, whose labour makes comfort possible. We also forget the speed of destruction until it becomes irreversible. This is not only a lack of information – it is the effect of a worldview that treats the world as external, something we use, then replace.
Many Indigenous cosmologies resist that forgetting. They keep the past close as a form of answerability. They embed history in landscape. They store warnings in myth and restraint in ritual. They make certain acts – overhunting, violating a place, ignoring a principle – feel not only imprudent but relationally wrong. This is why ritual matters here: as a technology of relationship. Chant, ornamentation and ceremony calibrate attention. They remind people, again and again, that the world is a field of encounters – some generous, some dangerous, all consequential.
The words that follow offer cosmology in action: living archives and working worlds that provide practical guidance for crossing thresholds, sustaining reciprocity and keeping life possible in a world that modernity has trained itself to forget. These are ways of living that have survived different genocides and still carry instructions for ancestral futures.
Beinghood
Modern language often reaches for a single explanation of Indigenous animism and relationality: anthropomorphism – as if Indigenous peoples simply ‘project’ human traits onto other beings. Anthropologists often reach for another: personhood, a concept meant to capture how many worlds extend social life beyond the human. Both terms can be useful. Both can also become traps. They risk keeping the human as the hidden measure of everything, turning Indigenous realities into variations of our own categories rather than allowing them to unsettle those categories themselves. Perhaps another word is needed here: beinghood. By beinghood, I mean a mode of existence grounded not in resemblance to the human, but in relation, presence, agency and participation in a world of many beings.
You can see how quickly the ‘projection’ story collapses if you look at coronavirus. During the pandemic, political leaders and journalists described the virus as if it had character: ‘an invisible enemy’, ‘brilliant’, ‘tough’, ‘sneaky’, ‘merciless’. Modernity, too, animates what it fears. When uncertainty hits, people reach for agency. The impulse is human.
The difference is what comes next.
In many Indigenous worlds, more-than-human beings do not become ‘like humans’ because humans imagine them that way. They arrive already as presences with perspective, intention and social consequence. The question is not ‘Do they have agency?’ It is: what kind of being is this? What does it require of us? What are the terms of relationship here? And this is where responsibility takes on its older meaning: response-ability – the practiced capacity to notice, to listen, to adjust, to answer. To act ethically is not to stand above the world and manage it, but to become skilled at responding to many kinds of beings.
Among some Jê-speaking peoples of Brazil, the cosmos is not a single flat stage but layered realms: underwater, subterranean, terrestrial, celestial. Time itself emerges from the friction and overlap of these domains, shaped by primordial figures such as the Sun and Moon, who leave guidance behind before returning to their own worlds. The Kayapó, living over a vast area across the states of Pará and Mato Grosso, make this cosmology tangible in everyday geography. Their village is not just where people live; it is the most ‘socialized’ space in the cosmos. The forest around it is not ‘nature’ – it is a space where humans can become something else: fall sick, lose themselves, encounter spirits, return transformed. Because the forest can absorb the social, hunting and planting require mediation. Before opening new land, Kayapó dancers move with the structure of a war ritual, not to celebrate conquest, but to acknowledge the seriousness of entering a living domain. After a hunt, men sing to the animals’ spirits, so their presence remains in the forest. These acts keep relationships from breaking.
Further northwest, Tukano peoples of the Upper Rio Negro tell of ancestors emerging from a great serpent whose body carved the riverbeds, shaping territory and social order. Harmony is a lived responsibility, not an abstract philosophical ideal. Pajés (shamans) do not only heal people; they help keep rivers flowing ‘properly’ and animal populations stable, and they work to prevent the consequences of taking too much, too carelessly.
The Wari (Pakaa Nova) living in Rondônia link existence to anima and recognize that many animals, and even elements of the world, share this quality, along with their own ways of life. The Manxineru in the Western Amazon speak of rivers, trees and animals as beings with spirit, and in some accounts humans receive names through these entities. The Xerente in the Central Amazon extend soul beyond humans as well, describing protective spirits that shape daily life. Among the Kayapó, vital energy – karon – runs through beings; master spirits oversee animals and plants, and ceremonial practice maintains the conditions for coexistence.
In the Pano worlds of the western Amazon – Kaxinawá (Huni Kuin), Yawanawá, Katukina – ‘beinghood’ does not stop at the skin. A being forms through flesh and yuxin (soul), and many beings carry body and soul. Knowledge moves between species. In Kaxinawá origin narratives, the squirrel teaches humans the art of planting, its practice of storing food offering a lesson in cultivation. The capuchin monkey teaches humans to copulate face to face. Even the most intimate aspects of human life emerge through relationships with other beings. These are memories of apprenticeship, lessons from the ancestors: humans learning from others, rather than crowning themselves masters.
Katukina relationships with animals and spirits often resemble relationships within the community: bonds, obligations, forms of address. Here, ‘beinghood’ is understood as a field of relations rather than a biological category. It belongs to those who can enter social life, who can respond, refuse, teach, withdraw, retaliate or bless.
This is why anthropomorphism misleads. It implies projection. It implies that humans remain the measure. Even ‘personhood’, for all its usefulness, can smuggle in the same bias if it quietly assumes that being a ‘person’ means being more like us. As stated by Canadian anthropologist Eduardo Kohn in his remarkable book How Forests Think, ‘We are colonized by certain ways of thinking about relationality’ that are framed by ‘our assumptions about the forms of associations that structure human language. Then, in ways that often go unnoticed, we project these assumptions onto nonhumans. Without realizing it, we attribute to nonhumans properties that are our own (…).’
Indigenous cosmologies refuse the mirror. They refuse a single, universal reality. They point toward a pluriverse guided by ancestrality: many worlds living side by side, each with its own agreements, dangers, responsibilities and ways of knowing. This is an ethical-ancestral demand. A pluriversal world requires humility and restraint. It requires learning response-ability: how to live among beings who do not exist for us and who may not forgive our ignorance.
If today’s crises are partly crises of relationships – ecological, spiritual, epidemiological – then these cosmologies offer more than ‘wisdom’ as inspiration. They offer training: a disciplined way of re-entering a living world, where nothing is mere scenery, and where responsibility begins with recognizing the knowledge of our ancestors and developing our ability to respond and relate to it.
Ancestral intelligence
What does it take to learn to respond? In the Yawanawá rituals I write about, chant and ritual created conditions in which participants could attend to presences they might ordinarily overlook. For some, the encounter unsettled the sense that their lives ended at the skin. A plant could be encountered as a teacher. The forest could be felt as a place where one’s actions had consequences for beings with lives of their own. What mattered was how that change in attention might carry into life after the ritual.
As Indigenous spiritual practices travel, those responsibilities can become harder for visitors to see. Davi Kopenawa’s description of the ‘people of the merchandise’ invites us to ask what habits we carry into ceremony and ritual. We may arrive hoping for healing, and the experience may indeed change us. We can also come away with a powerful story about ourselves while knowing very little about the people who made the encounter possible, the land that sustains the practice or the obligations that come with receiving it. Learning to hear what is asked of us is part of what I mean by response-ability.
This is where I would place ancestral intelligence. It lives in the practices through which people remember how to respond to and learn from different beings, in diverse places, over generations. A chant can carry a way of listening. A cosmology can remember what happened the last time someone took too much. A protocol can teach when to ask, when to wait and when to leave a place alone.
When Ailton Krenak speaks of an ancestral future, I think of these forms of memory and what they make possible. A ceremony may last a night. Learning to answer for what we receive takes longer. It continues in what we take, what we return and what we leave for those who come after us. As we turn to machines for answers, will we still recognise the knowledge carried by a chant, a forest or a cosmology? And how will we protect forms of intelligence whose value exceeds what a machine can measure?
Beinghood: on indigenous cosmologies and ancestral futures
This piece is adapted from Chanting Spring: Indigenous Wisdom for Ancestral Futures by Fernanda Gebara.
People often reach for cosmology when they want grand answers: creation stories, gods, the meaning of life. But in many Indigenous contexts, cosmology also does something more immediate. It works like a map for the dangerous parts of reality, and as a memory system designed to prevent collective amnesia.
Every landscape has verges. A river can feed you and kill you. A forest can shelter you and swallow you. A hunt can nourish a community and still disturb what should not be disturbed. Certain places, times and encounters demand more than technique; they demand protocol. Indigenous cosmologies hold these protocols. They teach how to cross boundaries without pretending boundaries do not exist: how to enter the forest without treating it as mere ‘nature’, how to take life without turning it into pure commodity, how to heal without reducing sickness to malfunction.
Modern life, by contrast, trains a different kind of forgetting. We forget where food comes from, where water goes, where waste ends up, whose labour makes comfort possible. We also forget the speed of destruction until it becomes irreversible. This is not only a lack of information – it is the effect of a worldview that treats the world as external, something we use, then replace.
Many Indigenous cosmologies resist that forgetting. They keep the past close as a form of answerability. They embed history in landscape. They store warnings in myth and restraint in ritual. They make certain acts – overhunting, violating a place, ignoring a principle – feel not only imprudent but relationally wrong. This is why ritual matters here: as a technology of relationship. Chant, ornamentation and ceremony calibrate attention. They remind people, again and again, that the world is a field of encounters – some generous, some dangerous, all consequential.
The words that follow offer cosmology in action: living archives and working worlds that provide practical guidance for crossing thresholds, sustaining reciprocity and keeping life possible in a world that modernity has trained itself to forget. These are ways of living that have survived different genocides and still carry instructions for ancestral futures.
Beinghood
Modern language often reaches for a single explanation of Indigenous animism and relationality: anthropomorphism – as if Indigenous peoples simply ‘project’ human traits onto other beings. Anthropologists often reach for another: personhood, a concept meant to capture how many worlds extend social life beyond the human. Both terms can be useful. Both can also become traps. They risk keeping the human as the hidden measure of everything, turning Indigenous realities into variations of our own categories rather than allowing them to unsettle those categories themselves. Perhaps another word is needed here: beinghood. By beinghood, I mean a mode of existence grounded not in resemblance to the human, but in relation, presence, agency and participation in a world of many beings.
You can see how quickly the ‘projection’ story collapses if you look at coronavirus. During the pandemic, political leaders and journalists described the virus as if it had character: ‘an invisible enemy’, ‘brilliant’, ‘tough’, ‘sneaky’, ‘merciless’. Modernity, too, animates what it fears. When uncertainty hits, people reach for agency. The impulse is human.
The difference is what comes next.
In many Indigenous worlds, more-than-human beings do not become ‘like humans’ because humans imagine them that way. They arrive already as presences with perspective, intention and social consequence. The question is not ‘Do they have agency?’ It is: what kind of being is this? What does it require of us? What are the terms of relationship here? And this is where responsibility takes on its older meaning: response-ability – the practiced capacity to notice, to listen, to adjust, to answer. To act ethically is not to stand above the world and manage it, but to become skilled at responding to many kinds of beings.
Among some Jê-speaking peoples of Brazil, the cosmos is not a single flat stage but layered realms: underwater, subterranean, terrestrial, celestial. Time itself emerges from the friction and overlap of these domains, shaped by primordial figures such as the Sun and Moon, who leave guidance behind before returning to their own worlds. The Kayapó, living over a vast area across the states of Pará and Mato Grosso, make this cosmology tangible in everyday geography. Their village is not just where people live; it is the most ‘socialized’ space in the cosmos. The forest around it is not ‘nature’ – it is a space where humans can become something else: fall sick, lose themselves, encounter spirits, return transformed. Because the forest can absorb the social, hunting and planting require mediation. Before opening new land, Kayapó dancers move with the structure of a war ritual, not to celebrate conquest, but to acknowledge the seriousness of entering a living domain. After a hunt, men sing to the animals’ spirits, so their presence remains in the forest. These acts keep relationships from breaking.
Further northwest, Tukano peoples of the Upper Rio Negro tell of ancestors emerging from a great serpent whose body carved the riverbeds, shaping territory and social order. Harmony is a lived responsibility, not an abstract philosophical ideal. Pajés (shamans) do not only heal people; they help keep rivers flowing ‘properly’ and animal populations stable, and they work to prevent the consequences of taking too much, too carelessly.
The Wari (Pakaa Nova) living in Rondônia link existence to anima and recognize that many animals, and even elements of the world, share this quality, along with their own ways of life. The Manxineru in the Western Amazon speak of rivers, trees and animals as beings with spirit, and in some accounts humans receive names through these entities. The Xerente in the Central Amazon extend soul beyond humans as well, describing protective spirits that shape daily life. Among the Kayapó, vital energy – karon – runs through beings; master spirits oversee animals and plants, and ceremonial practice maintains the conditions for coexistence.
In the Pano worlds of the western Amazon – Kaxinawá (Huni Kuin), Yawanawá, Katukina – ‘beinghood’ does not stop at the skin. A being forms through flesh and yuxin (soul), and many beings carry body and soul. Knowledge moves between species. In Kaxinawá origin narratives, the squirrel teaches humans the art of planting, its practice of storing food offering a lesson in cultivation. The capuchin monkey teaches humans to copulate face to face. Even the most intimate aspects of human life emerge through relationships with other beings. These are memories of apprenticeship, lessons from the ancestors: humans learning from others, rather than crowning themselves masters.
Katukina relationships with animals and spirits often resemble relationships within the community: bonds, obligations, forms of address. Here, ‘beinghood’ is understood as a field of relations rather than a biological category. It belongs to those who can enter social life, who can respond, refuse, teach, withdraw, retaliate or bless.
This is why anthropomorphism misleads. It implies projection. It implies that humans remain the measure. Even ‘personhood’, for all its usefulness, can smuggle in the same bias if it quietly assumes that being a ‘person’ means being more like us. As stated by Canadian anthropologist Eduardo Kohn in his remarkable book How Forests Think, ‘We are colonized by certain ways of thinking about relationality’ that are framed by ‘our assumptions about the forms of associations that structure human language. Then, in ways that often go unnoticed, we project these assumptions onto nonhumans. Without realizing it, we attribute to nonhumans properties that are our own (…).’
Indigenous cosmologies refuse the mirror. They refuse a single, universal reality. They point toward a pluriverse guided by ancestrality: many worlds living side by side, each with its own agreements, dangers, responsibilities and ways of knowing. This is an ethical-ancestral demand. A pluriversal world requires humility and restraint. It requires learning response-ability: how to live among beings who do not exist for us and who may not forgive our ignorance.
If today’s crises are partly crises of relationships – ecological, spiritual, epidemiological – then these cosmologies offer more than ‘wisdom’ as inspiration. They offer training: a disciplined way of re-entering a living world, where nothing is mere scenery, and where responsibility begins with recognizing the knowledge of our ancestors and developing our ability to respond and relate to it.
Ancestral intelligence
What does it take to learn to respond? In the Yawanawá rituals I write about, chant and ritual created conditions in which participants could attend to presences they might ordinarily overlook. For some, the encounter unsettled the sense that their lives ended at the skin. A plant could be encountered as a teacher. The forest could be felt as a place where one’s actions had consequences for beings with lives of their own. What mattered was how that change in attention might carry into life after the ritual.
As Indigenous spiritual practices travel, those responsibilities can become harder for visitors to see. Davi Kopenawa’s description of the ‘people of the merchandise’ invites us to ask what habits we carry into ceremony and ritual. We may arrive hoping for healing, and the experience may indeed change us. We can also come away with a powerful story about ourselves while knowing very little about the people who made the encounter possible, the land that sustains the practice or the obligations that come with receiving it. Learning to hear what is asked of us is part of what I mean by response-ability.
This is where I would place ancestral intelligence. It lives in the practices through which people remember how to respond to and learn from different beings, in diverse places, over generations. A chant can carry a way of listening. A cosmology can remember what happened the last time someone took too much. A protocol can teach when to ask, when to wait and when to leave a place alone.
When Ailton Krenak speaks of an ancestral future, I think of these forms of memory and what they make possible. A ceremony may last a night. Learning to answer for what we receive takes longer. It continues in what we take, what we return and what we leave for those who come after us. As we turn to machines for answers, will we still recognise the knowledge carried by a chant, a forest or a cosmology? And how will we protect forms of intelligence whose value exceeds what a machine can measure?
Fernanda Gebara is a mother, writer, scientist, and lifelong learner, raised between Brazil’s Atlantic Forest and the city of Rio de Janeiro. With two decades of experience working on Indigenous rights, biodiversity conservation, climate change, and behaviour change, her work focuses on weaving Indigenous and scientific knowledges and supporting Indigenous communities in sharing their cosmologies. She collaborates with the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute and the Runyn Pupykary Yawanawá Institute to support Indigenous elders in creating an independent framework to preserve ancestral knowledge for future generations. Fernanda is the author of Chanting Spring: Indigenous Wisdom for Ancestral Futures.