I am happy to be able to come and greet you people

in this place that is farther even for us.

We live up in the red waters,

we are a people who are dedicated to maintaining

and taking care of our forest, not just for ourselves but for all of you.

And this is the message that I would like to bring to you.

The Cofán people are a small indigenous group

that lives up in the northeast and corner of Ecuador

and the southeast and corner of Colombia.

And only number by 2,500 people in total.

It's a group that has lived in the forest

and with the forest for many, many, many centuries.

When my parents first arrived there in the 1950s,

it was a very, very small group isolated in a huge Amazonia

living a proud life on the rivers

but very, very distant from everything.

My mother and father were missionaries

and I was born just a little bit in the south

of the actual Cofán village where I grew up.

My parents took me there when I was about two months old.

I was a quite a thing for the whole village

because it was the first white baby that anybody that have ever seen,

but that wore off very quickly

and I grew up just as another one of the Cofán people in the village.

Small village with probably 120 people, more or less, when I was growing up.

Our culture was a culture that was based completely on the forest,

it was completely revolving around what we could take from the forest

and we had no concept of the time that it can ever change.

Our houses were built from materials that we found there at hand.

We were able to transport ourselves up and down the rivers

and packs some of the older Cofáns that have been down to Manaus.

The previous generation, actually my father-in-law.

This particular household was a household that I spent a lot of time

and personally because I really liked that

there is not a reason then I'll show you in just a minute.

But if you look around in the house, as I look at the picture,

I realized that we have...

just about everything in that picture comes directly from the rain forest,

and we didn't have to take anything from the outside world.

We have one aluminum pot sitting over on the corner,

but everything else is a product of the rain forest.

Our art worker social life are ability to create things

that we're really truly comfortable, for instance the hammock.

And we interface on a very small level with the outside world.

We are all important parts of what we were trying to live at the time.

The older man in this picture was my dad's closest friend,

in the village they were very, very close friends,

he was the chief of the village, named Guillermo.

My memories of Guillermo are...

that he was not only the chief, but he was also...

because of the shamanism, he never took a bath,

and so, when he'll try to hold me on his lap,

it was always this overwhelming sensory experience

that I remember to this day.

But it was an extremely attractive culture, extremely rich culture

where we lived in harmony with ourselves with each other

with the environment around us.

This old lady was the reason that I was so attracted to that particular house

and she eventually became my great-grandmother-in-law

when I married my wife Amélia.

She was always good to roast the lizard

that we would catch with our blowgun or whatever like this.

And this was my uncle,

that was my very, very treasured uncle that I would live with then.

This world was a world of unlimited resources,

a world that was just about impossible for us to understand

at this point in time.

It all changed dramatically in the 1960s

when, all of a sudden, the oil companies began to come in and...

as the oil companies poured into the area they brought tractors,

they brought roads, they brought our first taste of pollution,

as a rivers we have been able to drink out directly, previously,

all of a sudden it began to run with crude oil

and with chemicals that we didn't have names for.

I remember catching a fish and...

one of my, now he is one of my brothers-in-law, he says:

"Hey! This stinks, this doesn't smell right!"

And we were faced suddenly with a world

that was completely different and completely ignored us.

Pacho Quintero from San Miguel, died out during this stage.

And we were replaced by trucks carrying pipelines and pasture, grass...

Just an incredible, incredible impact for our culture.

Towns grew up in areas where we have previously used for our hunting

and our fishing and our subsistence culture.

All of a sudden, the Cofáns were considered an extinct tribe.

Anthropologists begin to talk about them have disappeared.

We begun to resist into the 1970s

that was a small group of young people

that begun to analyze deeply who we were.

And, when we begun the analysis we found that

we, aside from our language, aside from our cultural attributes,

aside from dance, aside from spiritual things,

aside from everything else,

we were people of the rain forest

and without our rain forest, we could no longer exist.

We begun a period of resistance that over the next few years,

we were able to organize ourselves

and we were able to recover, at this point,

about 430,000 hectares of our original territories.

Our original territories were probably about 10 times,

maybe 15 times as larger as that.

But we were able to recover the control over these lands

during that period of time.

As we did that we also developed methodologies

that would allow us to dam protect this area

in the face of a relentless push from the outside world

to take the resources from those areas for short term needs.

And in this case we had our park guards.

At the moment we have a core group about 50 park guards,

Cofán park guards that patrol the areas.

Relations with the government,

the president of the federation,

the Cofán federation with the president of Ecuador.

And the infrastructure that we had developed along with that.

In the process we begin slowly to realize that

we weren't just preserving this for ourselves.

And this goes directly into what Antônio was just telling us about.

The preservation for ourselves is a minimum part of what we are doing.

The challenge that we are facing at the moment is the rest of the world.

How do we go about making this something that

the rest of the world would also abide into?

Other indigenous group have become very, very interested in the procedure

that we've been doing and our motto.

At the moment, we are working in about 1,500,000 hectares of rain forest.

With indigenous groups,

who are actively in the same motto that we are,

we've convinced indigenous people we know that we need the forest

for being able to survive as people, as culture, as a world.

The question here is

whether the rest of the world is going to wake up to this

and be willing to take on their part of the responsibility.

This is not something that can happen in isolation,

that's not something that

indigenous groups are going to be able to handle on their own.

We have tremendous economic pressures.

Right now, we're talking about infrastructures,

right now the Manta-Manaus Project.

Within our concept it's called IIRSA.

We're talking about a transport system starting here in Manaus

and going over the Andes Mountains to the Pacific Coast,

to be able to access markets on the Pacific Rim.

This is something that,

for the Cofán people, for the indigenous groups,

is diametrically opposed to what we are visualizing,

what Antônio was just telling, the experience of the Yanomamö,

an individual that is saying

"we need this rain forest if we are going to survive as human beings",

this is where our water is coming,

this is where our planting is coming from.

Until the world begins to abide into this, that's not gonna happen!

The central message that I bring to you from the Cofán people

and from the other indigenous groups that we are working with

is to help us to wake up the world community

to the economic reality that is necessary.

This forest is not just necessary for the survival

of small indigenous groups out there

that are acquainted, interesting or the biodiversity that is there,

or whatever like that.

We are talking about survival of the planet.

Tansin'tsse hanni iou key.

Condase'cho. That's what I have come here to present you.

And thank you very much.