Check out the documentary
Aluna, about the isolated Columbian tribe theKogi, who wish us to know that our superficial understanding of the world is leading us to deeply damage the Earth and all life:
And please, boost the signal.
The film will be distributed through a major distributor, but also online. It really does need to be seen.
One of the things that intrigues me is that the film involves scientists talking about how "cutting edge" the Kogi understanding of astronomy, ecology and physics are. Steele Professor of Astronomy, Richard Ellis, met one of the Kogi Mamas (the spiritual leaders) in London:
"I unfurled a colour poster of the `Hubble Deep Field’ - a spectacular image of a tiny portion of the night sky representing tens of hours of exposure time with Hubble Space Telescope’s powerful optical camera. The picture reveals a wondrous spash of hundreds of colourful tiny galaxies, exquisite in their miniature irregular forms, seen as they were far back in time towards our cosmic origins. The image has, in fact, become an icon in our subject.
Shibulata considered the image and seemed, at first, unimpressed; perhaps bewildered and afraid to reveal his ignorance. Then, surprisingly, he outstretched his hand and pointed definitively to an object in the image and uttered an unintelligible remark. Out of several hundred sources, he had located one of only two foreground stars in our Milky Way. The Hubble Deep Field was purposely chosen to be largely absent of foreground stars. But, with no training, Shibulata found one of them very quickly.
Impressed, I asked our Kogi translater, Sylvestre, what did Shibulate think his chosen source might represent. Correctly, Shibulata declared it was a star but not one that could be seen with the naked eye. [In fact the star would not been seen with even a moderately powerful telescope such as could be afforded by even a wealthy amateur!]. Furthermore, Shibulata declared he had already known of the existence of this star!
Alan Eireira grasped excitedly at this remark. What could it possibly mean? How could Shibulata possibly have known of this faint star revealed only in this deep Hubble Space Telescope image? Through more interrogation we learned that the Kogi are aware of the existence of stars whose brightnesses lie beyond reach of the naked eye. Indeed, we learned they are categorized on a scale of 1 through 9. Shibulata was most likely speaking metaphorically that here was visual proof of their belief - something he knew must exist, even if he had not witnessed it before."