By linking linguistic and biological information, new research shows that most Indigenous knowledge about medicinal plants is linked to threatened languages.
Uldarico Matapí Yucuna, 63, is often called the last shaman of the Matapi, an Indigenous group of fewer than 70 people living along the Mirití-Paraná River in the Colombian Amazon rainforest. His father was a shaman and taught him ancestral knowledge, including how to use plants to treat all kinds of maladies.
In the new study, researchers scoured the literature, including early records by colonizers, to map medicinal plant uses and Indigenous languages in three regions—North America, the northwestern Amazon, and New Guinea. They found about 12,000 medicinal uses for more than 3000 plants, known to people who speak 230 Indigenous languages in these regions. But more than 75% of this knowledge resides in only one of these languages.
Uldarico adds that translation isn’t enough to transmit his culture’s knowledge of how to use plants to heal. A shaman is like a pharmacist as well as a physician, with knowledge that goes well beyond plant identifications that could be translated or simple matching of a plant to a symptom, he says. The results are consistent with previous research, says Victoria Reyes-García, an anthropologist at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies.showed adults have been losing about 3% of their knowledge about plant uses every year, much higher than estimated rates of overall biodiversity loss in the world.
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