“I have traveled many moons… In the forests, so thick, it was night being day…One day, when I arrived at a family, they said behind me: “Here comes the talker. Let’s go hear it” – Mario Vargas Llosa. The Talker (1987).
The life of Indigenous Peoples from the jungle are completely dependent on the use of the natural resources that the forests provide them. With great ingenuity and their uique technology, they found the materials to satisfy all their needs: food, medicine, shelter, the forests provided tools to build, fish and hunt, to entertain themselves and to be clean and perfumed. However, intra- and inter-community communication was carried out through person-to-person oral tradition. In the Amazon, some people traveled enormous distances to tell the good or bad news. They told fantastic stories about the worldview of the cultures in a system of connectivity that allowed the cultural cohesion of these communities.
This system was maintained for millennia, turning oral tradition into an efficient mechanism for cultural transmission and education. It was not until the 1950s that the Indigenous Amazonians dabbled in modern communication systems through the use of HF (high frequency) radios (brought in by the first religious missionaries). This was a significant advance for simultaneous communication between distant communities, when telegraphs and telephones were already available in the Western world.
HF radios were used for a long time until short wave radios appeared. In the 1980s, in a relatively short time, the communities began to communicate through landlines and later with cell phones.
Now, communication and interconnection shorten the distance between people and communities, but they are affecting the traditional systems of communication and cultural cohesion of the world, in general, and of Indigenous communities, in particular.
New communication technologies allow the sharing of content that can be very useful for Indigenous communities in terms of education, emergencies, art, culture, in obtaining funds and projects, etc., but the problem is that to access these systems, Internet connectivity is necessary. The dominant societies of the Western world are very advanced in terms of communication and connectivity, while rural and Indigenous communities of the developing countries still do not have the infrastructure to guarantee access to these new communication technologies. It is time for governments and all civil society to invest in these systems so that remote communities do not further delay their development and the right to live in a more equal and just world.