Before the new world came, our needs were simple.
My mother and I walked through the jungle and slashed
stalks of trees, folding the leaves into roofs for the maloka. I boiled tanti rao for the healers, planted chacruna in rows, and prepared buckets for the purge.

I remember the time I saw it: everyone in the village vomiting into buckets
at once while Maestro Jorge, our shaman, sang his ikaros. The Maestro told me their souls were being cleansed because his songs, piercing with love, healed their spiritual bodies.
My dear student, he said to me, this is to be your work one day too, healing
through the love of our tradition, the most powerful in the world.

For Ynes’ broken back, his ikaro was joyful and light, and for
Maestro Soi’s fever, his ikaro was booming and loud. He always sounded
plaintive around me, but I
never cried. His voice, though beautiful, always seemed weak to me.

To become a shaman, you spend decades of your life
tucked away from your family among the plants. You endure dietas, drinking
concoctions of psychoactive plants that confront you with your weaknesses, your fears, your triggers. You’ll spend hours in pain, writhing
over your mistakes until you can love those who have wronged you,

especially yourself. Then the plants gift you with whatever ikaros they have.
Maestro Jorge learned to sing songs that healed the heart from the bobinsana
and learned to navigate the evil spirits from the ayahuasca.
I can protect our village, he tells me again and again.
It is the greatest honor of my life.

But the Spanish came. They came with guns.
They forbid our plants, our medicines, our ikaros. What good are the plants?
I asked Maestro Jorge after they stormed our village and destroyed our malokas.
By this point, he could only sing his ikaros in secret, lest he be shot. If I truly wanted to protect
my village, I would buy a gun. That’s the only way to hex someone, I whisper
to him.

My dear, what good is a gun if you cannot use it properly?

I only understand Jorge’s words
years later when I become a shaman myself, long after
he has died.
They don’t shoot out of love or justice, they shoot for greed. You think
that won’t haunt them for the rest of their lives? Our bodies
may suffer, our materials destroyed, but white people have
nothing when it comes to their pride or the heart. They know
only how to point the revolver toward themselves. If I wanted
them to truly suffer, I’d show them the way of the plants.