The Amazon has been facing colonization, extraction, and the erasure of Indigenous culture for the last 300 years. The Amazon began to first be infiltrated by European missionaries, explorers, and businessmen in the 16th century. The initial exploration of the Amazon has created lasting legacies and myths about the region, glorifying it as a “wealthy (metals, medicines, materials), marginal, distant, dangerous, and sometimes empty (as a result of depopulation) space, attractive for the appropriation and mobilization of knowledges” (The Amazon We Want, 2021). It was the most glorified “Other” in the world, a place of fantastical legends and magic which prompted increased desire by Europeans to explore it.
Colonization followed the typical path of many other regions. In pursuit of “God, Gold, and Glory”, as it is often put, colonizers raided villages, took children to missionary schools for assimilation, rounded up the men for labor, and destroyed life as Indigenous peoples knew it.
Although not specifically about the Amazon and set in modern day Bolivia, this scene from También La Lluvia depicts the lengths that Christianization went to erase and assimilate Indigenous Peoples throughout South America.
Amazonian peoples met these colonizers with resistance, but decimation due to the amount of disease brought by colonizers made resistance futile in terms of numbers and weapons. The decimation of Indigenous peoples, where about 95% of the original population has been calculated to have died in the first 100 years of colonization from Western diseases (The Amazon We Want, 2021) spurred two coinciding events.
First, it allowed Indigenous Amazonian peoples to be much more easily colonized and assimilated into European culture. Missionary schools forced generations of Indigenous Amazonians into new identities and created ethnogenesis, in which the following generations of Indigenous Amazonians would be raised with both traditional and European/missionary ways of being. This has created centuries of conflicting identities and the division of Indigenous peoples (around the world) about how they should perceive and practice their own identities.
Secondly, “the demographic decline contributed to perpetuating the myth of the ʻgreat Amazonian emptinessʻ” (Amazon We Want, 2021). Similar to terra nullius or manifest destiny, this myth that the Amazon was empty and waiting to be “used” increased desire and motivation to explore and extract from the Amazon. By 1957, 87 ethnic groups had become extinct in Brazil alone (Amazon We Want, 2021).
Once colonization began, “missionaries became key to knowledge circulation and territorial control, being the protagonists in the opening of waterways, drawing of maps, and ethnographical and natural history observations. They were followed by naturalists motivated by curiosity and economic interests, sponsored directly or indirectly by hunger for overseas territories and raw materials. These fantastic visions of a place containing wealth, and knowledges about the material and cultural world are still very alive” (The Amazon We Want, 2021).
An obsession to explore and capture the magic of the Amazon has captivated the Western world for centuries. The Jungle Cruise, a Disney movie featuring a legend from the Amazon shows how Western media continues to influence our imagination and perception of the Amazon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_HvoipFcA8