Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta

For roughly four centuries after the Spanish conquest the Kogi, Arhuaco, Wiwa and Kankuamo peoples of the Sierra Nevada largely avoided contact with the outside world, a reticence that let their own religious specialists, trained over years within the community, continue the work the peoples hold keeps the massif, and in their own account the wider world, in balance. In 1990 that changed by the communities' own choice: religious leaders who had never before spoken to outsiders invited the British filmmaker Alan Ereira to record a message, broadcast by the BBC as From the Heart of the World, addressed to what they call the Younger Brother, the industrial world beyond the mountains, warning that damage to the Sierra's rivers and forests threatened consequences reaching far past its own slopes.

The film named itself an exception rather than a change of practice. It described the fact and the urgency of the warning without setting out the specific knowledge the priesthood otherwise keeps within its own trained ranks, the same restraint the Sierra's own record of its traditions maintains. The same leaders returned to the choice more than twenty years later, inviting Ereira back in 2012 for a second film, Aluna, when they judged the world had not heeded the first warning, treating the outreach as a deliberate, occasional act rather than an opening of what the tradition otherwise holds close.