Today, out of the 2,575 Siona people, only seven people speak the native Siona language. Of these, just two people can read and write it, while the remaining four preserve it solely through oral tradition. Without immediate, community-based educational spaces, this millennial culture - and the sacred wisdom it carries - risks going extinct very soon.
In 2024, the Siona elders took a decisive step forward by establishing a Foundation with a clear vision: to create a physical cultural and educational centre in the Putumayo region of the Colombian Amazon. This centre will serve as a school for the protection, teaching, and transmission of the Siona language, traditional dances, ancestral knowledge, and different cultural practices. Today, the Siona elders are asking for support to make this vision a reality.
In response, we’re joining forces with our beloved Taita Victoriano Piaguaje Yaiguaje. He is one of those three remaining elders that can read and speak the Siona language, and the leader of the Siona school project (ECOYAI). Through our 22nd, 23rd and all future Taozen retreats with Victoriano, a portion of the proceeds will be allocated to the development of this educational and culutral initiative.
At Taozen, we’re working to support indigenous-led efforts that helps ensure future generations receive ayahuasca from the hands of the ancient lineages, therefore preserving the authentic transmission of this ancestral knowledge.
This is because the Siona language encodes a specific way of being in the world. The ecological relationships, spiritual practices, and ancestral narratives held in this language cannot be fully translated into Spanish, let alone reconstructed once the last fluent speakers are gone. That loss is permanent.
This includes something with direct consequences for modern medicine. The Siona people have accumulated thousands of years of intimate knowledge of Amazonian plants - their properties, interactions, preparation methods, and therapeutic applications across a vast range of physical and psychological conditions. Much of this pharmacological knowledge exists only in the language itself: in the specific terms, stories, and oral instructions passed between generations. Ethnobotanists and medical researchers have barely scratched the surface of what this tradition contains. Losing the language forecloses possibilities for the rest of humanity, including treatments for conditions that Western medicine is still struggling to address.
ECOYAI has the community relationships, the methodology, and the leadership to do this work properly. What the project needs is funding, and it needs it while the window is still open. The total budget is $425,000. Phase 1 - the fieldwork, the recordings, the relationships with knowledge holders that make everything else possible - can begin the moment resources ($69,000) are secured.
The combination of community-led documentation, AI-assisted preservation, and intergenerational training programs will also be designed from the ground up to be replicable. There are thousands of endangered languages across the Amazon Basin and beyond, many facing identical pressures and the same shrinking timeline. A successful Siona model becomes a tested blueprint - one that other communities, organizations, and funders can adopt and adapt without starting from zero.
A single donation therefore, in this context, has a reach that extends well beyond one language or one people.
For those already engaged with indigenous wisdom traditions, this is a tangible opportunity to support the living communities that carry this knowledge, and to ensure the next generation inherits it intact.
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