Narrating in Multinatural Word and Color

Vegetal Vitality in Lastenia Canayo’s "Los dueños del mundo Shipibo"

Abstract

Shipibo artist and writer Lastenia Canayo’s 2004 visual/textual work Los dueños del mundo Shipibo presents images and descriptions of more-than-human beings of the Shipibo cosmovision. The titular Shipibo dueños are often associated with a specific type of plant, relating ancestral belief to natural resources in Shipibo territories in Western Amazonia. Throughout her work, Canayo, whose Indigenous name Pecon Quena means “la que llama a los colores” (“she who calls the colors”), emphasizes how Shipibo commitments to their natural environment are a function of their ancestral beliefs, in turn offering a counternarrative of vegetal vitality to extractivist deforestation and destruction on Shipibo Amazonian lands. Canayo’s images—paired with texts written in the Spanish language—invite reader/viewers, Indigenous or not, to come to know and learn from Shipibo knowledge in word and in color. Ancestrality and territoriality, concepts broached by Graça Graúna (2013) and Robert David Sack (1986), respectively, textually and visually unite in Canayo’s work to underscore how cosmogonic knowledge embodied in the dueños sustains Shipibo communities, as much in daily life today in the twenty-first century as well as in imagining Amazonian futures. In presenting a multi-edged vegetal vitality as a force of sustenance in Shipibo communities, Canayo deploys ancestrality and territoriality to textually and visually demarcate Shipibo socioenvironmental relations in Amazonia. As she mediates coloniality through her textual/visual narratives, Canayo highlights the diverse plant life along the Ucayali river and its tributaries, cosmological beings that multinaturally bridge human and more-than human Shipibo worlds, to engage with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s (2002/2020) understanding of multinaturalism, and to promote an imaginary of Amazonia that centralizes human and more-than-human socioenvironmental interactions