We were deep into the forest when Juayuk stopped walking. The midday light filtered through the canopy, painting the undergrowth in slow-moving gold. He looked up, silent, then down at the roots beneath our feet.
“Try to take a photo where I’m not what matters,” he said, half-smiling. “Let the forest be the one you see.”
I took some time to reflect on his request and lowered my camera before shooting.
I had been walking with Juayuk — a Wichí elder and spiritual ecologist from the Gran Chaco — for several weeks. My role was to document, to listen, and perhaps, if I was careful, to begin understanding. I came as an ethnographer and filmmaker, but more and more, I was shedding those words. In the forest, they felt inadequate.
What I was witnessing was not simply reforestation. It was a philosophy of regeneration, rooted in memory, fungi, fire, and reverence.
Beneath the Silence
What lies beneath the forest floor is not soil in the ordinary sense. It is a living archive — of relationships, of language, of grief, and of hope. Juayuk calls this world the deep memory of the trees.
Modern science has begun, cautiously, to echo him. A recent study published in Current Biology revealed that between 79% and 83% of ectomycorrhizal fungi (ECM) — the fungal networks that sustain trees — remain undescribed by science. These underground webs:
- Feed the roots with nitrogen and phosphorus
- Carry sugars, water, and chemical signals
- Help forests resist drought, fire, and disease
- And store 2.5 gigatonnes of carbon per year
And yet, in most conservation plans, they are still invisible. Unnamed. Unprotected.
Forests, it turns out, do not end where the eye does.
The Breath of Life
We came to a fallen tree — not long dead. Juayuk knelt beside it and brushed away the bark. There, emerging from a crack in the trunk, was a considerable protuberance, coppery orangish fungus. He held it carefully, like one would hold a newborn bird. It fell apart at a mere brush of the hand.
“This is wahan’cheiaj,” he whispered. “The breath of life.”
It is both metaphor and organism — a sacred fungus that emerges from the dead and makes possible the living. Juayuk uses it to reconnect what has been cut: he joins the still-living roots of a felled tree with a seed, sometimes from another species. The wahan’cheiaj acts as bridge, glue, alchemy, a protector.
Over time, the roots of the felled tree and the new sprout fuse. They grow. Sometimes they become something new.
We are currently documenting a remarkable hybrid — between a Yuchán (Ceiba chodatii) and a Cedro (Cedrela odorata). It is over 50 years old. Its trunk and flower defy taxonomic certainty. You feel, standing before it, that you are in the presence of something impossible — and entirely real.
The Bombs That Birth Forests
Days later, he shared with me another mystery. Beneath a towering Guayacán (Caesalpinia paraguariensis), we began gathering soil, ash, fungi, seeds, and dry wood. Juayuk formed a mound — a mother bomb, he called it.
Inside, he lit a small fire. Then he sealed the earth around it, leaving tiny breathing holes. Over the next 80 days, the fire would smoulder slowly, warming the mound from within.
This was not destruction. This was incubation.
“Like a womb,” he said. “Dark, warm, full of life.”
Inside, microorganisms, rhizomes, and fungal spores would multiply. The earth would become black and rich in carbon, much like the terra preta of the Amazon. Once ready, he would open the mound, spread the living soil in a circle, and wait for the rains.
And then — without planting a single tree — the forest would begin to rise.
“The trees walk by themselves,” Juayuk says. “We only remind them how.”
Youth, Memory, and the Unseen Emergency
What struck me most was not the technique — extraordinary as it was — but the urgency. Juayuk worries that younger Wichí are losing their connection to this knowledge. Decades of cultural erasure and systemic denial of the value of Indigenous ways of knowing and relating to living beings have led many to believe that their grandparents’ wisdom is irrelevant — unscientific, even. A long process of acculturation and internalised dismissal has silenced not only traditions, but entire ways of perceiving the world.
And yet, these very ways might hold answers to the ecological crisis we all face.
At Alianza Wichi, we are working to protect this ancestral wisdom, not just as cultural heritage, but as a living tool for planetary regeneration. With the guidance of scientists like Dr María Eugenia Suárez (CONICET) and her team of ethnobiologists, we are studying these techniques not to extract or simplify them, but to honour and share them.
How do we bridge the language of science with the language of spirit? How do we listen — deeply — across worlds?
Toward Sanctuaries of Culture and Nature
What we envision now is a network of Sanctuaries: places where ancestral knowledge, native ecosystems, and community-led restoration coexist.
These will not be parks or museums — but living landscapes where:
- Elders passing on ancestral knowledge to younger generations, preserving culture through living practice.
- Scientists working alongside Indigenous experts, in mutual respect and co-creation of knowledge.
- Forest regeneration tied to food sovereignty, restoring ecosystems while feeding communities.
- A living school of ancestral wisdom, open to the world, rooted in practice, spirit, and soil.
- A model for global replication, offering place-based solutions that can inspire regenerative action worldwide.
It is a vision born not only of urgency, but of trust and reciprocity towards nature and cultural diversity.
The Film, the Forest, the Future
The film weaves together themes of spiritual ecology, hybrid trees, fungal intelligence, mycorrhizal memory, pyrolysis, and the art of minimal intervention. It reveals that forests do not need to be controlled or replanted from above — they can return from within, if we learn to listen, to trust, and to act in reciprocity.
But this is more than a story of regeneration. It is a call to protect what remains and to recover what was silenced — to save these native forests from exploitation and collapse, and to ensure that the ancestral knowledge that sustains them does not vanish with the last elders who carry it.
At the heart of this journey is my bond with Juayuk — one that began in curiosity but grew into something deeper: a friendship rooted in admiration, humility, and learning. He is not a subject of my study, nor a figure in need of saving. Quite the opposite.
He is my teacher. My guide. In many ways, my saviour — reminding me of what it means to belong to a living world.
He carries a vision that can help all of us reimagine our relationship with the Earth — not as masters, but as kin.
What Juayuk embodies is not just a technique, but a worldview — one that sees trees as relational beings, not resources; fungi as bridges, not by-products. This way of knowing deserves to be recognised, protected, and shared. It is time to declare it for what it is: an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
This film, and the voices within it, seek to spark impact and awareness — not only to inform, but to transform: to invite a shift in how we relate to the natural world. To remember that we are not above nature, but woven into it — through soil, breath, memory and root.
