South American Indigenous Network Emergency Fund

Teia das 5 Curas: Covid-19 South American Indigenous Emergency Fund

This emergency fund will support Indigenous communities in South America who are part of the "Teia das 5 Curas" network. This network of Indigenous communities contributes to the Musagetes Foundation’s Towards Braiding program, reframing the arts as inseparable from practices of healing, wellbeing, and life-long and life-wide learning.

The Covid-19 emergency funds are administered by the Musagetes Foundation in Canada. In our last Covid-19 emergency fundraiser we raised $10,000 that were distributed to 5 communities ($2,000 each) who used the funds according to their priorities, mostly as seed funding for community projects related to health and food security. We now aim to raise another $40,000 to secure the continuity of these and other projects according to needs identified by the communities.

The network Teia das 5 Curas proposes a framework for global change that involves five dimensions of healing (5 curas): healing of the intellect, healing of the senses/feelings, healing of relations, healing of exchanges, and healing of cycles. To learn more about this, go to https://blogs.ubc.ca/teiadas5curas/ (Portuguese) or https://decolonialfutures.net/in-earths-care-dispositions/ (English).

The communities that will receive 100% of the funds are the following: Pitaguary de Monguba-CE, Funi-ô-PE, Tremembé da Barra do Mundau-CE, Pataxó-BA, and Huni kui-AC.

Towards Braiding is a program created and curated by Elwood Jimmy and Vanessa Andreotti to shape better generative relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. The principles of this work are described in the Towards Braiding book available here as a free download . The second book in that series is titled Towards Scarring the Collective Soul Wound, by Cash Ahenahew, available here . The PDFs of the books are available free of charge and the proceedings from the sales of hard copies are also donated to the communities.

Note: Musagetes will transfer 100% of the funds to the communities. Despite Musagetes’ charitable status in Canada, donations are not eligible for tax receipts due to regulations governing charitable giving.