Coronavirus: Colombia’s 16th century indigenous peoples’ wisdom about surviving pandemics

Sixteenth-century Spanish conquistadores brought diseases to what is now Colombia, South America, destroying much of the indigenous population. Those who survived fled deep into the most hidden, inhospitable regions—places few would or could follow them. (from Chapter 15, Please, God, Don’t Make Me Go: A Foot-Dragger’s Memoir)

Nowadays many people think of indigenous groups as ignorant but, in many ways, they were and still are wise. During our coronavirus pandemic, we can and must learn from them.

John Lundin, an American, is quarantined on a mountaintop in Colombia’s Sierra Nevada mountains where he has lived for nine years among the Kogi and Arhuaco indigenous people. When my family and I lived in Colombia, we knew and worked with linguists and Bible translators working among both of those groups.

John Lundin writes:

“My indigenous friends [in the Sierra Nevada, Colombia] recount from memory, a memory passed on from generation to generation for more than five hundred years, the stories of how the white  man arrived on the shores of Colombia, in ships with wings of cloth, bearing with them the white man’s disease, a pandemic that eventually wiped out the cultures of the Maya and Inca. . . .

“How did the indigenous peoples deal with it then? The cultures that survived did so with ‘social distancing’—isolating themselves from the infected Europeans.

“The Kogi and the Arhuaco fled to the high mountains, burning bridges behind them, and eventually settling into a new life that separated them from the harm that eventually came to the Maya and Inca and others.”

As I said, those sixteenth-century indigenous folks were very smart! And many, perhaps most, of those indigenous people groups have survived over these five hundred years. When we lived in Colombia, our Bible translator friends worked among some thirty-five of those groups.

I want to address another important bit of wisdom

ancient indigenous peoples understood:

They recognized the importance

of passing down stories from generation to generation.

That’s why I blog about and teach others to write memoirs.

Your stories are important.

There’s a reason people read great books.

There’s a reason the Bible is full of stories.

Stories teach us how best to live our lives.

Stories can help us avoid mistakes others have made.

Stories can tell us how to survive:

“Tell the story of the mountain you climbed.

Your words could become a page in someone else’s survival guide.”

Morgan Harper Nichols

You have stories only you can tell.

Your children, grandchildren, and great-grands

need to know them.

Make sure your family’s generational stories

get passed on to future generations.

Click here to learn what a memoir is.

Follow my blog: Click here on Spiritual Memoirs 101.

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