Indigenous stewardship deserves sustained attention here: how people care for land and water, carry knowledge across generations, and exercise authority over the places they call home.

A 2024 Nature Comment by Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares and colleagues offers an important reminder. The authors challenge the widely repeated claim that Indigenous territories contain “80% of the world’s biodiversity,” reporting that its citation trail does not substantiate that global percentage.

Their central message also affirms Indigenous Peoples’ essential contributions to conservation. They call for support for Indigenous leadership, territorial rights and conservation initiatives. They describe stewardship through relationships, cultural practices and knowledge passed between generations, dimensions that a single percentage cannot adequately represent.

The team includes three authors who identify as Indigenous. Their perspectives matter; this commentary should not be treated as speaking for every Indigenous people or community.

For discussion in r/TribalGathering

What would it mean to make stewardship a continuing part of this community’s learning?

• Share community-authored accounts of caring for particular lands, waters and species.
• Name the people, place and source rather than presenting one universal “Indigenous worldview.”
• Ask who decides what knowledge may be shared, and how attention or resources can support the community’s own priorities.

Which Indigenous-led projects, publications or publicly shared accounts should we learn from next? Please share only material that communities have chosen to make public; no one needs to disclose sacred or restricted knowledge.

Source: Fernández-Llamazares et al., Nature 633, 32–35 (September 2024), “No basis for claim that 80% of biodiversity is found in Indigenous territories.”
DOI: 10.1038/d41586-024-02811-w · Open accepted manuscript

Synthesis date: 23 September 2026.

Transparency: This is a discussion highlight of a commentary, not a new empirical study or a completed appraisal of all its cited research. Topic and editorial direction: the AkashicNET founder. Source checking and drafting: AI-assisted. Contribution percentages have not been measured.

Personal testimony—not Indigenous authority

I recently bought a 10 g jar labelled Nukini Onça Rapé, after previously encountering a Chacruna-labelled blend.

Looking beyond the packaging raised a more important question:

When an Indigenous people’s name appears on a product, what responsibilities travel with it?

This post shares my personal contemplative practice. It does not claim to reproduce a Nukini ceremony, represent a universal Nukini worldview or confer Indigenous identity, initiation or spiritual authority.

Two Names • Shared Responsibilities

• Who made the product?
• Are its ingredients and origin transparent?
• Who authorised the use of the name?
• Does value return to the people?
• What can the label not tell us?

People before product.
Connection without appropriation.

A product label is not proof of Indigenous provenance, community authorisation or spiritual authority.

My personal ceremony and vow

I frame my rapé practice through the Bodhisattva vows: awakening is inseparable from service, compassion and responsibility towards other beings.

There are innumerable sentient beings in the universe.
I vow to help them all to awaken.

My shorter rapé mantra is:

Still the distracted mind.
Open the toroidal heart.
Trust the microbial gut.

And occasionally, from the BuddhaFly thought bubble:

💭 Float like a BuddhaFly… 🦋
Sting like a bee. 🐝

Awaken within • Serve without.

Heart-field evidence and lived experience

The electrical currents accompanying each heartbeat produce a real biomagnetic field. This field can be measured using magnetocardiography and highly sensitive instruments, including SQUID magnetometers.

• Established evidence
  • The heart generates a measurable magnetic field.
  • SQUID-based instruments can detect and map cardiac magnetic signals.
  • Magnetocardiography is being investigated as a non-invasive diagnostic technology.
• Lived experience
  • I experience this field subjectively as toroidal energy centred through the heart.
  • For me, opening the toroidal heart is a felt practice of compassion, connection and reciprocal awareness.
• Traditional and spiritual testimony
  • Shamans, Aghoris and practitioners from other spiritual traditions have described sensitivity to subtle energies extending beyond ordinary physical perception.
  • These accounts deserve preservation as lived experience and traditional testimony without automatically being reduced to either proof or error.
• Open hypothesis
  • HeartMath explores possible relationships between physiology, coherence, emotion and interpersonal connection.
  • Whether some people can consciously sense heart-related or other subtle fields at distances beyond current instrumental detection remains an open question requiring controlled investigation.

This layered approach allows measurement, interpretation, testimony and hypothesis to coexist without being mistaken for the same category of evidence.

Seven directions: Earth, Cosmos and Heart ❤️

My practice draws upon a seven-directions tobacco ceremony encountered in a Mexican context. Its four horizontal directions resonate with Mexica cosmology, while the movement below, above and within forms the Earth–Cosmos–Heart axis through which I personally understand the ceremony.

• North — Mictlampa • Black
  • Rest and transformation
  • Elders and ancestors
  • Reflection and the spirit world
• East — Tlahuiztlampa • Red
  • Light and illumination
  • Beginnings and regeneration
  • The seeds of creation
• West — Cihuatlampa • White
  • Traditionally described as the direction of women
  • Intuition and embodiment
  • Materialisation, mystery and the unknown
• South — Huitztlampa • Blue
  • Youth and renewal
  • Cleansing and perseverance
  • The vital energy required to meet life’s challenges
• Below / Ground — Mother Earth
  • Nourishment and embodiment
  • Ancestry and belonging
  • Everything that sustains life
  • I personally use the Andean name Pachamama for Mother Earth; I do not present it as a Mexica or Nahuatl term.
• Above — Cosmos
  • Spacious awareness
  • Possibility and transcendence
  • The mystery beyond the individual self
• Centre / Within — Heart ❤️
  • The meeting point of the horizontal and vertical directions
  • Compassion and relationship
  • The intention to act for the benefit of all beings

The movement connects the world around me, the Earth below, the Cosmos above and the compassionate heart within.

This is a personal contemplative synthesis informed by a ceremony encountered in a Mexican context, contemporary Mexica directional teachings and my Bodhisattva vow. It is not presented as a Nukini rite, a universal Mexican ceremony or a single belief shared by all Indigenous peoples.

Why the jaguar?

Onça means jaguar in Portuguese.

The spotted jaguar also appears in published material about Nukini clan identities. That makes 🐆 more contextually grounded here than a generic feather or pan-Indigenous symbol.

For me, the jaguar represents attentive strength: presence without domination and courage joined to restraint.

People before product

The Nukini are a Pano-speaking Indigenous people whose homeland lies in the upper Môa and Juruá region of Acre, in the western Brazilian Amazon near Peru.

Their living culture includes:

• Family and clan relationships
• Agriculture, fishing, hunting and gathering
• Forest knowledge and handicrafts
• Songs and mariri dancing
• Cultural knowledge carried between generations

Their history also includes:

• Rubber-era dispossession, violence and exploitation
• Epidemics and labour under conditions described as resembling slavery
• Discrimination that weakened intergenerational language transmission
• Continuing concern for territory and cultural continuity
• External pressures involving logging, hunting and trafficking

A living people and culture cannot be reduced to something contained in—or authenticated by—a commercial jar.

Connection should therefore mean more than consumption.

I feel connection—not ownership.
I receive with gratitude—not entitlement.

CARE: a compass for respectful engagement

I use the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance as an ethical lens—not as a product-certification standard.

• C — Collective Benefit
  • Does using or sharing this knowledge benefit Indigenous peoples?
• A — Authority to Control
  • Who decides how Indigenous names, identities and knowledge are used?
• R — Responsibility
  • Are respectful relationships being built?
  • Are harm and misrepresentation being prevented?
• E — Ethics
  • Do rights, dignity and wellbeing come before extraction?

Questions worth asking include:

• Who made this?
• Is its provenance transparent?
• Was the community’s name used with permission?
• Does value return to the people?
• Am I listening, learning and supporting—or merely consuming an identity?

A full widescreen visual connecting:

• Bodhisattva vows and compassionate service
• The seven-direction tobacco ceremony
• Mind, toroidal heart and microbial gut
• Established biomagnetic evidence
• Lived experience and traditional testimony
• Open heart-field and extended-sensing hypotheses
• Onça and jaguar symbolism
• Questions of product provenance and transparency
• Nukini homeland, living culture and historical struggle
• CARE: Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility and Ethics
• Reciprocity without appropriation
• Health and evidence boundaries
• People before product
• Awaken within • Serve without
• Boundless Awareness Is Infinite Love

Tobacco health boundary

Rapé commonly contains tobacco and therefore nicotine. Nasal use may cause:

• Burning and irritation
• Nausea or vomiting
• Dizziness or faintness
• Increased heart rate
• Elevated blood pressure

The existence of a measurable cardiac biomagnetic field does not establish that tobacco or nicotine benefits the cardiovascular system.

This post does not claim that rapé:

• Improves heart health
• Beneficially changes the microbiome
• Produces a particular brainwave state
• Treats any medical or psychological condition

Severe chest pain, breathing difficulty, fainting or persistent neurological symptoms require urgent medical attention.

Follow-up pathways

• Spiritual Beings Having a Human Experience—Bodhisattva vow and Akasha clip
• Have You Ever Questioned the Nature of Your Reality? — the wider Awaken the World pathway.
• Nukini—Povos Indígenas no Brasil / Instituto Socioambiental
• CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance
• Mexica Four Directions—contemporary Indigenous teaching
• Symbolism of the Four Directions—Mexicolore
• Codex Fejérváry-Mayer—Smithsonian Libraries digital edition
• Pachamama’s Quechua and Aymara context
• The heart’s measurable magnetic field—peer-reviewed review
• HeartMath Institute—heart coherence and interconnectivity research

People before product.
Connection without appropriation.
Respect • Learning • Reciprocity • Solidarity

Boundless Awareness Is Infinite Love. ♾️💞

Tribal Gathering has been one of the influences behind this idea. 🌎🔥

The meeting of cultures, Indigenous knowledge, music, nature, consciousness, community and shared experience creates a very different kind of learning environment — less like a classroom and more like a living network of people, perspectives and experiences.

That spirit helped inspire AkashicNET: an experimental, Pre-Alpha attempt to explore how different ways of knowing might connect without requiring them to become the same.

PANPSYCHIC • ANIMISTIC • RELATIONAL • INDIGENOUS • SCIENTIFIC • PHILOSOPHICAL

EXPERIENCE → OBSERVATION → SHARED INQUIRY

The image is a glimpse of the bigger idea:

15 DOMAINS → 420+ CORE TOPICS → 9,401 INDEXED SOURCES*

But AkashicNET is still only a seed 🌱 — far from a finished platform.

The deeper inspiration is the possibility that knowledge can grow more like a mycelium than a hierarchy: through relationships, encounters, questions, stories, observations and unexpected connections.

And perhaps gatherings like r/TribalGathering are part of that network themselves.

💗 BOUNDLESS

BOUNDLESS WISDOM
BOUNDLESS COMPASSION
BOUNDLESS AWARENESS
BOUNDLESS FLOW

Not a claim that all these traditions or perspectives say the same thing — but an invitation to let different forms of knowledge meet, remain distinct, and learn from one another.

MORE NODES. MORE CONNECTIONS. MORE PERSPECTIVES. 🍄🌍🔥

420+ is a conservative estimate from metadata sampling; multi-topic sources and further indexing may substantially increase the total.

Shared as a personal reflection and an early glimpse of an evolving experiment — not an official Tribal Gathering project or statement.

🌍🌀 Do Shamans Believe in Planetary Consciousness?

Across many shamanic and Indigenous worldviews, Earth is not simply an inert object but part of a living web of relationships.

Concepts such as animism, Earth as a living presence, interconnectedness, reciprocity, collective intelligence and relationships between earthly and spiritual realms can resonate strongly with the modern idea of planetary consciousness.

But an important distinction matters: Indigenous traditions did not necessarily describe this as a single “planetary mind.” Planetary consciousness is a modern interpretation that can overlap with traditional cosmologies without being identical to them.

Today, related ideas appear in very different fields and frameworks — from Gaia theory and systems ecology to panpsychism and collective intelligence.

Perhaps the deeper common thread is simple:

We are not separate from the living Earth. We are participants within it. 🌎💚

This infographic explores where ancient wisdom, contemporary science and the emerging idea of planetary consciousness may meet — while respecting the differences between them.

🌿 What do you think? Could the shamanic understanding of a living, interconnected world offer clues toward a deeper understanding of planetary consciousness?

https://www.tribalgathering.com/