Arley Payaguaje is only 24 years old. So far, he has researched, seeded, cultivated, and distributed over 10,000 Amazonian fruit-bearing trees to families in his Sieko’pai community along the Aguarico River. All of this, has grown from the rich soil surrounding his family’s modest wooden stilt house. Encouraged by this success, Arley now plans to plant 15,000 more trees, while continuing to research ways to improve harvest yields and even recover heirloom seeds and native species from nearby communities and from Peru—the ancestral homeland of his people.

Arley is gently leading a resistance. Against oil companies, the palm oil industry, illegal loggers, gold miners, and fundamentalist missions — forces that tempt and pressure his people to abandon their way of life. He teaches a different path: to return to planting, fishing, hunting, drinking chicha, and cultivating traditional crops like banana, plantain, cassava, yuca, and chonta fruit.

Rather than surrendering land in exchange for cheap promises, rather than becoming laborers in crowded tin-roof settlements cut off from nature, 40 families have now joined Arley’s vision, choosing self-sufficiency over exploitation. By doing so, they preserve their forest, language, cultural integrity, and dignity. They ensure that the birds and animals still have a home, and that their children grow up free, close to nature, and rooted in tradition.

What’s remarkable is that Arley had this vision when he was just ten. In the community where he grew up, the forest was given away to oil and palm industries. With his parents’ support, he began planting fruit and medicinal trees anyway — digging holes, learning, dreaming. When authorities sent bulldozers to flatten the land, his parents moved their family across the river, near his grandfather Don Basilio, a traditional yagé drinker (shaman), so Arley could continue his passion.

Many of us are desperately asking: How can we support the forest, protect Indigenous knowledge, and safeguard our planet? What Arley is doing — what he has done since age ten — is the answer. One quiet, determined soul can ripple change through an entire world.

Support Arley’s reforestation work through the Yakum Foundation:
https://yakum.org/siekopai/